Today I found this excellent Flash animation on the Metalab members mailing list, which may prove to be a great help in raising your non-techy friends awareness of privacy issues. Unfortunately it’s in German only…
Since I got a really bad cold accompanied by an annoying cough and have been feeling like sh*t for the past few days, I finally decided to call in sick today. So after sleeping long, all I did for the rest of the day was lying in bed, playing some poker (won my first HORSE Sit’n’Go), playing World of Warcraft, reading 2+2 and some of the other forums I regularly visit and watching The Simpsons. Although that may sound like a lot of fun, it actually wasn’t that great since (1) I really feel like shit and (2) I realized this wasn’t much different from most other days. Sure, the Poker and WoW sessions were a bit longer than usual, but other than that the saddening conclusion is that lately I don’t seem to be doing anything valuable with my time. But what’s valuable anyway?
After ignoring or even bashing the game for a long long time, i surprisingly bought a copy of World of Warcraft last Thursday, a fact I entirely blame on Joi Ito. Of course I’m playing the game on my shiny new Macbook and I have to say that I really enjoy it so far. Or maybe that’s just because being a monster slaughtering Troll shaman is much easier than dealing with certain real life issues I’m currently facing. As it seems decadence kills depression once again… Considering this last argument it’s a shame that there won’t be a Mac version of Warhammer Online, because I’m pretty sure by the time it will be released I’ll have some new issues which will need some good ol’ repressing.
Oh, before you become the n+1th person (where n is fairly large) to ask: Yes, I know the South Park episode.
Get intrigued by the low prices of the Intel based Mac Minis and use them as an excuse to finally buy your first Mac.
While on holidays in Hong Kong (or any place else without a VAT), get yourself a black 8GB iPod Nano to go along with the Mini. Again, use the comparatively cheap price as an excuse.
When your boss offers you a bonus, insist on getting payed in hardware and choose a black MacBook.
Today I started writing a useful little Greasemonkeyuserscript for a browser-based MMRPG I’m playing. Although I’m no JavaScript guru I feel somewhat confident in the language and am quite fond of XPath ever since I joined the hoodwink.d community. Everything was going well, until I kind of hit a road block: selecting images whose src attribute contains a certain directory (e.g. “funky”) from a frame within a frameset. What sounds trivial at first cost me close to one and a half hours, but luckily enough I finally found a solution. To spare you the hassle, here’s the working result:
Of course if any of you know sbout a better way to achieve the same result, please don’t hesitate to post a comment, thanks!
On a completely unrelated note: I’m probably the last person to find out that Slashdot features random Futurama quotes in its HTTP headers, but nonetheless I find it pretty cool to find stuff like “X-Fry: The less fortunate get all the breaks!” in there!
Say you live in a country where access to information isn’t as free as it should be. Sure, there are a lot of free proxy servers you could use, but unfortunately they tend to get blocked after a while. Tor would also be an option, but unfortunately it’s not always as fast as we’d like it to be (run more servers, folks!).
That’s why I thought I’ll show you another possibility to get the information you want without somebody censoring it:
Use ssh’s cool “-D” option to start a local SOCKS proxy.
Example: ssh -D 9999 youraccount@somefreeshellserver.com. Consider adding this to some startup script to make life easier in the future.
Configure your browser to use localhost:9999 as a SOCKS5 proxy. If you’re using Firefox, consider using MM3-ProxySwitch or FoxyProxy.
Voila, from now on every connection you make will go over an ecrypted connection to the SSH server which unlike the site you really want to access isn’t blocked. The server will then perform your originally planned connection and forward the results to you (once again encrypted and not coming from a blocked IP). And of course this doesn’t only work with browsers, but all applications supporting SOCKS proxies. Additionally tsocks may help with applications which normally don’t support SOCKS servers.
If you experience connection problems and are suspecting that someone has tampered with the name servers in order to deliver bogus results for certain sites (bad government, no cookie!) make sure that the option “network.proxy.socks_remote_dns” in Firefox’s about:config is set to true, because then DNS lookups will be performed at the SSH server.
That"s it, please leave a commentary if you have any questions or suggestions regarding this little tip or if you just want to provide me with some feedback how this worked for you.
Conclusion:
As usual the C3 was a blast: interesting lectures, meeting nice people, and generally having a good time with friends is what makes this event a highlight for me. This year’s congress seemed a little less organized and more chaotic than 22C3, but in a way that was quite refreshing.
MMORPGs
Although I’m not into WoW myself, I was looking forward to see Joi talk again at the C3. As expected his lecture was quite entertaining and since it wasn’t about a “heavy” topic it was a perfect starter for what would become a pretty long day.
Tor and China
As you might know I’m a big supporter of Tor and have studied Chinese for several years, so this was a lecture I was obviously really interested in. The talk was pretty nice, although it didn’t offer too much for people already familiar with Tor. Besides that I was a little disappointed that it actually had so little to do with China, that one could easily have used $genericEvilCountry as an adequate substitute.
Hackerspaces Metalab, C-Base and Netzladen introduced their projects and the challenges involved in creating a Hackerspace in a light-hearted way which was just perfect for me since I was quite tired at that time.
You can’t make this stuff up
You can’t blame Fefe and Ilja for trying, but IMHO this was only a weak substitute for the “Literatisches Code-Quartett”.
But the real highlight of the day started at around midnight, when Monochrom started to perform what they call “proto-melodischen interventionismus”. It’s pretty hard to describe how funny this spontaneous concert which moved through the whole building really was if you haven’t been there, so you just have to believe me that this was great stuff!
Who can you trust?
Business as usual: introduction by Tim Pritlove, followed by the keynote. This year’s speaker was EFF’sJohn Perry Barlow, who talked about ethics and responsibility in the hacker community. Quite nice, although I wasn’t all too fond of the way he encouraged people to police their fellow hackers. But for me the most interesting thing possibly was the confirmation of a Chaos Communication Camp in August 2007!
The Grim Meathook Future
Despite not really having a concept, this lecture wasn’t all bad. The speaker was a quite funny and opinionated guy, as were the people who joined the discussion in the end. Nothing great, but quite entertaining.
Dylan Introduction
No concept, terrible English, and altogether not really informative – at least if this wasn’t your first contact with Dylan.
Drones
My personal highlight for the day: interesting topic, good and funny presentation, motivating people to go out and have fun. That’s how talks at the CCC should be.