Q: Please tell me a story. One involving a unicorn and a talking ham sandwich if it isn’t too much trouble.
A: Sure. Story time.

Ham

Alex didn’t immediately realize something was a little bit off with the world. In retrospect, the talking ham sandwich he had for breakfast should have been a dead giveaway, but, it being a Saturday morning, he attributed that to his lack of sleep and the drugs, and went on about his business as if nothing had happened.

His business kept him occupied and glued to his computer screen most of the time - even today, on a stormy 1st of may - traditionally a federal holiday where he lived. Alex, you see, worked as a “Senior Systems Analyst and Administrator” for the european divison of HardNet incorporated, or, as he liked to put it, he was in the business of pumping out tens of thousands of gigabytes of hardcore bondage pornography at three hundred fucking megabit per second, fuck yeah, baby. Not that any of that mattered much anymore, though, now that he was dead.

Most people had always thought that the apocalypse would come in form of some man- or god-made earth shattering kaboom. When the apocalypse came, later that morning, about 2 hours after Alex had put half of the now-quiet sandwich back into the fridge, it came in the form of unicorns. The first people to spot the unicorns were scientists at NASAs near-earth-object observatory with their telescopes, detecting them hurling for the earth at awesome speeds, accelerating as they neared the blue planet. Upon reporting their findings to the US government officials responsible for such things, they were promptly told that ha ha ha ha yeeeeeah, right, why don’t you shoot our care bear beams at them?

When the unicorns became visible to the naked eye a few minutes later, the lead researcher managed to at least get a “told you so” in before the world ended. It wasn’t so much the kaboom everyone had expected than a sudden complete loss of molecular integrity of everything that got in the way of the swarm of unicorns as they blazed past. The earth, now closely resembling a piece of swiss cheese, collapsed into a ball of rocks and molten iron within minutes, eventually losing orbit and dropping into the sun. After barely half an hour, it was as if nothing had ever been where the earth used to be, the only indication of there ever having been a planet between Venus and Mars except the now slightly irregular orbits of the surrounding planets.

Alex, though, hadn’t been there to wittness any of this. His house had happened to be in the trajectory of one of the rainbow-spewing harbingers of the end, which had made him one of the first people to go.

He didn’t have any time to figure out that he had just died. Having lost all faith in god due to his strict religious upbringing, he imagined death to be a much less interactive thing. After he had been disintegrated by a magical creature traversing space at 98.7% the speed of light, he had suddenly found himself in what appeared to be a semi-transparent room somewhere towards the top of a multi-story building in the middle of a bright yellow-white plain that extended to the horizon in all directions. Next to him, two strangely feature-less people were busy defenestrating white boxes, which, on closer inspection, turned out to be refridgerators. When Alex asked them whatever the hell they were doing and why there were doing whatever the hell they were doing, he was informed that the two people, who introduced themselves as A4153 and A4155, were doing important work furthering the unicorn cause in the great ham war. Then, he was promptly thrown out the window.

As he flew down towards the ground, thoughts raced his mind, and he remembered the sandwich’s words, and something clicked, and the days events suddenly made perfect sense to him. Sadly, though, he hit the ground and splattered into several thousand tiny pieces - severely impairing his functioning as a human being in a way his death earlier had not - before he had the chance to do as much as shout “Eureka!”, and that is the end of that story.

A new page is created:

Releases, on which demoy things I made a part of are linked.

(Also, a picture that stares into your soul.)

It’s UNIQLOCK, customized for Karlsruhe, running on a panel hanging on my wall! WALLQLOCK!

The construction of the frame is pretty terrible, but the end result is kind of cool. There is actually a whole notebook computer in that thing.

This little application, which runs via inetd (Like so:

ident           stream  tcp     nowait  halcyon /usr/bin/identd

) returns the same username on any ident request.

PROS:

• Works behind NAT
• Probably free of exploitable bugs

CONS:

• Kind of misses the point of having an identd in the first place
• Utterly useless except for epeen

So, without further ado (Compile like you would any C app):

include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#define USERNAME "ordinary_magician"

int main() {
  char buf[4096], *p;
  if (fgets(buf, sizeof(buf), stdin)) {
    if ((p = strpbrk(buf, "\r\n"))) {
      *p = 0;
    }
    printf("%s : USERID : UNIX : %s\r\n", buf, USERNAME);
  }
  return 0;
}

I snickered.

Stock quote: AAPL

Google trend: Anal Fisting

Stock quote: MSFT

Google trend: Butts

Stock quote: GOOG

Google trend: Goatse

All in the name of science. (Related: Graphy graphthings, Quota)

It has AA characters on it! (Also, I run KDE, despite this being an Ubuntu sticker. I didn’t have a Kubuntu one. Meh.)

UPDATE: Flash player 10 64-bit version for Linux is out. Go for that, it can’t possibly do worse than this hack.

Flash Player 10rc1 is out, and there’s a Linux version - but still without native x86_64 support. It’s also a bit of a pain to get running with nspluginwrapper due to some new dependencies and lack of distro-specific packages. Here is how you do it. (On K- or Ubuntu Gutsy, specific directories and ways to install things may vary for your distro.)

First, remove all previously installed versions of flash player, whether you installed them by hand or via apt-get or with Adept or whatever. Install nspluginwrapper and a few dependencies, if you haven’t already anyways:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs util-linux lib32asound2 nspluginwrapper

Now, get the Flash Player 10rc1 package from Adobes web site and extract it somewhere on your disk. Copy the file “libflashplayer.so” from that archive to /usr/lib32/:

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
tar -xzvf flashplayer10_install_linux_081108.tar.gz
cp install_flash_player_10_linux/libflashplayer.so /usr/lib32/

Flashplayer 10rc1 needs the 32bit-Versions of a few more libraries to work, specifically:

• libssl3.so
• libnss3.so
• libssl.so.0.9.7
• libcrypto.so.0.9.7
• libnssutil3.so
• libplc4.so
• libplds4.so

It’s a bit of a pain to hunt all those down, so here’s a .tar.gz with all of them (Mirror). Copy the libraries in this archive to /usr/lib32/:

wget http://halcy.de/misc/flashplayer10deps.tar.gz
sudo cp flash_player_10_deps/* /usr/lib32/

You’re finally ready to let nspluginwrapper install the flash plugin now:

sudo nspluginwrapper -v -i /usr/lib32/libflashplayer.so

That’s it, flash 10rc1 should work now! Unless, of course, you’re using Firefox3, which stores it’s plugins in a place nspluginwrapper does not know about, so if you use Firefox 3, you have to create a link to the plugin in Firefox 3s plugin directory:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins/

Now, it should work in Firefox 3 as well.

If you’re unsure if everything worked, check about:plugins in your browser, Flash 10 should be listed.

6 * 1.5V (AAA) batteries + tin foil + tape = I need a 9V battery and nothing will stop me!

In that sense, happy Whatever You Feel Like Celebrating, everyone!

November 9th:

• 1923: Hitler-Ludendorff putsch.
• 1938: Reichskristallnacht.
• 2007: Vorratsdatenspeicherung. (de)

The pattern here is clear.

Jep, today the Bundestag decided to go against the will of the people, against the Grundgesetz (The german constitution), and agaist the likeley decision of the European Court and the highest german court, and passed a law permitting the government to use all the peoples connection data, be it from internet or phones, for pretty much whatever. It also mandates ISPs to keep said data. This is, of course, to protect us from the terrorists!

Nevermind that the econonic impact of having to store all this data will pretty much kill small ISPs, worsening the situation on an already pretty monopolistic market.

Nevermind that studies showed that 99.9% of all that data will never be even requested by police, and that, obviously, the biggest part of all that data is about completley innocent people, a crass violation of people rights.

Nevermind that this creates a climate of fear, in which people are afraid to say what they think.

Nevermind that this data will be misused, by people inside the system, and computer criminals outside the system.

Nevermind that it’s trivial for actual criminals to work around this with the likes of TOR and with stong cryptography.

Nevermind that this is a slippery slope to worse laws, and that laws like this usually only exist in facist states, like the DDR.

Nevermind all this, we have to have this law, as there is no other way to protect us from the immense terrorist threat.

What follows now is the biggest number of lawsuits about a single issue ever brought before germans highest court (Over 7000 people, and all opposition parties will file suit). As this is so clearly against the fundamental right of informational self-determination, this law must go. Or the terrorists, wanting to destroy our freedoms, win.

• More info at Vorratsdatenspeicherung.de.

So apparently, he pissed of someone with a botnet, who went on and killed off his tumblelog. Which means I think you should read what pissed of those people and what they wanted to suppress, and what he has to say about that.

lol, bundestrojaner

For those who do not know, the so-called “Bundestrojaner” is a trojan horse app developed by the German law enforcement agencies to peek at suspects hard drives without them knowing. This is a highly illegal and unconstitutional practice, and the law must be clarified in that way and not be fumbled around with to excuse this human rights breakage.

Take action: de/en, Chaos Computer Club.

I wrote this ages ago and just now found it again. This is WTFy as well as kind of cool. Here’s a screenshot of three instances running under Linux in wine.

Amazing features:

• Generation of rather random, pretty neat mazes of various sizes (Just resize the window).
• Three (!) ways of drawing labyrinths.
• Completley configureable colourscheme.
• Saves high scores in some kinda encrypted way, I forgot.

You can Download Laby2003 here.

Bonus points if you figure out the highscore encryption scheme, I forgot what exactly I was doing there.

…which is pretty far away from home, learning stuff about how to properly treat patients and other medical things, like endotracheal intubation. Behold this video of my roommate:

Yes, we’re bored.

Wooo. Fucking. Hoo. It’s official: The German bundestag passed a law illegalizing the posession of tools whose aim it is to break computer security.

nmap, tcpdump, or *gasp* metasploit: Illegal in germany.

Watch in awe as network administrators just suddenly stop administrating, universities delete linux from their servers (Cause like it’s illegal!), and people teaching computer security stop teaching (Who needs security experts anyways, when the internet has been declared hacker-free. I mean, this will sureley stop people who were planning to do something illegal anyways.). Basically, business as usual, but now we can get jailed for it.

To celebrate this occasion, I’ve just downloaded nmap. You can, too: It’s here, please be aware that clicking this link and downloading and compiling the source is illegal in germany, and might get you thrown in jail. Really, it’d be funny if it wasn’t actually a law.