citizen428.blog()

The web is a great tool for sharing ideas and freedom of expression. However, efforts to try and control the Internet are growing. Internet repression is reported in countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. People are persecuted and imprisoned simply for criticising their government, calling for democracy and greater press freedom, or exposing human rights abuses, online.

But Internet repression is not just about governments. IT companies have helped build the systems that enable surveillance and censorship to take place. Yahoo! have supplied email users’ private data to the Chinese authorities, helping to facilitate cases of wrongful imprisonment. Microsoft and Google have both complied with government demands to actively censor Chinese users of their services.

Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is one of the most precious of all rights. We should fight to protect it.
http://irrepressible.info/about

I’ve signed the pledge and have added irrepressible content to this blog (in the sidebar on the left) and I encourage you to do so too!

There are also two other petitions which I deem worthy of your support:
Flucht is kein Verbrechen – Keine Schubhaft für AsylwerberInnen (in German)
Protect the Baltic Sea while it’s still not too late!

Setting Orange, Confusion 49, 3173 YOLD

After running a Tor server for more than half a year already and having donated some money to support Tor’s development, I was looking for new ways to help out the project. That’s why I decided to set up a mirror, which can be reached here (dist/ mirror). The initial sync is still running, but the site should be fully functional soon. Once this is finished, I’ll also try to set up another mirror on the Vienna based server hosting this domain.

Boomtime, Bureaucracy 48, 3172 YOLD

Since I was pretty busy with personal stuff during the last few days, I hadn’t noticed that two days ago German authorities started confiscating Tor middleman servers. That changed when earlier today I received an email from the owner of a confiscated system, who wants to get in touch with other Tor admins, in order to start a kind of “Knowledge Base” for people who were affected by the recent confiscations or who (still) want to set up their own Tor server. Since I’m also running such a baby (which never was an exit node though) on a virtual server in Germany, I’m of course interested in this recent development, so I want to share the informative links provided in his mail with you.

Articles/postings about the confiscations:
Anonymisierungsserver bei Razzia beschlagnahmt (German)
Staatsanwaltschaft beschlagnahmt Anonymisierungs-Server (German)
Erfolgreicher Schlag gegen die Privatsphäre (German)
Wie man die Anonymisierung kriminalisiert (German)
Re: confiscating middleman-tor-nodes [1], [2] & [3] (English)
Staatsanwaltschaft geht gegen Tor-Server vor (German)

General info on Tor/anonymity:
TOR web site (English, German and more)
Wikipedia article on Tor (English, German)
Sicher und anonym im Internet mit Proxys (German)
Onion Routing und Tor (German)
TheOnionRouter/OperationalSecurity (English)

Tor network overview:
Tor Network Status
Current Tor routers

Don’t get me wrong, child pornography is one of the worst crimes I can think of, and I wish the German authorities all the best in finding the people they are after. I do however feel that the route taken here wasn’t ideal, as it may well lead to a negative perception of Tor in the general public.

That’s why I’ve tripled the total amount of traffic Tor is allowed to serve on my system and donated some money to the project. I would advise you to do the same! Besides that I also encourage you to use Tor and promote it to other people, because anonymity is something that can’t be gained, only lost.

Pungenday, Bureaucracy 34, 3172 YOLD

Jennifer Government for real?

Pungenday, Discord 30, 3172 YOLD

While reading netzpolitik.org yesterday, I found a link to an article on the OpenNet Initiative Blog, explaining how the filtering of Google.cn works. Now let’s have a closer look at some of the blocked sites:

site:hrw.org
site:hrichina.org

Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China. Who is surprised that they get blocked? Nobody? Guessed so…

site:rfa.org

Radio Free Asia describes itself in the following way: “RFA is a private, nonprofit corporation that broadcasts news and information in nine native Asian languages to listeners who do not have access to full and free news media. The purpose of RFA is to provide a forum for a variety of opinions and voices from within these Asian countries.“

site:tsquare.tv

A pretty informative site about the incident on Tiananmen Square in 1989. You really should try to see the documentary, it’s probably the best I’ve seen so far on this topic.

http://64memo.com/

The Tianmen Massacre Memorial Museum. I haven’t read any of the articles on this site yet, so it’s hard to tell how exactly they are dealing with the subject.

site:news.bbc.co.uk
site:voa.gov

Ok, the BBC and Voice of America may not be the most objective news sources one can find in the world, but blocking them seems a little harsh.

site:boxun.com
site:peacehall.com

Both domains will lead you to the Boxun News Network, a site writing a lot about censorship, free speech and similar topics.

site:freechina.net

After having a look at the goals of The Free China Movement, it should be pretty obvious why the Chinese government wants this site blocked.

site:geocities.com

Free web hosting == free expression? It seems so…

site:falundafa.org
site:epochtimes.com

After having been at a conference with participants from these groups I have to say that I don’t feel any sympathy for them, but that definitely isn’t an excuse for locking them up and censoring their sites.

site:savetibet.org

It should be pretty obvious why this got blocked.

site:topforum.com

A dynamic index of Chinese forums websites.

site:laogai.org

Since 1992 the Laogai Research Foundation is trying to gather information on Chinese penal camps and other “systemic human rights violations in China, including public executions, organ harvesting from executed prisoners, the coercive enforcement of China’s population control policy, and persecution of religious believers.“

I guess that sites like the China Labour Bulletin and related worker’s movements get filtered as well, but I can’t personally confirm this currently.

Boomtime, Chaos 27, 3172 YOLD

I just noticed that I haven’t blogged much lately, so the least I can do is put together one of my random link dumps for you:

Tech Stuff:

• FLPR:
  Sure, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) has proven itself to be a pretty neat platform for web development. However, there are people who disagree with one or more of the choices implied by the acronym, and yours truly is one of them. If you want to learn a little more about alternative technologies head over to FLPR to read up on web development with FreeBSD, lighttpd, PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails.
• Speaking the Lingo:
  A nice presentation on creating domain specific languages with Ruby
• Why Good Programmer’s Are Lazy and Dumb:
  Ok, almost everybody already knows that good programmers exactly know when to be lazy and dumb, but the article is still a good read for poor folks like me who are lazy and dumb without being overly good programmers…

Fun:

• Semapedia:
  Hyperlinking Wikipedia articles in meatspace is what this cool project is doing. Interesting stuff, as soon as time permits I’ll have to play around with this a little more!
• What’s My Pirate Name?:
  Everyone should have his own pirate name…
• ColdPizza:
  A nice parody of Coldplay’s recent DRM-EULA.
  

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

Today when I talked with a non-techy friend from the Midde East on IM, the topic of free speech on the net came up. I then started telling him about Tor and how hidden services could be a solution to this. But when I sent him the links, he couldn’t open them, but instead saw the following:

We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political and moral values of [insert country here].

I guess it should have been obvious that countries which censor the net wouldn’t easily give their citizens the information needed to circumvent this censorship, but still I was pretty baffled by this.

So please everyone, spread the word about Tor and consider if you want to volunteer or donate something to the effort!

Boomtime, Chaos 22, 3172 YOLD

22C3 is over since last Friday, but I needed some time to let everything sink in. Besides that I just came home from Germany this morning… Here’s a list of all the talks I saw:

Day 1:
Private Investigations
Understanding buffer overflow exploitations
Hacking CCTV
Hacking Data Retention
Bad TRIPs
We lost the war
VoIP Phreaking

Day 2:
AJAX Based Web Applications
Anonymous Data Broadcasting by Misuse of Satellite ISPs
Digital Identity and the Ghost in the Machine
Literarisches Code-Quartett

Day 3:
COMPLETE Hard Disk Encryption with FreeBSD
How to construct Utopia
The truth about Nanotechnology
Fnord Jahresrückblick
Hacker Jeoparday

Day 4:
A discussion about modern disk encryption systems

People:
berq, lippi and Manuel were really great company and we had a damn good time together! Thanks guys! teemow also was at the congress, and once again we had some interesting conversations. I’ve also met some fellow Gentoo devs, but unfortunately we didn’t talk that much. Maybe next year we once again should try to organize a more formal get-together. I’ve also met some nice people to play Go with, and although I still suck at this game, I really enjoyed playing it.

Misc:
Get rich, because using busses for long-distance travel sucks, at least if you want to sleep. Luckily our hostel (CityStay Berlin Mitte) did great in that regard, and I only can recommend this place to anyone looking for a clean and cheap accomodation in Berlin.

Conclusion:
22C3 definitely was good fun. I’ve seen interesting talks, met a lot of nice people and generally had a good time. However, I found the overall quality of the lectures not that impressive and I tried to express this sentiments via the feedback forms…

Prickle-Prickle, Chaos 4, 3172 YOLD

I haven’t blogged for quite some time now, so I decided I could at least entertain you with one of my semi-regular link dumps until I’m motivated enough to write a proper entry again…

Ruby

RadRails: From a rather recent mail on ruby-talk I learned about RadRails, an IDE for (who would’ve guessd) Ruby on Rails which was built using the Eclipse RCP. Unfortunately I didn’t have too much time to play with it yet, but so far it seems to be quite nice and if you’re into Rails you maybe should have a look at this project.

eigenclass: Recently RedHanded kept talking about Mauricio Fernandez’ new blog called “eigenclass”, which talks about a lot of really interesting and advanced Ruby stuff. Definitely an interesting read for every serious Ruby programmer and everyone who wants to become one.

try ruby!: As I found out on poignant-stiffs why is at it again, which means there’s something cool coming up. Despite not involving cartoon foxes or chunky bacon, try ruby is still a really neat project, giving you the opportunity to interactively test Ruby from within your web browser. There’s also a little tutorial, so this site may very well become the first stop to send Nubies to…

Disobey

The Hacktivist: Instead of summing up what the Hacktivist is all about, I’ll just give you the self-description of the project: “The Hacktivist is dedicated to examining the theory and practice of hacktivism and electronic civil disobedience while contributing to the evolution of hacktivism by promoting constructive debate, effective direct action, and creative solutions to complex problems in order to facilitate positive change.“ – Involve yourself!

The World’s Most Populated Countries: Sometimes a new look on things helps changing your perspective in a positive way. That’s why it’s important to take a minute or two to think about this map of the Earth, where all the countries got resized in relation to their population.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: This comes from an open letter to the Kansas school board: “ I am writing you with much concern after having read of your hearing to decide whether the alternative theory of Intelligent Design should be taught along with the theory of Evolution. [...] Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him“. Ramen!

Relax

Unintentionally sexual comic book covers: Part 1: If you know The Best Page In The Universe you either love or hate Maddox. No matter to which group you belong, check out this collection of unintentionally sexual comic book covers and have a good laugh! (via hoodwink.d onslaught)

The Website Development Process: Learn everything important there is to know about the process of developing a professional website from platic figurines. (via BoingBoing)

Squidoo: The developers of Squidoo thought that “Everyone’s an expert on something”, so they decided to give all of us the opportunity to share our knowledge in the form of “lenses”. For all of you who are to lazy to look at the FAQ to find out what a lense is, here’s the answer: “ A lens is one person’s (lensmaster’s) view on a topic he cares about. More specifically, a lens is a single web page filled with information and links that point to other web pages, to continually updated RSS feeds, or to relevant advertising. It’s a place to start, not finish. “. Interesting concept, and there are some pretty cool lenses already. (via teemow).

Setting Orange, The Aftermath 53, 3171 YOLD

“The time has come to guarantee consumers certain basic rights in the digital world, and to tell them what they can do with their digital hardware/content. This is our message in this campaign.“

(via CARGAL)

Prickle-Prickle, The Aftermath 22, 3171 YOLD

Trusted computing: A great animated short film by Benjamin Stephan and Lutz Vogel. It talks about why TC is a bad idea in a way even your non-nerdy friends and family members will understand, which is really great (via Chaos Update).

Against TCPA: Old but still good. Learn more about TCPA and why you should be opposed to it if you value your personal freedom.

The Cluetrain Manifesto: teemow was blogging about this, so I found that interesting looking book. Amazon reviews tend to agree that the book is a bit repetitive but well worth a read. Now let’s put this on the huge pile of books which has a sign in front of it that reads “Things to read later”.

The C Book: I found a free C book on the web which seems to be pretty good. Not that I’m into C again, but I discovered this while I was looking for something else and thought someone might find it useful…

NYC2123: Interested in well-written and drawn cyberpunk comic under a CC license which can be read on the web for free? Honestly, who wouldn’t be? (via BoingBoing)

Internet: the final frontier. These are the voyages of citizen428. His mission: to explore strange net worlds; to seek out new forms of communication and new communities; to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Now what do I want to tell you with this rip-off Star Trek intro? The answer is pretty simple: I just love the Internet! Since my first contact with the medium around 1993/94 when I was around 14 it really fascinated me. Nowadays I’ve mostly abandoned stuff like the Usenet and BBSes and am more focussed on the WWW, which more often than not makes me spend more time online than is really good for me. Where this fascination comes from I can’t really tell, but I supposse it has to do with the enormous possibilities the web has to offer: you can find nearly all the information you want, build online communities or communicate with friends everywhere in the world in real-time. Webzines and blogging have in some cases become a valuable alternative to traditional media and additionally the WWW has taught quite a lot of people some things about freedom of expression, and how important it is to stand up and fight for your rights. At least that’s what I want to believe. Now that this intro got a lot longer than I originally intended, let’s get to the things I really wanted to tackle in this entry.

What the Hack is over since Sunday, and I finally feel like writing about this great event, which so far definitely was my personal highlight of this summer. A big “Thank you!” goes to everyone who made this event possible, I’ve really enjoyed these 3 days with interesting lectures, nice people and an overall great atmosphere. Special thanks go to Gentoo user and travel compagnion Red B@ron who regularly lent me his laptop (yep, mine’s still broken) as well as teemow who told me about quite some cool stuff, including Plazes and who incidentally is also a Gentoo user.

Unfortunately I didn’t meet any other Gentoo devs at the event, can it really be that besides me and Hanno nobody made it to the event? If that’s really the case it’s a shame, as WTH really was a good mixture of interesting technical and social lectures, as well as a good chance to meet nice people. It surely boosted my motivation to work on FOSS projects (including Gentoo of course) even more, so it definitely was worth the trip for me.

And now for some comments on the talks I’ve seen:

Data retention is no solution!

The signatures will be sent to the European Commission and the European Parliament.“

Link (via Chaos Update)