RaSchi’s Valhalla

British telecom (BT) and FON Community today announced that BT is partnering up with FON. While many telco’s run their own networks of wifi hotspots (e.g. Swisscom Mobile, T-Mobile) and probably consider the community their competitor, BT apparently goes a different route.

“We have integrated FON in BT and now more than more than 3 million Total Broadband customers are invited to join the enormous global community of people sharing their WiFi.”

3 million new Foneros just like that? At first that sounds like a smart move for Fon. But has BT really thought this through? Are customers actually asked whether they want to join and do they have choice to say no? Then probably those 3 million will turn out to be significantly less. As usual, I’m not a legal expert, but this sounds to me like a change of contract conditions which would mean BT’s broadband customers could more or less immediately terminate their contract if they don’t want to become Fonero’s and BT doesn’t want to keep them as non-Fonero’s. And what if these BT customers choose to become Bills, does BT get a share as well?

And of course one would hope that BT really makes sure that the WLAN routers they deliver are properly secured. With such a deployment they should soon become an interesting target for all those blackhats out there.

Update: On the new community’s btfon.com website there’s the answer to the question. Existing BT broadband customers must opt-in to become Foneros. And if they don’t, they can buy vouchers via BT and so BT does get their share.

Intel Research has published about Intel Mash Maker Technology Preview, a Firefox add-on which is supposed to make mash-up development a point-and-click process. Unfortunately it’s preview only and only for a limited audience. That means you can sign-up and you enter the waiting list. If you watch these videos, you’ll most likely be as impressed as I am. I am curious how this is working…

The American Civil Liberties Union has installed a countdown labeled the Surveillance Society Clock. It is six minutes to noon.
The timer is supposed to alert the public to the increasing trend towards a surveillance society. The initiative imitates a similar countdown which was set up by nuclear scientists after the WWII and which was supposed to alert the public to the danger of the disaster of a nuclear conflict ending with the world’s destruction.

In his blog on ZDNet.com, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has a report about a stealthy Windows Update. And apparently Mircrosoft has responded to his inquiry and confirmed. Despite the fact that the Automatic Updates service is set to not download or even install updates automatically, the updater does still download and install updates for the Automatic Updates service itself.

Some contributors to discussions actually question the legality of this action. No matter whether this is actually true or not, not even getting to the question of enforcing this law, Microsoft definitely ruins trust of industrial customers. Imagine your running systems in critical infrastructure and spent a whole lot of effort on patch management. The report doesn’t quite say anything about how it behaves in configurations with an intermediate WSUS server but no matter what, even if this time it wouldn’t affect those configurations, if Microsoft ignores customer configurations without notice once, you may not want to trust them to do it in all other occasions either. For Microsoft clients who are legally required to perform strict change management and not perform any modifications without prior site acceptance tests, this may lead to liability charges.

Well, it’s not that long ago that I upgraded my Wordpress installation to 2.2.2, with which I had some trouble due to a larger gap between the former installed release and the upgrade and also due to a non-restorable backup. Now Wordpress 2.2.3 was released today and I figured that it may be a good idea to not leave out an upgrade this time. While it may be very early (and thus also risky) to upgrade the same day, but I figured I’d be able to fix the restore of the backup again, just as I did last week ;-). And tada, everything worked like a charme (as far as I can tell right now, nock-on-wood).

Reading my c’t (admittedly still with some vacation backlog) I stumbled upon this link to “Sprachnudel” - a German slang dictionary - wikistyle. It’s a dictionary of German slang expressions, of course built by the community, featuring the nowadays standard features such as tagging (incl. tag cloud), RSS feed, etc. The “random word” button seems to be entering a loop pretty quickly, but just browsing the toplist is plain hilarious. Or did you know what “Froschfotzenleder” means? Or what a “Zuchtrusse” is?

P.S.: Of course, most of the expressions are far from politically correct or polite. It’s a slang dictionary!

Slashdot has a report on mandatory Keyloggers in Mumbai’s Cyber Cafes. I thought in cyber cafes keyloggers are in the default configuration anyway.

German VoIP provider SipGate announced an open API to their VoIP service. The API is based on XML-RPC, the HTTP connections are secured using SSL/TLS. They have some Perl examples on their website, there’s a .NET SDK and a Firefox extension as well. Now, it would be interesting to look a little further into it and to see other VoIP providers go along. And of course it will be interesting to see how this affects Skype’s position, since they have a tradition of being very protective of their proprietary interfaces.

Cisco seems to have announced to bring it’s telepresence equipment to the consumer market (says computerwoche.de. Their current enterprise solution with three big screens, high-end audio, etc. is at about 300k$. A lower priced edition with only one big screen is available at 80k$. Now they plan to release an edition which will use the customer’s existing HDTV screen and run on a separate device (think settop box). Computerwoche mentions a price of 1′000$. Now that’s supposed to be consumer market? What is the use case for telepresence systems like this that would justify 1′000$ for a private houshold? Grandma wanting to be closer to the grandchildren? Now then she certainly won’t leave much behind to be inherited, will she?

Well, well, well… It’s been a while since I last posted here and I had planned on getting back to blogging for a while already. Now, after coming back from vacation, I thought this might actually be a good time to do so. However, during my vacation my database ran over quota and everything here was messed up.

So I decided to take the occasion to upgrade to the most current Wordpress version. Of course, the upgrade script (which is supposed to upgrade the database scheme) failed due to the DB being over quota. Well, I of course had a pulled a backup of my DB so I figured, so what. The DB was mainly over quota because of the statistics plug-in I used. My ISP has recently come up with a neat statistics service that now comes with my domain, so I no longer needed that data. So I dumped all tables in the DB and thought it might be quickest to start from scratch.

NEVER rely on a backup which you have never restored before. Of course, this sounds like a simple and obvious rule. But of course, you only learn by suffering pain (i.e. making mistakes yourself). So here I am, having a backup and a not working restore. I’m still working on it, found a manual way to reenter data into the DB, but that’s tedious, of course.

Update: Actually, the mySQL GUI Tools, in particular the mySQL Query Browser allows to run the SQL script that I could extract from the backup, so it wasn’t as bad in the end. Since last night, everything is back up and runing. Except for the statistics plug-ins, of course.