An intern working for facebook created a beautilful map based on the relationship graph of facebook users.
So far, so widely blogged about.
One thing is remarkable: you can still see the border between the old west- and east part of Germany:
vs. 
I wonder whether this is just the result of more people per square mile in the west, or if this one effect of still differing infrastructure or social structures.
A few years ago, Comcast generated a lot of negative PR based on their RST–injecting P2P throttling scheme.
This lead them to adopt a new strategy which is protocol and destination-agnostic and is designed to shift inevitable packet-loss to those users that stress the network.
Comcast has now published their strategy in an informational RFC. It’s longer than it needs to be, but still: recommended reading.
The story so far: WikiLeaks posted some secrets, the US governments throws a hissy fit and some spineless companies see it as their “patriotic duty” to withheld service from WikiLeaks. This doesn’t especially endear them to the 4chan/Anonymous crowd which then starts to DDoS the pushovers.
So how is a Civil Libertarian and Network Security guy supposed to react to that?
Two bads don’t make a right. There are better ways to show disgust of and punish those electronic money movers. Attacking their operation cannot be the right answer.
But: I’ve been arguing for years now that one of the few ways to actually shut down some of the real menaces (not the imagined ones like WikiLeadks) of the Internet like Spammers, Fake AV Software scams, Viagra/… sellers, and other frauds would be to deny them the credit card payment option.
Thus, MasterCard and Visa: If you are so eager to distance yourself from WikiLeaks, when nobody can even tell you what actual laws they are supposed to have violated, why are you not able to deny service to the frauds when it is absolutely clear that they violate laws and cost the worldwide economy huge sums of money to clean up their crap?
This year, we organized a Nikolaus Fest again. This time we had:
11 kids (only the twins (Isabel and Leo) could not come)
11 parents
my sister
and a very impressive Bishop.
Many thanks to our neighbor who played the role perfectly and dealt with all the idiosyncrasies of the kids.
Today was a perfect autumn day in Vienna and we met a good number of other families in the park:
The weather is getting colder and thus building a track on a Sunday afternoon seemed like a good idea:
After a long break we build a full set of tracks again. On the first go I used the bridges, but the kids almost immediately destroyed them as they move the tracks on the wooden floor. So, the next version only used the simple overpasses that survive being shoved.
By now both kids push trains along. Now I have to make sure that a) Clemens’ train doesn’t expand by assimilating cars from Elena’s and b) that Clemens doesn’t just crash his train into Elena’s.
I recently got a request for help concerning the generation of ENUM Validation Tokens according to RFC 5105.
In order to check what went wrong, I had to re-install the software I used while writing that RFC. That wasn’t so easy as the upgrade from Xerces 2 to Xerces 3 made a few changes to the XML Signing module necessary:
First of all, there are more security conferences in September and October in Europe than any sensible organization will ever want to send people to. Sorry.
Aggressive hard-sell phone calls will not help. Quite to the contrary.
And if you send email invitations, remember that you’re sending mail to security professionals. Including tracking images in the HTML version and linking to a tracked version of your conference website is considered rude in these circles.
Cut it out.