all politicians suck. all hardware sucks. all software sucks, too.

source: the always awesome pearls before swine

[ published on Mon 03.09.2018 09:19 | filed in interests/anti | ]
reboot
[ published on Sun 14.01.2018 19:03 | filed in interests/anti | ]

the EFF is much too nice in wording their farewell letter; the register has an overview.

[ published on Wed 20.09.2017 19:50 | filed in interests/anti | ]

weil einen braunen arsch zu haben ist wirklich das letzte.

das wählen in österreich ist ja meistens mehr eine übung zum arschauswischen; aber diesmal brauchts grad das besonders dringend.

[ published on Sat 21.05.2016 15:54 | filed in interests/anti | ]

i though that i have to handle enough bullshit support stuff at work, but no; apparently you can never have enough of that kind of crap.

[ published on Sat 12.03.2016 12:03 | filed in interests/anti | ]
banking-reality

(source: somewhere in milano)

every time one of the local(ish) Big Bastards trumpets their advertising slogan 'we live in your world' my immediate response is "i wish you damn parasites STAYED OUT OF MY WORLD!".

*sigh*

[ published on Sat 19.09.2015 11:55 | filed in interests/anti | ]

...eingekastelter! lt. dem standard ist österreich "führend" beim haftstrafen-verhängen - leider negativ-führend.

"ob gross, ob klein, mir kastln alle ein!"

(klaro, das passiert natürlich nur denen die keinen Politischen Papa haben der's einem richtet. warum die bladen weniger wegen brutalität eingekastelt werden ist nicht ganz so klar.)

[ published on Tue 19.05.2015 22:31 | filed in interests/anti | ]

The Windows 10 announcement: certified hardware can lock out competing OSes means that it would become much easier and more common that the computer you've just bought does not boot anything but MS shiteware.

[ published on Sun 22.03.2015 11:03 | filed in interests/anti | ]

Da sind sogar die Trotteln besonders unbeschreiblich deppert.

lernern
[ published on Tue 03.03.2015 17:54 | filed in interests/anti | ]

"clearly we can't have that! so, up the pain!" must be mozilla's official line. point in case: firefox 31. (inflicted upon us as a security update from debian's marginally bearable ff24.)

by and large humans are pretty lemming-like and flock to the "oh, shiny!" but when it comes to FF 31 the natural reaction is more like "booh, shitty".

the ui layout is plain stupid. the options and choices are gone. it's less usable than all the older versions of FF. it's a memory hog. it manages to both waste more screen real estate and show less useful information simultaneously, which is quite a feat.

An editor is a tool for saving programmer-bukkake to disk. -- Anthony de Boer

oi! mozilla team: less wanking. please.

(unfortunately there are no real workable alternatives: midori isn't flexible or solid enough yet, and with chromium the stoopid never goes below 11.)

fortunately there are lots of other people who also hate the default setup and have spent some time cooking up useful extensions for getting FF back into a workable state:

[ published on Sun 19.10.2014 14:53 | filed in interests/anti | ]
stop-data-retention_infographic

source: andrew bath's site

[ published on Thu 09.10.2014 20:40 | filed in interests/anti | ]

source: the ever-topical and refreshingly nasty First Dog on the Moon

firstdog-21st-centuryfirstdog-attack-800wfirstdog-eggplant-800w
[ published on Mon 29.09.2014 20:54 | filed in interests/anti | ]

So the local *unspeakable* *elided* with the big ambitions, glib tongues, short memories and minimal brains have decided to play the "nasty evil terrorist" sock puppet once again - very likely because

  • it's convenient for justifying all kinds of absolute abuse,

  • the sheep will nod their heads and be suitably subdued by your fear mongering propaganda,

  • and you never have to substantiate any of your divine inspirations - because you can always just handwave some soopersekrid rule that says you're not allowed to say anything about those "threats" - but hey, they're "imminent! honest, trust me". bwuahahaha...

As we all know pretty well there's a ridiculously low risk of the evil bad torrorists (who are obviously "everywhere" according to the *unspeakable*s) terminating you, yes you!; much lower than the risk of you getting mushed by traffic & croaking, or slipping in your bathtub & croaking or...gazillions of other causes.

As a matter of fact i'm quite sure that you're much more likely to be killed by your own government (or one of its allies and sundry henchmen) than by the nasty oh-so-ubiquitous terrorists.

Refuse to be terrorized! (and please do enjoy your noodles)

[ published on Sat 13.09.2014 15:48 | filed in interests/anti | ]

There are very good technical reasons for why SMTP has an envelope that is separate from the mail headers. DMARC ignores those completely and insists that the envelope matches the mail body and headers.

Net result: DMARC completely breaks mail forwarding and mailing lists. The fun part for anybody running mailing lists (like me) is that there are no alternatives - to appease the DMARC cretins you'd have to violate real mail standards or make your lists broken by disabling useful features of proven efficiency (like VERP) and exposing all your subscribers to bounces and other crap.

In the physical world DMARC would be like prohibiting blank envelopes and requiring that all letters must have the full letter head printed on the front of the envelope.

"this letter contains a new credit card - please steal me!"

Clearly only cretins would think that's a good idea. The list of cretins who insist that DMARC being a great idea includes yahoo, aol and hotmail.

I hope yahoo's dumb move does serve to 'improve protection' - by prompting people to go to somebody more sensible for their mail hosting.

[ published on Sun 22.06.2014 13:49 | filed in interests/anti | ]

nachdem jetzt langsam österreich nimmer andauernd mit The Sound of Music (falsch)verbunden wird, werdens wohl beim thema österreich jetzt für die nächsten 50 jahre mit dem komischen würschtl daherkommen. wunderbar.

[ published on Sun 11.05.2014 18:28 | filed in interests/anti | ]

"Sie, mein Herr, sind ein Scheißschweizer."

[ published on Sat 22.02.2014 12:37 | filed in interests/anti | ]

too bad that the bastards in power will likely not give a damn...

[ published on Tue 11.02.2014 19:43 | filed in interests/anti | ]

more specifically: this V. Nuland person, diplomatic underling now known best for spindoctoring and being a nekulturny pissant needs to have more European High Culture :-)

[ published on Sat 08.02.2014 10:33 | filed in interests/anti | ]

decent and cheap aldi-brand chewing gum? completely gone.

great rice crackers with lots of seaweed? no longer sold.

feta, danish or greek style? history.

i'm somewhat underwhelmed by aldi au's recent product policy...

Update (Fri 29.11.2013 22:22):

oh, and and what marketdroid genius decided to rebrand the aldi sausage as "bërrk"?

 boeark

extra points to them for the guts - or maybe somebody just had a bad attack of the röck döts?

anway, somehow i don't think it's sound commercial procedure to associate your comestible product with the sounds of somebody hugging the toilet after a long and alcoholic night...

(still, the product is quite good - just don't try to pronounce the trademark.)

[ published on Fri 29.11.2013 21:55 | filed in interests/anti | ]

(sorry for the untranslatable title :-))

So Reuters polls 835 yanks online, and extrapolates 835 bots' answers to 'Nearly half of all Americans' - great work! snort

Inferring a "credibility interval" of +/-4% from a sample this tiny is pretty creative use of statistics.

Anyway, 47% of those 835 bots are, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, complete idiots ("those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.") - and that's what nearly 100% of all the az's on the internet say.

[ published on Wed 12.06.2013 12:39 | filed in interests/anti | ]

In New Zealand software is no longer patentable.

This is pretty good news and a welcome development, especially when you contrast it with less great news, like the never-ending war of the Content Cartel against everybody else: for example, have a look at the Trans Pacific Partnershite, where NZ is apparently also involved.

Not-NZ-related but also on my big fat hate list is the undead CISPA, the Completely Idiotic Spying and Persecution Act...

 Say no to this Typical Protectionism Project! I wish CISPA was less like Bela L.
[ published on Fri 10.05.2013 14:50 | filed in interests/anti | ]

For CISPA, that is. It would be really good if it got stopped - and you may be able to help, so please do so!

Note that I'm highly skeptical as to whether any of the damn bastards in power (in any country, they're all scum) listen to the unwashed masses, online or not - but it doesn't cost a thing to express one's displeasure at the latest version of this pretty evil law.

[ published on Wed 17.04.2013 14:06 | filed in interests/anti | ]

My Voice-over-IP to analog gate is fully visible on the net, because I like it if people with working SIP phones can directly call me without going through any commercial provider at all.

That's all fine and well, except when folks start hammering my systems with sipvicious/friendly-scanner: the damn thing doesn't wait and listen for responses but rather blasts out gazillions of (doomed) REGISTER or OPTIONS messages.

Here's my fix for this annoyance: if an inbound SIP message looks like REGISTER or OPTIONS, drop it. I don't run any VOIP server, so nobody is supposed to register with me, ever.

That's actually pretty straightforward to achieve with iptables: iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 5060 ! -f -m u32 --u32 "0>>22&0x3C@8=0x52454749,0x4f505449" -j DROP

The u32 match module is low-level but really efficient and precise, and this cryptic instance will simply look for REGI or OPTI at the beginning of the UDP packet payload. The iptables string match isn't as flexible, and could quite easily wrongly match the words in the body of the request (and SIP responses are pretty verbose and full of echoes...).

[ published on Wed 26.09.2012 23:55 | filed in interests/anti | ]

And here we go again: behind closed doors They are negotiating the rules of TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership=next-generation ACTA.

Then there is, of course, the new CISPA bill (=SOPA/PIPA regurgitated and made worse).

And there is Austri^WAbsurdistan's VDS (= preemptive wholesale surveillance of the whole population).

Repeat ad nauseam.

Looks like humanity needs more Tor relays (and bridges), more services like Tor Mail, DDG (with its Tor hidden service), and ideas like the Telex Project - oh, and would somebody please cook up some gene-engineered plague that takes out politicians? Those pests are really annoying...

[ published on Thu 12.04.2012 01:56 | filed in interests/anti | ]

One of the nasty coercive laws of the last few years has just taken a beating:

A Yank federal appeals court has ruled that being forced to decrypt your stuff is unconstitutional. Good for the J. Doe in question, who relied on TrueCrypt which is a pretty nice tool (open-source - but badly licenced, multi-platform, and it does plausible deniability).

The actual text of the ruling is also pretty interesting in its argumentation.

Now if only the powers that be in this place would scrap the Cybercrime Act 2001 No. 161, items 12 and 28...

[ published on Fri 02.03.2012 23:24 | filed in interests/anti | ]

Nope - I'm in the wrong movie...or more likely: I work for the wrong gang.

 another brick in the wall

Maybe they 'award' us these things so as to properly weigh us down here in the trenches, to make sure that no dreams or hopes escape and fly away.

Well then, back to work in my usual 'first week of the semester' work clothing...

 workattire
[ published on Tue 24.01.2012 20:55 | filed in interests/anti | ]

The current wanking draft for HTML5, section 8.2.2.2 translates into the W3C saying 'standards are a good thing, but we are clairvoyant and know better than all of you, so fuck them standards and all the people actually relying on standards compliance!'

Dear W3C, when I label material as being encoded in iso-8859-1 then I MEAN ISO-8859-1 and not smart-shite-infested windows-1252, thank you very much.

Your oh-so-helpful labelling of this mess a 'willful violation, motivated by a desire for compatibility' motivates me to shoot you all on sight.

[ published on Fri 16.12.2011 23:26 | filed in interests/anti | ]

dear wikileaks webhamsters, would you please stop inflating every single damn cable with all the navigational fluff? it's all empty carbs, you know, and makes mirroring you a FPITA.

if you downloaded the latest cablegate snapshot via bittorrent you might be surprised that it's only about 300 megabytes (for 150k cables) - but you WILL be unpleasantly surprised when you unpack that archive: it expands (like kudzu) to a whopping 30+ gigabytes.

the reason: every single cable page is infested with links everywhere else and then some, so that the actual content is just about 3%.

take this cable for example: after ripping out all the gunk between <div class='pane small'> (might have called the css class 'pain, big') and the closing </div> after 'courage is contagious', the page shrinks from a whopping 168k to just 6k. the cleaned page thus consumes only 3.6% of the disk space and network bandwidth of the fugly original beast (and don't forget there's 150 thousand such occurrences right now).

nobody, dear leakers, is going to mirror 30+g of you strutting your fluff on a daily basis - but a decent, still navigatable 7g would be a very different story.

[ published on Mon 29.08.2011 14:57 | filed in interests/anti | ]

zeit wars, und gut is: der letzte von den 'adligen' gfriesern, ein gewisser otto, ist jetzt endlich abgebankelt. zeit hat er sich gelassen - wie mit allem anderen, wie zb. dem herrschafts-ansprüche aufgeben (das hat bis 1961 gedauert...na hallo?!?).

aber sogar einen widerling wie den da erwischt es irgendwann - und jetzt kriechen ihm, wie in ö ja so üblich und komplett erwartet - posthum die ganzen schwarzen und sonstwie ewiggestrigen deppen in den modrigen arsch.

[ published on Tue 05.07.2011 00:05 | filed in interests/anti | ]

Making the news today: QLD coppers have arrested a journalist - for attending the AusCERT conference and publishing articles about the conference. Hello, WTF?!?

Right now it seems the coppers are backpedalling quite furiously, but they certainly deprived him of his freedom (temporarily) and seized his ipad (not so temporarily).

[ published on Wed 18.05.2011 13:59 | filed in interests/anti | ]

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