i can has censorship

Our junta of incompetent politicians have passed the law that will now introduce censorship in Germany. Ignorant assholes.

msdnaa fail

To download a ISO image for Windows XP (as a member of a university, I joined the Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance programme) I have to download a special windows-only binary program... Which doesn't work right in WINE (the windows API for Linux). But they didn't even get it right on Windows either, as the screenshot here suggests.

Disappointment

I ordered a GPS antenna, checked that the list of "compatible" GPS receivers include +5V types, asked them in a Email about it, to which they replied "3.3V - 5V is ok", and now got the product depicted next to this text.

Vorratsdatenspeicherung

I have removed the banner in the upper-right corner linking to http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/, obviously the aim of this campaign was not reached: Our beloved parliament has passed a law demanding storage of extensive records about phone- and internet usage of every citizen yesterday. I'll not go into the details of the infamous lies Mrs. Zypries has told the citizens to get to this point, please read about it in the link above. Update: If you want to learn about yet another reason why CDU/CSU or SPD must not be allowed to govern this country any longer, please have a lookt at the names of the members of parliament and their votes on this law.

stupid government, part 81233

Our beloved government today passed two stupid laws, one concerning copyright, the other concerning computer crime. As they are a bunch of imbeciles both are a great failure and only please the people bribing them and I'll refrain from stating my obvious dissatisfaction with those idiots. Nevertheless the Chaos Computer Club made a nice statement by replacing their homepage with the image you can see left of this post. They state that now the internet has become a nice flower-meadow without any security problems and no internet crime left. It'S just the way the members of parliament that passed the law prohibiting security tools (which might of course also be used in a offensive way) probably think it now has become.

Userfriendlyness

The current Ubuntu versions are (in my oppinion) a big step backwards in terms of reliability. For example last week, I wasted quite a lot of time working around various breackage in the networking area.

Especially high brain-damage can be experienced by using the ifup/ifdown network configuration, because it only does half of the work, when you are lucky. Right now, for example, my machine here lacks it's ipv6-address, even though it's clearly configured in /etc/network/interfaces as it should. Now if I try to ifup manually, it fails because of the already configured ipv4-half... and ifdown fails because of the non configured ipv6 half. If I manually flush the addresess, ifup does the right thing though... but ifup just blindly running the network configuration commands and failing on the first one signalling an error is just BAD, BAD, BAD!

Things like secondary ip-addresses added with the up directive seem to work even less often....

The second-to-most-painful thing is the udev scripts that now merrily rename your network interfaces according to /etc/iftab, a very bright move that --combined with the abomination that is NetworkManager-- can make the unsuspecting administrator hunt for non-existing configurations for hours!

To add insult to injury, the NetworkManager manual-page says (emphasis mine):

The NetworkManager daemon attempts to keep an active network connection available at all times. The point of NetworkManager is to make networking configuration and setup as painless and automatic as possible. If using DHCP, NetworkManager is intended to replace default routes, obtain IP addresses from a DHCP server, and change nameservers whenever it sees fit, with the aim of making networking Just Work.

The obvious solution to all that idiocy of course is to just ignore the non working amatuer work and fall back to the method that already worked in Slackware, 1995. That's what I call progress.

/etc/rcS.d/S41rc-networking
#!/bin/sh
ip link set lo up
ip -f inet addr flush dev lo
ip addr add 127.0.0.1/32 dev lo
ip link set eth0 up
ip -f inet addr flush dev eth0
ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 broadcast 1.2.3.255 dev eth0
ip route add default via 1.2.3.1
# ... add ipv6 stuff here...

My tax euros at work.

The german government tried to persuade its citizens to file their tax declaration electonically by providing a free (as in beer) windows application. It's called Elster, which is german for Magpie, a bird that at least in german folklore, is said to be quite thievish. Now, I installed that application to finally file my 2005 tax returns. And I'm prepared for the worst, because the german government is known for it's phenomenal failure in all its software projects. And my confidence in their incompetence was not disappointed, the dialog box above tells you that they were not able to make the program work without administrative rights. That's especially funny because -at least as a merchant who also can use that program- you are required by law to abide to basic security practices on your computers.