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On Walker-Online I have a small link database, including a form to submit new links. Usually I receive a few suggestions per month but today we got 10 at once and that seems a bit strange.

Where are these coming from? Who ever submitted these links did not even bother to choose the right category – in fact I don’t even have categories for their sites (can you guess, what the sites are about?!). So, did some marketing company which is offering URL submission to more than 1000 sites find a few stupid and desperate marketing managers? The web-server logs tell me, that the link submissions did not come from the same IP address. But the visitors did not visit any other page than the link submission confirmation page, so it probably originates from a special software which even leaves a fake referrer. They did not even visit the form page directly. OK, so I wrote a friendly email to one of the senders to ask, which software they have been using to spam me, but of course the email is invalid. I should have known better!

I removed the ’suggest a link’ form now, since I am not maintaining the database any longer. I used the database mainly as an online bookmark storage for myself but new services like del.icio.us are much more flexible. This is another unfortunate example of marketing driven abuse of open and trusting systems on the internet. Previously I already had to close a guestbook and comments on the blogs have to be protected against spam as well.
Also del.icio.us has this problem as this post by brian illustrates and we all read about the recent manipulations within wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: spam, wikipedia, delicious

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Philipp Lenssen reports on his Google Blogoscoped blog, which is covering Google, the search engine world, online research, and other related topics, that obviously BMW.de has been removed from the Google index.

From what it looks like, the German websites of car maker BMW have been kicked out of the Google index. BMW.de at this time has a PageRank of 0. A search for BMW Germany, which only days ago yielded BMW.de as a top result, now doesn’t show any sign of BMW.de at all. Instead, BMW.com – BMW’s international site – is on top for this search.

The reason for the ban is likely to be that the BMW websites have been caught employing a technique used by black-hat search engine optimizers: doorway pages. German and international bloggers last week were quick to spread the news.

Technorati Tags: google, bmw, doorway pages

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Have you been missing your good old unix terminal with green letters on an old CRT montitor, just like when you where a student hacking the AIX on the mainframe of your university?

The answer is GLTerminal. A small terminal app for Mac OS X:

GLTerminal emulates a 1970’s terminal monitor, complete with flaws in brightness, warped display curvature, and flicker. It even simulates baud rate lag. And! for extra verisimilitude, the character colors can be green or amber.

The the world wide web the way we saw it more than 13 years ago (the first graphical browser was released in 1993):

Technorati Tags: apple, unix, terminal

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Yesterday we visited the Information Wants To Be Free day of the Weerwoord Festival in the Melkweg in Amsterdam. I already blogged about the European Archive and the Big Brother Awards 2005. Here are now some more impressions of the interesting afternoon.

Professor E. Dommering of the University of Amsterdam opened with a review of the current situation of censorship on the internet, with the most recent example of Google’s decision to launch a special google.cn service in China. Next the Tibet Support Groep Nederland explained how the Chinese regime uses internet censorship to block access to information about the situation and history of Tibet, its ongoing occupation and the Dalai Lama. In December Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the European Commission had already criticized Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in her weblog and hoped that these companies one day will understand that to endorse democracy and corporate responsibility is a prerequisite for “smart” growth.

That internet control and censorship also happens in eastern Europe was the subject of the next presentation. Aleksander Parfentsov, director of the Informational Development Promotion Foundation (IDOF) and of the TV-production Studio 42 in Minsk, Belarus, gave an overview of the current social and political situation in Belarus and the creative ways in which young people exercise their right to free opinion.

As a positive example for free information and communication, the videoletters project was presented next by Katarina Rejger. In Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Monte Negro and Kosovo Videoletters reconnects former friends who stopped talking to one another since the war.

The video webcast of this even will soon be online on Fabchannel.

Technorati Tags: google, belarus, videoletters

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At the Information Wants To Be Free event in Amsterdam Julien Masanès today presented the new website of the European Archive, which will be the European version of the Internet Archive. The website which was originally scheduled for launch in September 2005 will now officially go online in February 2006.

Julien Masanès is the cofounder and Director of the European Archive, a non-profit foundation for web preservation and digital cultural access. Before this he directed the Web Archiving Project at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France since 2000.

European Archive’s 200 Terrabyte data center is being hosted by XS4ALL in the center of Amsterdam here in the Netherlands and has been in use already as the European mirror of the Internet Archive.

Technorati Tags: internet archive, european archive,

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The winners of the Dutch Big Brother Awards 2005 have been announced today at the Informantion wants to be free event at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

The winners are:

• Minister Rita Verdonk
• Sony BMG
• Flevo hospital
• the proposal for central data biometric retention

Minister Verdonk is awarded the price because she handed-over the status of asylum seeker of rejected applicants to their country of origin, denied it repeatedly in parliament and later minimised the impact of this information. Though much media attention was devoted to the credibility of the minister, the gravity of the privacy violation remained underexposed, according to the jury. The information about their attempt to seek asylum might very well cause life threatening situations for the applicants in their country of origin. Thus the case provides a perfect illustration how important privacy is for the security of people.

Sony BMG has won the award in the category Companies. The company installed spyware on 2.6 million audio cds, intended as copyright protection. When the rootkit was discovered, the company issued a patch. But that made matters even worse. People interested in the patch had to provide many personal details and after the installation the patch secretly set up encrypted communication with Sony BMG.

In the category government institutions, the Flevo hospital earned an award with very poor security of personal data about patients. Subsidised amongst others by the European Commission, the hospital embarked on a project to disclose appointments with patients via the Internet, but failed to put adequate access control into place.

In the category ‘proposals’, the government idea is crowned to put a central database into place with biometric data, data every Dutchman will have to provide soon to obtain a new passport. From August 2006 a picture will be included on the chip, later on fingerprints of both index fingers will be added. The jury is deeply concerned about the surveillance possibilities of such a central database, for example when facial recognition tools are linked to the omnipresent camera surveillance.

As a special price Prof. Mr. Hans Franken, professor in Law and Information Science at the University of Leiden and member of the Senate for the christian-democrat party received the newly created Winston Award to honor his consistent resistance in the Senate against mandatory data retention.

These images are published under a Creative Commons License.

Technorati Tags: bof, big brother, verdonk, sony, root kit

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Since the office location where we temporally located our software development team does not have any broadband internet connection and getting a new ADSL or SDLS line takes weeks, we decided to use the UMTS network for the Internet connectivity. First we got the Possio PX30 wireless gateway. It recognized the KPN UMTS card but could not establish a connection, reporting a PDP context error. Neither Google, the dealer nor KPN support was able to provide a solution, so after hours of trial & error we returned the device, which in general did not seem to be very reliable. Next we went ahead an ordered a Linksys WRT54G3G, which arrived yesterday. On the Linksys website it says:

Includes PC Card slot for any Vodafone Mobile Connect 3G/UMTS data card

So, does it only work with Vodafone or not? That indeed only Vodafone UMTS cards would work was also the response from the Linksys support which took them 7 days to answer and arrived a today. Not knowing this late answer yet, I tried it anyway and followed the instructions (bad idea!). As usual Linksys only delivers setup software for Windows. So I started the setup application, which told me 3 times to insert the UMTS card and in the end could not connect to the router at all.
Fine, who needs setup software if we have a fancy web interface? Just go to 192.168.1.1 with your browser and use the default password to enter the management interface.
Here a java-script alert was already waiting for me with the message that I should enter the pin code for the UMTS card. At least the UMTS card has been recognized but entering the pin did not work, so I removed the pin and now the WRT54G3G was able to connect to the card for the first time (green light on the card). In the default options one can not select a KPN network, but there is a select network function. Looking good but as soon as I tried anything, the web interface stopped working and just returned a blank screen. It turns out, that the web interface stops working as soon as the UMTS card is active.
Good news, you can enter most of your settings and save them without the UMTS card. Use ‘internet’ as the parameter for the APN name, user name and password fields. You can also plug the UMTS card in while you are using the web interface. The WRT54G3G should automatically recognize and activate it. Click on the ‘Select Network’ button now and a pop-up window should open. Click on the ‘Search’ button. I didn’t get any search results but I have seen this working on the Possion PX30, so maybe they are just not displaying results which are not from Vodafone to us. Desperate and clueless I clicked on ‘OK’ and surprisingly now the UMTS card started connecting. Blue light! We were online. Major downside is the lack of the web interface from this point on, so we can not see the signal strength, connection time and bandwidth usage. It really looks like this UMTS gateway from Linksys has been crippled in the firmware to work exclusively with Vodaphone networks while there is no technical reason.

We have been using the KPN UMTS card in the Linksys now for two days for internet access without any problems. Speed is not great but good enough to visit sites, use VPN and check e-mail.

Warning: don’t forget to turn off or configure the WLAN access point, because it is unprotected and open by default!

Technorati Tags: linksys, kpn, umts

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Luis Felipe from Brazil developed a nice little Google Maps application which displays where you would arrive if you dig a very deep straight infinitous hole on Earth. “Earth: Dig it, but dig it right.”

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EFF reports, that the ACLU relaunched its informational surveillance network mini-site formerly known as EchelonWatch. NSA Watch contains a wide variety of materials and links documenting the NSA’s extraordinary communication interception capabilities, which are part of an international arrangement sometimes referred to as “Echelon“. The NSA, acting at the orders of President Bush, has recently been uncovered engaging in the warrantless eavesdropping of American citizens and legal residents, an activity that is clearly illegal, according to ACLU.

Technorati Tags: ACLU, NSA, EFF

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The Michigan Lawsuit Abuse Watch has published the winners of the annual Wacky Warning Labels. A heat gun’s warning saying ‘Do not use this tool as a hair dryer‘ has been awarded as the nation’s wackiest warning label. 2nd price goes to the ‘Never try to catch a falling knife‘ label on a kitchen knife. A cocktail napkin showing a map of the waterways around Hilton Head, South Carolina warns its users not to go off sailing with it: “Caution: Not to be used for navigation.” Next year a book with the 101 stupidest, silliest and wackiest warning labels will be published.

Technorati Tags: m-law, wacky

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