When I started in SEO business almost have a year ago, I have been shunt into Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team. Reading his blog articles, i did not only get insights into Google, but also in his person. I got to know, that he starts challenges which would endure 30 days, usually. For one of those, he decided to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, and he eventually he kept using it. The latest challenge was to replace his iPhone with Android based Nexus One, and he does not seem to roll back, too.

In our time, when everything is, goes and is going to be more and more web based, my impression is that many users do not think about where they put their data, how secure the provider is and which control they have. Especially with the rise of software-as-a-service models you need to be sure to know what happens with your data, somewhere in the cloudy somewhat. Who is you email provider and who can read your mails? Are there Backdoors? Should i upload my pictures to flickr? Where can i safely send private and possibly sensitive messages?

Can this be? The fourth day now? Time is going much too fast. Anyway, this day was a great final for this excellent event.

Relevance discussion in German Wikipedia

Two core Wikipedia contributors have been invited to take part in a debate in the long running and currently peaking relevance discussion in Wikipedia. They were Kurt Jansson, associated with exclusionists, and Mathias Schindler, associated with inclusionists. And additionally there was Tim Weber, founder of the Levitation-project, which aims to provide personal and VCS-based Wikipedias. Beside them, Martin Haase and Fefe were in the podium as well as Andreas Bogk who did the moderation.

Review of 2009, Part I

Todays upbeat was the review of the passing year 2009 in Chaos Computer Club's point of view. Andy Müller-Maguhn, Constanze Kurz, Frank Rieger and Martin Haase gave a chronological overview of the remarkable events of this year. Besides events as Hacking at Random and the first performance of SIGINT in Cologne, many law topics has been pointed at, e.g. the adjudgement regarding voting machines or the enactment regarding the voting pen of Hamburg. Another sad point, which did not affect CCC directly, was the dramatic suicide of the 20year old, who crawled publicy available data from schuelerVZ. In this case some background details have been mentioned.

Somehow i caught a slight cold yesterday, but that does not lower my anticipation for this second day. Just like yesterday i'd like to share my experience of this day with you. Here it goes:

Voting Machines

Kathleen Wynn showed the audience a video of reports and interviews regarding the irregularities in US vote in 2004 and the general problems with voting machines. She concluded, that in US has been a wall between citizens and the elections and compared it to the Berlin wall. She points, that USA failed to realizise reasonable changes with the use of voting machines in contrast to Germany and calls for help.

First day of 26th Chaos Communicaton Congress. Thomas and I got our tickets yesterday evening, fortunately, as the event is apparently sold out. I have forgotten a network cable (need to rely on WLan) and my headphones (need to rely on seat in the rooms). Well, from time to time internet access breaks down, however.

Dawn

I was too late for the keynote, so if i do not want to stand the whole time (which i did not), i needed to get a seat on a table in the upper story. Headphones would not seem to help as the video stream does not seem to work reliably (afterwards it was quite stable as i heard), so i checked mails, the 26c3 wiki and stuff.

As reader of Planet Ubuntu might now, the nice porgram vrms from the self-named packed shows how (un-)free your system is. Mine:

21:53:49 blizzz@xara:~$ vrms

Non-free packages installed on xara

fglrx-modaliases Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver

latex2html LaTeX to HTML translator

nvidia-96-modaliases Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver

My use case is that i use my other computer primarily for watching TV (my notebook overpowers it and i use it with dual screen at home). So, usually i don't need a full blown KDE, but only kdetv as i have an older analog TV card plugged in. Thus, best is to generate a kdetv-only session.

Therefore you need basically two files. The first is .desktop file that populates your session, the second is the script which is being started if you log into it. Let's take a closer look:

As you know, I was at the FrOSCon last week, in first line to keep our Kubuntu booth up and running. On the outward bound i met Eckhart from KDE by chance, which made it quite entertaining.

The first day started with waiting for our booth material, which had some delay, so that it was made out of my Laptop and few CDs I got from ShipIt (all in all we had about 30 to 35 of them only) for about an hour (which was not so bad, however).

This night I will travel (by night train, again, i'm getting sick of Deutsche Bahn, though) to FrOSCon, which takes place in St. Augustin, near Bonn, near Cologne, Germany. We're running the Kubuntu booth (german) again; having 4 (and a half) persons around it should be possible to see some of the interesting talks and have some chats.