Quick Links, September 24
Privacy? Not at Ebay.com -Update-
"When someone uses our site and clicks on the I Agree button, it is as if he agrees to let us submit all of his data to the legal authorities. Which means that if you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name, address, sales history and other details - all without having to produce a court order. We want law enforcement people to spend time on our site," says Joseph Sullivan, director of the "law enforcement and compliance" department at eBay.com.
"He says he receives about 200 such requests a month, most of them unofficial requests in the form of an email or fax. All they have to do is ask. 'There's no need for a court order,' Sullivan said, and related how the company has half a dozen investigators under contract, who scrutinize 'suspicious users' and 'suspicious behavior.'"
Blind obedience in times when terrorism is used to justify basically all kinds of privacy breaches, in times when everyone is a suspect until proven innocent? Of course not. It's called flexbility: "'I don't know another Web site that has a privacy policy as flexible as eBay's,' says Joseph Sullivan."
Read the full story in Tel Aviv's Ha'aretz newspaper.
Large parts of the paper's current print edition are also available in PDF format. Story via Paul Nitsche
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Concorde 1971: Die tollsten Vögel des Jahrhunderts!
Texaco wirbt mit der Concorde (Großansicht) in der Bild am Sonntag vom 25. April 1971 (Titelbild in Großansicht). Gefunden in der ehemaligen Waschkaue des Siemens-Martin-Stahlwerks 3, Westfalenhütte, Dortmund.
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Grünes Dortmund
Rechtsextremistische Demonstrationen gegen die Wehrmachtsausstellung sind zwar nicht mehr der letzte Schrei, einige hundert Nazis ließen sich am Samstag in Dortmund zur Ausstellungseröffnung aber dennoch nicht davon abhalten. Dazu die obligatorische Gegendemonstration, und ein Polizeiaufgebot, wie es seit den Kurdendemos vor einigen Jahren nicht mehr gesehen wurde.
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KVR Geodatenserver: Ruhrgebiet aus der Luft
Den Bereich von Xanten bis Hamm und von Haltern bis Hagen kann man sich auf dem KVR Geodatenserver in Form von Karten und Luftbildern aus der Luft anschauen. Für kostenloses Material sind die Luftbilder erstaunlich hochauflösend, und wer weiß, wann in Dortmund-Eving das neue Logistikzentrum in der Feineisenstraße gebaut wurde, kann die Luftaufnahme sogar datieren. Zu einem ausgewachsenen Geodatenserver mag zwar noch einiges fehlen, und hier und da scheint es teilweise etwas zu haken, aber schöne Luftbilder des Ruhrgebietes liefert das System auf jeden Fall - mein Auto ist z.B. auch zu sehen ;-)
KVR Geodatenserver
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Misleader
"Misleader.org will provide an accurate daily chronicle for journalists of mis-representations, distortions and downright misleading statements by President Bush and the Bush Administration. Misleader.org is presented as a service of MoveOn.org, the on-line public interest group."
misleader.org - A Daily Chronicle of Bush Administration Distortion
[via Booknotes]
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Knowledge Logging at Lucent Technologies
"Making sense of weblogs in the intranet: What they are, why people are using them, making them useful for knowledge management" is a is a presentation Lucent Technologies' Information Specialist, Michael Angeles gave yesterday: "I talked about weblogs inside my company, their use in knowledge management, and how my organization is hoping to make them usable for enterprise knowledge work if the number of blogs in the company increases significantly."
Presentation slides and notes are available for download. This is quite a long presentation and I haven't read it thoroughly yet. It seems to give interesting insights into Lucent's practices, but seems to a bit thin at the point where it gets interesting: how to glue all the data together, how to make blog data findable, how to make it usable.
Intranet Blogging is a subject I discussed a lot with Martin Röll. While he stresses that it basically is about people and contacts, I think the aspect of an (self-)growing knowledge reservoir often is underrated. As this aspect is what the Lucent paper is about, it will be interesting to read Martin's opinion on it - under JASPER, our Joint Strategic Special Premium Content Program, he is working on his blog entry this very moment.
Studio ID: Blogging in Corporate America slides
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Laws, opinions - tailormade
I
"These judges are doubly mad. Firstly, politically and secondly they are just mad. To to that job you have to you have to be mentally disturbed, you have to have psychological problems. If they do that work it is because they are anthropologically different from the rest of humanity."
Silvio Berlusconi in an interview given August 27
II
"Silvio Berlusconi's ruling coalition yesterday [September 16] approved a package of constitutional reforms that will increase the prime minister's powers. The changes proposed by the cabinet would enable the premier to dissolve parliament, a power presently held by Italy's president, and appoint or sack ministers. [Also], coalition parties will be barred from leaving the government between elections. The intention is to prevent a minor ruling party being able to trigger a change of government by switching sides, as happened in 1994, when Mr Berlusconi's first Centre-Right coalition fell after seven months in power."
Telegraph news story
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Politische Morde: Oscar Romero
24. März 1980: Erzbischof Oscar Romero fordert in seiner Predigt die Soldaten zur Befehlsverweigerung auf und wird in aller Öffentlichkeit erschossen. In El Salvador bricht der Bürgerkrieg aus. Die ARD berichtet morgen in ihrer Reihe Politische Morde über dieses erwartete, sogar Teilen der eigenen Reihen gelegen kommende und bis heute ungesühnte Attentat.
ARD: Tod eines Erzbischofs
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Industrial Night and Magic
Introducing hebig.org/photos. RSS feed and further galleries to come.
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All your .com are belong to us
Given you had the power to add any entry you like to the DNS directory because you have been appointed to run the .com and .net TLDs, which one would it be? A wildcard redirecting all requests to unregistered (read: mistyped) domain names to your site, advertising your services or serving paid search results, right. Versign, notorious for exploiting the DNS infrastructure to its own advantage ever since, did just that: requests to unregistered domain names get resolved into 64.94.110.11, http://sitefinder.Verisign.com/index.jsp. It serves you with a web search result set for your mistyped or unknown term. In plain English: Versign claimes all non-registered .com and .net domain names for itself. Let's have a look what this means, apart from the obvious unfair competition:
- Technically, all .com and .net domain names now exist, and except for a infinitesimal portion, they are all owned by Versign
- With the wildcard in place, DNS does not work as specified, it basically is broken. DNS is a core part of the internet infrastructure and not an advertising tool
- Without "Hostname unknown" errors, tools like web browsers, ping and traceroute don't show the expected behaviour. Once the Verisign infrastructure is not reachable, one has no possibility to discern a non-existing domain name from an unreachable host
- This is a feast for spammers: many mail servers check if the domain the mail originates from exists and reject mails with spoofed envelope senders. Now, they all exists, and all mails from .com or .net domains, existing or not, travel free
- Even more, as reported on Slashdot, "64.94.110.11 has a working MTA listening on port 25. This means that any MX records with typos in the primary record will have all their e-mail redirected to Verisign's MTA. Mail that would normally automatically be re-routed to the secondary MTA instead now gets bounced by Verisign's ''Snubby Mail Rejector Daemon v1.3''. Not returning NXDOMAIN will break mail delivery to secondary MTAs." And technically, nothing keeps Verisign from harvesting instead of bouncing mails sent to unregistered domain names
- Effects (or non-effects) on search engines and web spiders could be interesting to observe. In any way, the measure will result in increased overall internet traffic
Don't like it? Don't use it (or send them some strange messages via HTTP):
"Your use of the Verisign services is at your own risk. if you are dissatisfied with any of the materials, results or other contents of the Verisign services or with these terms and conditions, our privacy statement, or other policies, your sole remedy is to discontinue use of the Verisign services or our site." - Verisign Terms of Service
So far, just four DNS root servers seem to be affected, and it is not clear if the wildcard is here to stay (probably not). But four servers are enough to finally make clear that Verisign in no way serves the net, but endangers its infrastructure and freedom for the sake of own profits. com and net TLD operations should be handed over to nonprofit organizations similar to PIR that operates the org TLD in order to prevent further conflicts of interests and breaches of trust.
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Abschleppmaßnahmen
Getrieben von der steten Bemühung um Sicherheit und Ordnung auf Dortmunds Straßen scheut die Verwaltung nicht davor zurück, Sonntags morgens eine kleine Armada Abschleppwagen in Wohngebiete ausschwärmen zu lassen, um nicht völlig regelkonform geparkte Wagen aus dem Sichtfeld der geplagten Anwohner entfernen zu lassen - so zum Beispiel meinen.
Daß der Tatbestand "Parken < 5 m hinter Kreuzung oder Einmündung" auch mit einem Abstand von nur 4,90 m erfüllt ist, daß der eigene Parkplatz von der diensthabenden Politesse gleichsam als Feuerleitstand für die Zielverteilung der eintreffenden Armada verwendet wird und daß eine Leerfahrt eines Abschleppwagens 40,99 € kostet, überrascht in Dortmund nicht mehr wirklich.
67,00 € "Verwaltungsgebühren gemäß §7a Abs. 1 Nr. 7 KostO NW" dagegen schon. 131 DM für das dreiminütige Ausfüllen eines A5-Formulars durch eine Politesse drängt durchaus den Verdacht kreativer Preisgestaltung auf - aber halt:
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CSS IE Crasher
When checking and validating the few lines of the Zollverein Gallery source code, I realised that it nicely doubles as a Internet Explorer 6/Win crasher - once you put the code of the menu divs not into a single line, but split it up into one line per link.
Then, IE offers some additional line breaks and spits out the "Interior #5" link twice - click on and hover above them long enough, and this valid code, rendered perfectly well in other browsers, will crash your IE - enjoy. Perhaps I made blatant mistakes. Perhaps it is a well known error. Perhaps it is something new. Do you know why IE crashes on this one?
hebig.org/ie_crasher - Zollverein IE Crasher
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Photo Gallery: Zollverein Coke Plant / Kokerei Zollverein
Click image to view gallery
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Wayfaring Stranger
71 years, diabetes. If you think this is all Country, you're dead wrong. Go and listen to American III and American IV. Go and listen to magic.
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:: in category Music
El presidente esta muerto
Click image to enlarge
Last known photo showing President Salvador Allende alive
Today 30 years ago - September 11, 1973 - Augusto Pinochet overthrew Chile's Allende governement and installed one of the worst Washington-backed dictatorships in South America. Allende was the world's first democratically-elected Marxist head of state.
With Pinochet out of power for 13 years now, the public still is deeply split, most perpetrators are still at large, and though the current government stresses that Chile is just a normal country and there are signs of reconciliation, still few are the indicators how to handle the country's past.
For a moment in the late 1990ies, there was hope justice could be served when Britain detained Pinochet in order to extradite him to Spain, where judge Baltasar Garzon wanted to put him on trial for murder, torture and genozide, but Britain freed him - for "humanitarian reasons".
RESOURCES IN SPANISH
La Tercera: cobertura minuto a minuto tal como si fuera hoy
El Pais Digital: Las Victimas del General
Universidad de Alicante: Proceso a Pinochet
El Mundo: La extradicion de Pinochet
Crimenes e Impunidad: La experiencia del trabajo en la violacion del Derecho a la Vida - Chile 1973-1996
CIA informes: Desde Pinochet y Kissinger
RESOURCES IN ENGLISH
BBC On this Day: President overthrown in Chile coup
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Delete this comment link
With the number of spam comments (both submitted by bots and humans) rising, it becomes more and more annoying that Movable Type requires so many clicks to delete a comment.
Now Yoz Grahame posted a list of seven quick tips for a spam-free blog. Number six of which is something for my taste: a single line added to lib/MT/App/Comments.pm adds a "Delete this Comment" link to the comment notification email, making deleting comments a one click, one return key hit endeavour - Ben, Mena, write this down for the next MT release :-)
Seven quick tips for a spam-free blog
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Day four without smoking
SOME FACTS
- I smoked my last cigarette 0500 the morning of Saturday, September 06, 2003
- I did not have to force myself quiting. I suddenly found the taste so disgusting, I would have had to force myself to smoke another one
- Since then, I lighted four cigarettes in total and killed them off immediately after lighting them
- I don't have problems having heavy smokers around me. I will not harass them with stop smoking tirades
- I managed a night in my favourite cocktail bar without. A night in my favourite club without will be the next milestone
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Bandequipment abzugeben
Werbung in ungeschminkter Form gibt es hier ja eigentlich nicht, in eigener Sache wird sie ausnahmsweise aber doch mal gemacht:
Im Auftrag eines Bekannten habe ich ein komplettes Band-Equipment abzugeben. Die Anlage wurde vorwiegend im Live-Einsatz auf Tourneen betrieben, stammt aus wirklich guten Händen und wurde gut behandelt. Sie ist zwar nicht brandneu, kann aber so wie sie ist im Studio oder live in Betrieb genommen werden und liefert einwandfreie Resultate.
Das Herzstück bildet eine Gesangsanlage bestehend aus 12-Kanal-Mischpult, Yamaha REV-7 Reverberator, Crossover Network und Endstufen im rollbaren Rack. Dazu gibt es einen Kawai K3 Synthesizer, zwei Congas, zum Abhören eine vierteilige Dynacord PA, zwei Fostex Aktivboxen und einen Dynacord Monitor, und zur Untermalung können zwei Lichtstative mit je vier 500W-Scheinwerfern eingesetzt werden.
Die Anlage steht in Holzwickede bei Dortmund und kann dort auch besichtigt werden. Wer sie komplett kauft erhält einen Bonus, und der Bandleader würde sich freuen, wenn alles wieder in gute Hände kommt. Bei Fragen bitte die üblichen Kontaktmöglichkeiten nutzen.
Hinweis: Die Auktionen sind beendet!
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Neu-York -UPDATE-
Melissa Gould: "Neu-York is an obsessive exercise in cartography. I have recreated an accurate map of Manhattan, circa 1939, removed all the street & location names and replaced them with ones from Berlin of the same period. All the names used appeared on actual Berlin maps from the late 1930's."
If you have a heart for cartography and typography, this could make your day - it made mine. Thanks Heiko and Jason!
Melissa Gould: Neu-York
UPDATE
Rainer Volz draws an interesting parallel to project scenario building: Changing the reality of plans
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The News According to Neil Young
Neil Young interviews are rare events - the last longer one I read was in Mojo magazine a long while ago - so new ones always catch my attention. Now, he discussed his new album Greendale with David Fricke of Rolling Stone magazine:
"This is a time, I believe, of great inner turmoil for the majority of the American people. There is a new morality coming out of this administration - fundamentalist religious views; a holier-than-thou attitude towards the rest of the world - that is not classically American. I don't think Americans felt holier-than-thou in the twentieth century. We were happy and successful, with a great lifestyle. But something else is going on now. That's what Greendale is about. That's what Grandpa's problem is. He can't understand what's going on. He sees all of these things that the Patriot Act has taken away from what he feels is America."
The News According to Neil Young - Rolling Stone interview
RELATED LINKS
Rolling Stone: Greendale comes alive - US tour dates
Rolling Stone: Greendale album review
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:: in category Music
Presenting: Muse
The new Muse album Absolution, out in Germany on September 22, might well be one of the most interesting releases to hit the turntables this fall. Though it has some weak spots, sounding like Radiohead on a bad trip or trying to imitate the sheer beauty of Beth Gibbons songs, it basically is a show of what "ballroom-dancing punk poets with fire in their eyes and grit in their veins," as New Musical Express puts it, can do.
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:: in category Music
