~stef/blog/

Technology Bill of Rights

1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites
2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds
3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer
4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product
5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source
6. Any media content legally purchased by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time

Brazil komment:

WE Are Currently Living In a historical moment which will define and shape digital rights and information freedom on the internet for generations to come. It's one of those rare moments where the issue is black and white and where the two opposing camps can be identified without over-simplifying the issue. On one side, there are those fighting for the information revolution's culture of sharing, co-operation and the public commons. On the other side is a powerful, industry cartel who would stomp out the commons to salvage proprietary information that they can buy and own.

Németországból egy idevágó, provokatív filmecske: "Terrorista vagy"

Du bist Terrorist (You are a Terrorist) english subtitles from alexanderlehmann on Vimeo.

[update: reposted]

Jquery UI v1.7 came out yesterday. The new timecloud v1.2 already supports this upgrade.  Enjoy.

Good news everyone. A fresh timecloud release is awaiting you. Stuff that changed:

• you can embed multiple timeclouds in a page
• lot's of bug fixes
• updated to the latest versions of jquery (1.3.2), jquery-ui (1.6rc6), sparkline (1.4)

Head over to the project page or directly to the downloads while it's fresh. If you're inclined you're welcome to the git repo as well.

After looking into the problem with jquery 1.3+ and timecloud widget, the issue seems to be, that the culprit was my upgrade of jquery-ui to 1.6rc6 up from the 1.5 branch. The slider widget was heavily rewritten if i understand this mailing-list thread correctly.

My guess is, that there is a discrepancy between different versions of  jquery and the slider widget. The timecloud widget will work with jquery 1.3+, but without correctly working sliders.

i'll need to dig deeper to work this out.

seems like those two don't like each other yet - as far as the slider controls are a concern. sorry folks, in the mean time stick with jquery-1.2.6.

cheers,

s

Nothing to hide

I have been lucky to visit the 25th Chaos Communication Congress between the 27th and 30th December. It was sold out the very first day, good seats, power outlets and free switch-ports were rare and well-guarded. :)

The lectures all were very inspiring, if you had a wired net-connection, you could also watch the talks in other rooms. Below is a short list to most lectures i saw either way. If you care there is a bunch of torrent files indexed on the pirate bay. Please note that all quotes below are not verbatim, they are notes quickly taken during the lectures.

quotes

• Fnord news show "good indicator for e-gov adoption is the loss of data"
• rfid talk: "never force technology onto users"
• Bre Pettis: "smoke is how robots express love", "school is dead",
• cisco ios "international ... sign: (_ x _)"
• la quadrature du net - netzpolitik.de
  • "law is code, ammendmends are patches. if a patch arrives 1 day before voting and and more than 800 patches need to be vetted it is very bad project managment."
  • the term "illegal software" raises interesting issues what about free software? if i alter it will it change from legal to illegal?
• not soy fast
  • patents: monsanto bought a lot of seed producers for soy, corn, cotton, etc. "protecting" IPR.
  • "hunger is not the result of scarcity of food, it is instead the result of an uneven distribution at the world level..." amartya sen. nobel prize winner.

visit

• hackerspaces

privacy

• onioncat with anonymous services - never leaving the tor network - .onion addresses.

robots

• Formica swarm robots: very cool robots, lot's of potential
• about://Asimov/robot/laws...

politics

• neusprech - newspeak in german
• Der elektronische Personalausweis - towards a commercial surveillance architecture / in german.
• e-voting and crypto - no silver bullet?
• wikileaks using onioncat to anonymize usage

crypto

• new stream ciphers: great to see some fresh approaches
• md5 collisions

security

• storm: p2p botnet owned.
  • opendht
  • python dht - entangled
• dect owned - used in many places.
• NFC phones hacked
  • An rfid tag presents a free "tourist info" telefon number, but a premium charged call is made instead.
  • Sticker attack:: putting your own sticker over an other rfid tag.

  quis custodiet ipsos custodes: who will watch the watchers

Thanks a lot everyone! It was great!

After some further development yesterday came v1.1 and now today v1.1.1 with some additional fixes. Head on over to the shiny new project website and grab your copy while it's hot. There are also some updated examples

• Tikiwiki subversion activities (also on screenshot),
• view your delicious tags in real-time

Hint: try to scroll the view with your mousewheel. If you're using this widget, please let me know, thanks! enjoy! update: fixed link to subversion example. updated: links to demos.

JQuery Timecloud v1.0

Lately I have been trying to visualize a couple of things around me. One of the results is this JQuery Timecloud plugin producing somewhat nice looking animated tagclouds.

In the screenshot below I processed the Subversion logs of the Tikiwiki project and plotted the number of changes (commits) by developers over time.

As you can see below, the timecloud widget provides a similar interface to the Google Finance timeseries. In the top you have an overall view of all time activities, here you can zoom the timeframe and pan the selection.

Underneath there is a zoomed in view of the currently viewed timespan.

The first button starts/stops the animation, where the time frame is automatically advanced to the next day, thus creating an impression of moving through time. With the second button you can step forward by one frame, dunno if this is really necessary, it might be removed later.

HINT: If you set the timeframe in the overview to cover the whole dataset, you will be able to see an all encompassing tagcloud, but won't be able to animate it.

If you're interested head over to to the project home and have fun!

Cheers,

s

[UPDATE] In the download package there is an example which let's you visualize your delicious tags in such a tagcloud, unfortunately it needs a PHP enabled webserver to run.

[UPDATE2] a live example can be found here and one  for your delicious tags

[UPDATE3] the project home moved to ohloh.net, all references updated. development and versiontracking  is still at github.

[UPDATE4] demos found a new home.