I am sure you've heard that "hacker tools", including nmap and other system administrastion essentials, may be considered illegal in Germany as of now. It'll depend on whether judges determine that e.g. nmap is a tool primarily used to do harm, so we all have not become criminals overnight, but there will be complications and ridiculous showdowns in courtrooms. I was only one of thousands of protestors, when this bill was first discussed by our politicians. Back in October 2006, I wrote an email to Ilse Aigner, the spokesperson for education, research and the estimation of consequences of techynology (whatever that may be) of the Christian Democratic and Christian Socialist Unions, who is a member of the German Bundestag. She's the Bundestag representative for my hometown. Surprisingly, I got a reply from her secretary, which I shall quote in full below:

im Auftrag von Frau Ilse Aigner ich habe mich bez glich Ihres Anliegens bei unserem Referenten der CDU/CSU-Arbeitsgruppe f r Recht erkundigt. Ich wurde darauf hingewiesen, dass die Bedenken Ihrer Branche hinsichtlich des Refentenentwurfs eines Strafrechts nderungsgesetzes zur Bek mpfung der Computerkriminalit t bekannt sind. Auch hat der Bundesrat eine Pr fbitte ge u ert. Zwar ist der Referent der Meinung, dass die Gefahr der Illegalisierung schon jetzt nicht best nde, trotzdem wolle man aber im laufenden Gesetzgebungsverfahren alle Bedenken beseitigen. Seien Sie versichert, dass Sie auch in Zukunft weiterhin Ihre Arbeit ganz legal aus ben k nnen.

That last sentence says: rest assured that you may continue to exercise your profession legally in the future. In the spring of 2007, it seemed as if all protests were overheard, the Bundestag pushed the new legislation 202c StGB, and the Bundesrat drew in their horns and failed to appeal the decision. I wrote another email to the secretary of Ilse Aigner asking whether I can still "rest assured", but this time, no response came back. And now the law has been passed. Politics as we know it. On the topic of whether the Debian project now has to provide a non-German archive for Germany, I find myself in the middle of the swamp of German legislation. On the one hand, publication or distribution of "hacker tools" has been made illegal, in addition to their (ab)use. On the other hand, however, the law only makes tools illegal which are (a) primarily used for cracking, and (b) are used with malevolent intentions. It's the "yes or no?" "maybe." bullshit which makes it impossible for people to do their job in Germany, if they actively want to stay on the legal side. A good example is the tax system where you have three options: do it yourself with minimal time investment and pay way more taxes than you have to, or let a tax advisor do it, or try to do it right yourself. If you do the latter, it's like walking a thin ridge in absolute darkness, except you won't be told immediately when you fall off. I think Debian should not take any action. We're not malevolently or intentionally distributing tools primarily used for cracking, so we stand good chances of getting by with it. Apart, Debian is not a legal entity in Germany anyway, so who are they to sue? NP: Overhead: Metaepitome Update: Thomas Jollans writes in that Debian can't be sued, but the German mirror operators can, with which I have to agree. Then the solution is obviously to move the German mirrors. That's a topic for this thread.

For whatever reason, my flights always bite with my food schedule; not that I have one, but I'll get hungry part way through, it must be the excitement. Under no circumstances will I gulp down the crap they serve on short haul flights, and being a last-minute packer, I usually never find the time to eat before I leave home I am also seldom hungry when there is stuff to be done before an immutable deadline, such as the departure of a plane. Fortunately, Switzerland provides healthy and great relief in the form of Bircher M esli, a snack that can keep you nourished for hours, and which renders itself well to tuppaware transport. So I've gotten into the habit of taking some along on trips. Today, the security staff at the Zurich airport forced me to break with this habit and to throw out my treasured mush. I have since recovered from the pain, but because there is more to the story than M esli in the dump, I thought it's about time for yet another airport security story about liquids my last one is more than half a year old and I am sure you're craving by now When the attendants saw my 400ml container containing M esli (think yoghurt for now, so you'll know what consistency I am talking about), they categorised it as liquid and would not let me take it through. Obviously, there was no point in arguing nor in mentioning that I often take the stuff with me on planes and never had a problem before (which is true). I was left with the choice to dump it all, or try to eat it up before my flight left. I opted for the latter, but 400ml of M esli is quite too much for quick consumption and I had to declare forfeit about three quarters through. In a moment of genius, I did the math and postulated publicly that I should now be allowed to take the rest, because it's less than 100ml (airplanes are allergic to liquids in larger volumes). I learnt then that the size of the container matters, not the amount of stuff it contains. I handed over the container to the attendant under the pretense that I refuse to throw away food and had her do the deed instead. When I got the container back, I noticed that it still had traces of M esli, looked at the queue of my flight and decided to have a go and be difficult. The result was that I had to head for the toilets and wash off all remaining traces of explosive M esli. I made sure to leave a good bit of water in the container, sealed it, and returned to the wardens of safety. This time, they let me pass, despite the 400ml container filled with, say, 30ml of water. But clear liquids aren't dangerous, or so it seems. Or maybe this is the way to smuggle the real stuff on board? The entire situation was hilarious, I stayed calm and friendly and made sure to inject a sentence about understanding that they're just doing their job and aren't responsible for the regulations at least every minute. They assured me that this was in fact what they were doing, and that it was their orders to obey the regulations imposed by Brussels without exceptions. Just then, as I was repacking my bag behind the x-ray machine, I noticed how another passenger got through with shaving cream and other stuff in a small toiletries bag. When they didn't even bother to unpack the bag, I remarked that the regulations also demand for a single, one litre, transparent plastic bag to contain all the 100ml containers and asked whether they were aware of those. At first, the attendant denied it. When I asked her to step over and look at the informational signs all over the place, which clearly documented the plastic bag requirement, she shrugged and got seemingly annoyed: "we do our job the way we do our job, leave it up to us." Some airport staff make you take off your shoes, others don't. At some airports, you have to switch on laptops, at most you don't. Some passengers are subjected to the new liquid regulations and have to throw out M esli, others are exempt. Now what was that they say about the weakest link? NP: Dream Theater: Awake

Due to popular demand and a related story, I am herewith sharing my recipe for what I consider to be among the best types of food available: the Bircher M esli. As you'll see shortly, I am talking about mush, about a creamy, cereal-and-fruit-based mix of all kinds of ingredients. Its creator, Mr. Bircher designed this M esli to release the contained energy into the body very slowly. Thus, with some M esli in the morning hours, I can easily make it through to dinner without losing blood sugar or feeling down. And from the recipe, you'll be able to conclude that it's also, in fact, quite healthy. My recipe started out from a recipe by Aline's mother, but it bears little resemblance to the original, I've spent two years experimenting on it. No kidding. This also means that you don't have to copy the recipe, but you can freely replace, add, or leave out ingredients to your liking. Especially the ginger, kardamon, and chili aren't exactly what the Swiss would put in there (I almost never use ginger or chili anymore, but kardamon works really well). Without further ado:

Continuing my enjoyment of Scandinavian art, I have become almost entirely hooked to the music of Gazpacho. It's hard to classify this Norwegian band, but their website has a number of streams, so you can make up your own mind. In fact, they'll stream the entire album Night to you, which is my favourite by far but that doesn't make the other three albums I bought any less good. Their music is very innovative and creative, borrows from a plethora of styles, is technically attractive, and has a high potential of addiction. Very high indeed. As someone who's not too much into vocals, I am all the more impressed by how much I dig the unison of voices and music in most of their tracks. Highly recommended. It took me a bit to get into the tunes, so don't lose your patience. Now take some time off, sit comfortably and just listen to Night for 53 minutes. It's powerful. NP: Gazpacho: Bravo

I am sitting at Frankfurt airport in between flights home from Edinburgh (not anymore, but that's where this post was born). It's been an intense 2.5 weeks of DebConf7, which has been unlike other DebConfs for me in two respects: this was the first time I actually went to DebCamp, the week leading up to the conference, which is designated to teams and individuals with development goals to achieve during the week. And I was also actively involved in the organisation of the conference, which was unexpected, but a very good experience I am not going to miss next year. Well, it wasn't unexpected. When I booked my flights in January, I had decided to arrive a day early and leave a day late to be able to lend a hand. In between then and the conference, my life turned somewhat upside-down and I had forgotten everything about these noble goals of mine. So when I arrived at the conference venue on Saturday morning with thoughts of netconf circling my head, I was surprised to find everyone buzzing about (how na ve of me) and somewhat clueless as to how I should merge in: my wrists didn't really hold up to heavy lifting, and my knee certainly didn't enjoy stairs, of which there were plenty on the way up to the top floor, where DebCamp was taking place. After trying and being mostly ridiculed by the other organisers ("friends"... ha!), I set out to accomplish some other tasks more suited to my bodily condition, such as wiring the hack lab to accomodate 40 geeks for the first week. That took me most of the day, but at least the space was ready for Sunday morning and the official start of the camp. My goal for the week was netconf and I made good progress until I ran into a wall on Tuesday and had to back off and rethink my design. Reinhart Tartler and Enrico Zini dedicated their time to listen to my design and the problems and helped me clear the mess up and helped me reduce complexity and converge on a straight-forward, event-based design. As the newly appointed DebConf press officer and one of the organisation volunteers, I did not get any further for a few days, as I was manning the front desk or preparing and releasing my first press release (with the help of several others), which lead to a lovely story on The Register and doubled the number of attendees that preregistered for DebianDay (which marks the end of DebCamp and the start of DebConf). I blame the geeks in skirts, actually. Silly bunch, but not quite as silly as those attendants who could get a laugh out of the underwear question for two weeks in a row. Up to this point, I had managed to keep a perfect balance between netconf, orga-team, and sleep. So good, apparently, that when the orga-team t-shirts arrived, Uncle Steve made it quite clear that I should be getting one, even though I had spent considerable time on netconf, am sure some of the others must have worked twice the amount, and I was still quite well rested then. But they gave me a shirt and thus I became part of the orga-team. And even though it was rough at times, running around during the day, filling spare minutes with netconf brain-work, and enjoying nights that got longer with every day of the conference, I am glad and proud to be a member of this team now. It took me until after the official start of the conference to return to the netconf code, but with the new design, I got most of the framework to a point where it could obtain static and dynamic addresses from configuration files as well as DHCP servers in time for my presentation on Tuesday (the recording of which shall be linked from the netconf homepage as soon as it's available). Of course, nothing worked on screen in front of the audience, but noone really expected that anyway. and then I took it all apart for further simplification, so by the time night fell, the slides from the talk had already become outdated as I moved to yet another design, which is even simpler and which allowed me to sketch complex scenarios, such as DHCP after WPA. For two days, I made good progress, but the time available for hacking decreased noticeably, as I kept volunteering for more tasks that needed doing, and more and more people turned up. Somewhere in between, Keith Packard took hostage of (and fixed parts of) my broken X40 laptop, but that's the meat of another story. And on some other night, our leader Sam, in his official capacity as DPL, presented me with the instantiation of my innermost desires as consolation for my hosital stay: a pony. Just look at that smile! With 400 attendants, this year's DebConf continued the trend of immense growth of the event, and while it's great to witness this increase in popularity among attendees and sponsors, who make it possible each year to fly more people to the destination, I am also rather sceptical. The problem is less the additional load on the organising team the next 100 people are going to be easier to accomodate than the previous 100 were. It is more that the conference is losing focus. More people make you spend less time with the same folks, and as the number of non-contributors increases, the social element starts to outweigh the technical element. I am not condemning the social element, but to paraphrase the words of my favourite Debian developer, it's painful to come to DebConf or even IRC with a project and questions just to find that the people are generally more interested in being social, even to the point of preventing technical discussions. I realise that this is a sensitive subject as the issue of various cabals keeps coming up frequently and it does not seem right to start limiting the audience to this conference, but unless we consider the matter, DebConf might deteriorate similarly to other conferences, which have enjoyed enormous growth as well before it was too late. I think we must make sure that people understand that we are, after all, a technical project and must not lose touch with out roots. Of course, I may also be overreacting, after a week of intense coding and many other stress factors I continued working hard on netconf and helping with the organisation throughout Friday, briefly taking time off to prepare a presentation on my Ph.D. research, which was very well received, as well as a workshop on Debian packaging with modern (distributed) version control systems, which yielded around a dozen new subscribers to the vcs-pkg mailing list. But now, back to netconf. All things considered, I was making good progress, but not getting netconf into a releasable state just yet. I can parse /etc/network/interfaces files and get data from DHCP servers, even configure interfaces with those, but it's all still work in progress as I have not yet bothered to implement such basics as default gateways or DNS servers. But the framework is in place, and I am very happy with it as everything I keep adding falls into place beautifully. To mark the end of my netconf development sprint at DebConf7, I scheduled a code introduction session on Friday, where around 15 people turned out to get a walkthrough of the code and explanation of some of my design decisions. The session was recorded and will be available on video shortly. I think it turned out to be a very good idea; I found myself intrigued by someone else's code before until that someone took the time to explain what was going on. I sincerely hope that this introduction helps bootstrap a few people's experiences with the code and yields more contributors! Even though we ended almost every single evening of the two weeks in one of the surrounding pubs, the last few nights were definitely the most enjoyable. On Thursday, the local team had organised a Ceilidh with a band teaching us geeks how to dance the Scottish way, and the venue stayed open for two hours longer than before, causing most people to come out for beer or bouncing about. On Friday and Saturday, the folks of InfoSeed let us use their comfy couches (in the basement of the conference night venue) and we chilled to music and massages, while on Sunday, after a very tiresome day of cleaning up, the noticably lesser number of survivors hung out at the Forest Cafe for some so-so live music, few beers, and an early journey to bed, where a Dutch Muppet kept us entertained for at least another hour. The best about Monday, my day of return, must have been that the airline lost my backpack, which saved me from having to lug it around in Zurich, and made for a great moment on the phone with the baggage tracing service, who announced that my bags would be delivered in about 6 hours between 20:00 and 22:00 just as the door bell rang and the courier dropped off my bag. I'll be back in Argentina, unless something goes seriously wrong. And I'll be on the orga-team again. If you guys stop holding your meetings on Monday night. Thanks to everyone who made DebConf7 possible. I am proud to have been able to contribute, but the real work was done by a few others. You know who you are. NP: Solar Project: Five

Every now and then I must get in touch with a company whose client I am. With that I mean that the company has my record in their customer database and that I can log in to their webpages with the associated account. Since companies generally don't consider their clients' comfort, they'll usually make you click about a dozen times through mazes of silly questions until you reach a HTML form you can use to send your message on the way. If you take a wrong turn anywhere in the maze, you'll be dropped into a list of frequently asked questions and have to start from scratch your quest for the contact form. I understand the motivation, which is to shield the understaffed customer support department from just those frequently asked questions. However, never has my issue been adequatly answered in those shielding documents. For instance, with Lufthansa, I've had to request ticket changes because they had screwed up (and not my travel agent), or request replacement member cards. And in the Case of Cablecom, I've been trying for months to hear their statement on why my 3500/350 kbps cable connection only ever delivers around 1500/250 (as established in a long-term trial over almost seven weeks), and to get them to stop sending several pages of advertisements about the same products with each and every invoice I get. In none of these cases could I find any useful information online, so I had to embark on the painful journey to the contact form, formulate my request into a tiny text box that would often not even be able to show start and end of a single sentence without scrolling (this is German after all), nor respect line breaks, and then hit the "send" key with a drop of sweat on my forehead because you never know what kind of crack the CGI on the other hand had smoked just a minute ago. What pisses me off most of all is, however, that in the two cases of Lufthansa and Cablecom (this list is not exhaustive, I'm sure, Sunrise is another offender), you have to login to your customer account in order to be able to fill out the contact form, where they ask you for all your contact details again. I don't understand why they want gender, birthdate, postal address, phone number, email address and whatever else for a simple support request one means of contact so they can get their answer to you should be enough. But what I surely don't understand is why they can't just use your login cookie to retrieve all those data from their data store. It sure seems like they're not really in control of their own infrastructure. And this list is not exhaustive. NP: Dredg: Live at the Fillmore

For the next two weeks, I am proud owner of a dog. Or well, at least care taker: Zeno, that's his name, is absolutely convinced that he is the centre of the universe, the "l'ombelico del mundo", as Jovanotti would sing. So it's very incomprehensible to him if I do anything but play with him and he follows me even to the toilet to make sure I don't miss a chance. Apart from having learnt to type single-handedly now (the other hand petting him), what's really amusing is his never-ending, asymptotic quest for perfect comfort. Enter the sequence at any point:

0. if not being petted, walk up to martin
1. strike paw against whatever body part is available.
2. if martin does not react, bite into his thigh, lightly.
3. repeat 1-3 until martin reacts and starts petting.
4. slowly start to lie down, thereby leaving martin's circle of reach
5. wait a second so as to not arouse suspicion
6. stand up, continue at 1.

I find this extremely reminiscent of control theory or a crap PID controller. You'd think dogs are intelligent until you witness the 20th iteration. I am not exaggerating. And I still love that dog. NP: Gazpacho: When Earth Lets Go

Every now and then, I want to remove the background from an image and replace it with transparency. Instead of painful pixel work with the select tool, the following Gimp recipe does the job quite well, provided the background is a single colour:

1. Choose Layer->Transparency->Colour to Alpha and select the background colour in the dialog box. Then click OK.
2. Use the magic wand tool (Z) to select the contiguous region around your object. Make sure to use a sufficiently high threshold such that the selection line coincides with the image's silhouette.
3. Press Ctrl-I to invert the selection.
4. Choose Select->Shrink and shrink the selection by a pixel or two.
5. Create a new, transparent layer. The selection should still be active.
6. Make the background colour you previously converted to transparent your foreground colour and choose Edit->Fill with FD Colour from the menu.
7. Switch the two layers such that the current one moves behind the one containing your image.

The method isn't perfect, but it certainly saves me a lot of time. For instance, my new hackergotchi a tribute to Scotland and the local team of DebConf7 only took me a few minutes to get ready. Suggestions still welcome. NP: Barclay James Harvest: Everyone Is Everybody Else

At DebConf7, I took part in the keysigning party. Since keysigning is not about authenticating government-issued IDs, I took only my Transnational Republic identity card to the event. The reactions I got were multifarious:

• some (most) people had heard the story from last year and joyfully checked off my name.
• a number of people challenged me to present a "real" ID, which I refused to do. They then told me they could not sign my key. I asked each to consider what it is they're signing: a statement about their perception of my identity, or a statement about their trust in the governments issuing "official" IDs. Given a second or two, most people would check off my name anyway. What's alarming is that in those cases I had the impression that they simply succumbed to my pressure without thinking about what I actually asked.
• several people didn't need to see my ID and checked off my name after I answered the question about having checked the hashes (which is also rather pointless).
• very few people checked off my name without knowing me or questioning the ID.
• two people smiled and checked the ID, but placed an X or question mark on their sheet.
• one person refused to inspect my ID and crossed out my name.

All in all, I am satisfied with the results and happy to see many more people questioning the web of trust, or at least the way in which we pretend to secure it. Yet, I have come to the point where I will not take part in keysigning events anymore. The value of the web of trust is overrated, and with every single keysigning party, we just make things worse. It was a good idea to separate folks into groups around well-connected keys to speed up the process, but the groups were still too large to allow for experienced people to pass knowledge to the lesser-experienced ones. Instead of taking part in the event with a critical eye, I saw people present three forms of identification ("does that mean you are really you, or just that you have more money than the other identify fraudsters?") or asking "trick questions" to verify the birthdate written on these documents ("someone ready to deceive an identity who went through the trouble to fake documents will surely have remembered their data"). I shall, in the future, only sign keys of people I already know, and with whom I've interacted before on a level to know bits about their life, personality, and project involvement. I will not require an ID to be presented. If this goes against your idea of the web of trust, please edit your trust database accordingly. My keys are 0x330c4a75 and 0x667c7088 (not yet used). NP: Proto-Kaw: Before Became After

I arrived at DebConf7 with my X40, which would randomly freeze on any video-related event. I even reinstalled everything without copying /etc from the old installation onto a fresh harddisk without success. I tried various kernels, including Ubuntu kernels which rendered my system unbootable. I swore, I kicked and screamed, I contemplated throwing it out of several windows at once and buying a non-IBM replacement, I think I even had bad dreams about it. I did not cry just yet though. I was unable to work on it, neither locally nor via external monitor. In fact, my solution for the first week was to occupy one of the spare desktop machines, link up the original laptop harddisk by way of a great PATA/SATA to USB converter, which Hanspeter gave me for Christmas, boot off the encrypted filesystems, bring up X, and finally ssh into the laptop, where I did the actual work. Trust me, it was ugly. But at least I was able to make progress on netconf. I called Lenovo and they agreed to send a technician out to the venue. Yay for on-site support. That was Friday though, so I'd have to wait until Monday, which was of course when my talk on netconf was to take place. Suddenly, or not so suddenly, but it happened in real-time: in walks Keith Packard, developer of the Intel graphics chips driver for X, and I swear he had "bring me broken X40s!!!!!!" written on his forehead and BIOS latency timeout values as pupils like a popular comic character's eyes may be made off a dollar sign when excited. Ask Matthew Garrett if you don't believe me. So I approached him and handed over the X40 and had him even more excited when I mentioned i855 and it was all downhill from there. I left him with password for root and the encrypted filesystem (he's a Debian developer after all, so he has root on all my machines anyway ) and wandered off for some organisational stuff. It feels great to be at DebConf without your laptop to come back to. So great even that in a moment of genius I decided to do my laundry, and off I went, back to the hostel. Get stuff from hostel B, convince staff from hostel A that I am in fact allowed to wash there as hostel B has no laundry facilities, buy tokens and detergent, dump stuff, find couch and sleep gosh was I tired, but not anymore, when my phone rings to announce the end of the washing cycle. Retrieve, return to hostel B, hang stuff all over the room (we all know each other and these are clean clothes), return to hostel A to say thank you (I actually did), fetch lunch at Subway, arrive at venue, return to desk to find laptop but no Keith. Look confused. Look around to find Keith smiling at me and that the patch to my problem had already made it to the upstream repository. Sit, relax, think, breathe, wow. 60 damn efficient minutes. Let my next machine have Intel chips, please? (call Lenovo, "suspend" the call. Lucky for them, or imagine the ripples of the on-site technician suggesting to try to reproduce the problem with Windows). PS: Unfortunately, the problems aren't all gone. There still seem to be some DPMS-related crashes, and suspending to RAM from X leaves a black display on resume (some might say it's good that this is happening to me too), but I am definitely a lot more peaceful now. Thanks, Keith. NP: Threshold: Critical Mass