December7th, 2003:
SpiegelNET is attacking me! About 10 minutes after I surfed the website www.SPIEGEL.de (and had since long left the website again) a massive attack onto my firewall started. The originating IPs were 194.64.249.64 and 194.64.249.65. These machines belong to quality-channel.de (QC), a company responsible for delivering advertisements to internet users, and a 100% subsidiary of the SPIEGELGruppe. Within five minutes the two machines tried to connect to my computer at least 126 times! Asked why this has been, Rudolf Gross of QC, the man responsible for those two machines, told me: "Ich habe Ihr Logfile gelesen und habe die starke Vermutung, dass es sich hierbei um einen Effekt bei der Auslieferung von Werbemitteln über einen Loadbalancer handelt. [...] Möglicherweise haben Sie eine Seite geöffnet gehabt, welche vom Quality Channel mit Werbemitteln beliefert wird? Das wären unter anderem beispielsweise Spiegel, Heise oder die Süddeutsche Zeitung?" Can anyone of you tell me why their machines should connect to mine? The machines tried to connect to the upper ports of my machine, mainly with 5digit port numbers, but anyway: After asking why connecting to my machine was necessary, my questions were punished with silence. And I don't believe him.

November 29th, 2003:
T-Com has finally reacted to the cries of a horde of privacy advocates who claimed T-Com's unfair practices (see further down), as far as their T-DSL quick check was concerned, to be illegal. The T-Com website now properly asks for a customer number if one would like to find out whether T-DSL is available in his neighborhood: "Um einen Missbrauch durch Dritte auszuschließen, benötigen wir neben der Vorwahl und Rufnummer die nur Ihnen bekannte Telekom Kundennummer[...]". Fine. Or as Swabians would say: "Waromm ned glei so?" ;-)

November 8th, 2003:
You're running a website hosted by the big German internet provider 1&1? You're a bit of a techie and don't shy at rolling up your sleeves to analyze your website's logfiles? You're not amused by the sparse information you get when you look at the logfiles summary on http://your-web-site-name.here/logs? You want to find out exactly who accesses what information on your website and not only who accesses it and what is accessed, without those two pieces of information being interconnected? Read this article (in German only) to find out what you can do.

November 1st, 2003:
The link to the SCO FTP site i presented further down is no longer available. SCO still thinks they can force customers running one of their Linux distributions to register for the use of their copy. In a statement in a text file on their FTP server located here, SCO lets us participate in the flashy outcome of their cerebral activities in the following way: "Dear SCO customer, Starting on November 1, 2003, SCO will institute new procedures for you to access binary updates and source rpms. If you own an SCO licensed copy of Linux (such as such as OpenLinux, eDesktop, etc.), it will be necessary for you to register (or re-register) in order to continue to receive support files. During the registration process you will receive instructions on how the new access procedure will work or you can visit: http://www.sco.com/support/linux_info.html". Furthermore, they say: "This SCO license balances SCO's need to enforce its intellectual property rights against the practical needs of existing customers in the marketplace." Has anyone of you seen anything like a proof that SCO owns this intellectual property? Disbelief or at least doubt is advisable in my opinion.

August 25th, 2003:
The new T-Com website is online. T-Com is the fixed network branch of the Deutsche Telekom AG. "Should this bother me?" you might ask. It should! Definitely. T-Com provides information about YOUR telephone mainlines, the tarrif you're charged and info on whether you're using T-DSL or not. In the upper right corner in a window named "T-DSL Quick Check" anyone can enter your telephone number and find out if you're using ISDN, T-Net, T-DSL and so on. Asked when this privacy mess will be fixed T-Com has only stated that they will fix it, but do not know when this will be happening.

July 14th, 2003:
Wardriving! When you drive along the roads of Stuttgart with an ordinary laptop computer, equipped with a Wireless LAN (WLAN) Antenna, you'll soon discover you're not alone in this world. Dozens of WLAN Access Points, sometimes called hotspots, mark your way along the road. Some of them are configured in an inherently insecure way: no encryption, no MAC address checking, nothing. This means: you could just put your computer near an appropriate hotspot and, almost instantly, you'd be able to use the internet access of the owner of that hotspot. Of course, you are not allowed to do that. Read aboud this and other nasty things about WLAN Access Points and what you can do to secure your Wireless LAN here.

July 3rd, 2003:
Several events take place on that day:
- The Medieninformatik-Forum at the Hochschule der Medien, Location Nobelstraße, room 148 or 132
- The MediaNight at the Hochschule der Medien, starting on 2pm
- The Java Forum 2003 by the Java User Group Stuttgart in Stuttgart-Möhringen

June 10th, 2003:
Looking for three or four people for translating the Mozilla Webbrowser into Swabian (Schwäääbisch)! The people of the Mozilla Localization project already told me that they find this a good idea because they know people here happen to like their dialect and that this would make them try to use Mozilla (instead of the one evil browser we all know). The Swabian Mozilla's official locale would then derived from de-DE and will be called swabian-de-DE. There is ready-made translation software which we could use, it's quite simple. We don't intend to make this translation high-priority, it should be a just-for-fun-project and it would, besides the fun with the Swabian language, give us an insight into how the localization inside the browser's engine is done. Interested? Send eMail to

June 2nd, 2003:
Is anyone else out there who feels hatred when it comes to paying a visit to the dentist? At my last visit they X-rayed part of my lower jaws and then, 10minutes later (!), presented to me the results on a funky 15"-TFT which swung down in front of the chair i sat on. They told me that some shades there and there indicated that this and that tooth needed some care and this would cost some hundred Euros. Ok, maybe those two teeth really need the care, but: The X-ray image was taken digitally, the image was presented to me digitally, but nobody can give me the guarantee that the image has not been manipulated digitally in those 10 minutes. A digital signature system could be used to render such manipulation impossible: The camera itself would have to be contructed in a way so that every image it takes is signed with the camera's built-in on-chip private key. Its public key must then be made literally public in several places and even be noted down in a notarial act. With that public key every customer may immediately check that the image has not been manipulated. Of course, the software developers' task is to provide a system that makes this checking easy for every technically unbiassed custumer. And of course, politics should enforce the installation of such systems by paying less for the treatment to dentists who do not install them. Acid-tongued claim, I know. A pity that paying and trusting your car mechanic cannot easily depend on similar systems...

May 31st, 2003:
It seems to me that SCO really wants to commit suicide. One the one hand, they try to sue users and distributors of Linux for using and distributing source code for which SCO has, according to SCO, the intellectual property rights. On the other hand, SCO themselves are offering the source code of a SuSE (sic!) Linux kernel on their own FTP site.

May 28th, 2003:
I'm proud to have found a place of employment for my diploma thesis. A medium-size company located in a town near Stuttgart markets a huge Content Management System with an integrated product database. That system is, amongst other things, used for Single Source Publishing, for example by companies in the media industry. The company grows and so does their need for knowledge. As of September I'll be a part of their team. And of course, I'm looking forward to it.

May 28th, 2003:
With the work of the TeRM E-Learning project we're going to apply for the TheoPrax Price which is awarded anually by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft to students and pupils for innovative projects performed at universities and schools.

May 23rd, 2003:
Weyheyhey! This new website has been launched. After a long time of having only some "Under Construction" note on my old website I have finally decided to get up early in the morning and launch this new website. The feeling of being virtually cut off from the rest of the world without a website didn't make me feel too lucky. So here it is an I hope you enjoy it though most of its parts are only just being constructed as well.

Securing your Wireless LAN
Maßnahmen zum Absichern Ihres WLANs
(HTML, german)

Analyzing your ISP's website logfiles
based on an example of the
big German internet provider 1&1
(HTML, german)