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Submission + - Update on Paypal's rejection of WikiLeaks

Submitted by thetinytoon
thetinytoon writes: Just to be clear: Paypal did not deactivate an account of Wikileaks, but of the german Wau Holland Foundation. Wau Holland was a german hacker and journalist and one of the founders of the largest german hacker community, the Chaos Computer Club. After his death in 2001, family and friends of Wau founded the Wau Holland Foundation to preserve his ideals and attitudes by broadening the knowledge and fun in (information) technology.

Although no clear statement has been released so far, the foundation did provide monetary help to WikiLeaks, among other projects. Suspending the account of the foundation for a loose link to WikiLeaks is a really bold step for PayPal. There are still other methods to support WikiLeaks. Hopefully, the online support button will be back soon. Hey Peter, how about PayPal-functionality in Flattr?

Submission + - EMI Music distributed "illegal music" themselves (heise.de)

Submitted by thetinytoon
thetinytoon writes: In a legal battle between EMI Music and MP3tunes over illegal distribution of copyright music, the owner of MP3tunes Michael Robertson was able to get hold of secret emails from EMI Music, in which representatives of the group admitted to have used the well known file sharing company Rapidshare to distribute copyrighted material as virual marketing. The legal problems of a company distributing their music over file sharing sites and then suing people for using these downloads should be clear. Anyone here who was sued by EMI and would like to revive their cases — now is your chance.

Submission + - China views Internet as "controllable" (nytimes.com)

Submitted by
Radcliffe_V
Radcliffe_V writes: "According to a leaked cable via Wikileaks, the Chinese government views the internet as very controllable, despite western views otherwise. The New York Times article also sheds light on how involved the Chinese government is in cyber attacks against US assets and companies such as Google."

Submission + - PayPal cuts off Wikileaks (domaincensorship.com)

Submitted by lothos
lothos writes: PayPal has released a statement on their blog: “PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity. We’ve notified the account holder of this action.”

This move comes right on the heels of Amazon cutting off hosting for wikileaks.org and EasyDNS.net terminating DNS services for wikileaks.org.

Comment Plausible Deniability - TrueCrypt (Score 1) 467

by thetinytoon (#33629794) Attached to: Distinguishing Encrypted Data From Random Data?
what you want is plausible deniability and that is not easy to achieve, as some states have started to have laws allowing to hold you hostage if you do not provide an decryption key to an encrypted container (which, with your method, would be corrupted). Have a look as TrueCrypts technical details behind their plausible deniability feature: http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability
Google

Submission + - Google sued for Picture Search in Germany (tagesschau.de)

Submitted by thetinytoon
thetinytoon writes: Google's been sued (again) for it's picture search in germany. An artist does not want it's pictures to be shown on Googles result page and to have her pictures saved on servers in the US, arguing that as she has the copyright on her pictures, Google should have had to ask for permission first.

Although this could be correct under german law, the case could be more interesting than it seems. By publishing a picture (or anything that validates as "art" under german law) on your homepage and not denying search bots to crawl your page with a robots.txt or a metatag, do you implicitly allow your page to be indexed (opt-out) or do search providers only have permission if a robots.txt explicitly allows indexing (opt-in)? In the latter case, this would have dramatic effects on search results in germany.

On a side note, the timing for this lawsuit is just right. Google's been under fire in germany for Google Street View and Google News in the past months already and the privacy ministers of different federal states are currently discussing ways to constraint Google's hunger for data.

Submission + - Constitutional complaint on employee spy law (foebud.org)

Submitted by thetinytoon
thetinytoon writes: The german ELENA-law has been passed the legislative process in 2009 and forces employers to send a monthly report to a central database about their employees, starting this month. This report does not only include name, address and salary records, but also information on participation in strikes, legal lockouts, sick days, general misbehavior, disciplinary actions and other sensitive information, giving employers lots of different ways to force his employees to abandon legal actions against them. On top of that, employees currently have no way to get information on the saved data (although this possibility has to be given according to german law), because the central database is "technically not ready" for that and expects to be in late 2012.

As a consequence on the latest decision of the german high court on the data retention law, a constitutional complaint has been started, on which every german employee may take part in. Unfortunatly, the time is short, since the deadline for this complaint ends on March 31st. So if you are affected, start signing immediatly.
Science

Submission + - Humans can gain ability to regenerate lost limbs (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by Arvisp
Arvisp writes: The discovery suggests that healing in humans could be accelerated by "switching" off the p21 gene. In normal cells, p21 acts like a brake to block cell cycle progression in the event of DNA damage, preventing the cells from dividing and potentially becoming cancerous.

Submission + - German high court strikes data retention law (yahoo.com)

Submitted by thetinytoon
thetinytoon writes: German High Court has striked down the german data retention law as unconstitutional in great parts, but did not rule against the law in whole.
In its ruling, the court said the law failed to sufficiently balance the need for personal privacy against that for providing security, although it did not rule out data retention in principle.
"The disputed instructions neither provided a sufficient level of data security, nor sufficiently limited the possible uses of the data," the court said.

The complaint against the law was signed by more than 35.000 persons and is the biggest complaint ever handled by the High Court in german history.

Comment codelines/h from BMW (Score 1) 532

by thetinytoon (#31125884) Attached to: Learning and Maintaining a Large Inherited Codebase?
Already stated, but my 2 cents: - use a good IDE with fast referencing possibility (e.g. right-click on a function call => "follow") - use a profiler to see a flowchart or UML for a high level overview - start commenting the classes and refactor their names if unclear. There are nice tools out there (depending on the language), which create DocBlocks for everything first and then you can use DoxyGen to generate a nice overview over everything. And about the question of how bad you are: one of my IT lecturers had worked at BMW and they had made a test on the efficiency of their programmers on new code and on code written by other developers. When the same developer had to extend or change code of other developers, he was a hundred times slower than when he would code on his own himself. That was around 2001, if I'm not mistaken.

Submission + - Sourceforge digging their own grave (sourceforge.net)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Sourceforge now blocks IPs from Cuba, Syria, Iran and a few more countries. While Google has the balls to show the finger to the Chinese government, Sourceforge chickens out. The obviously have become a bunch of corporate lamers. Not even a try to activate their community against this nonsensical censorship. Word goes round that many are already canceling their accounts. Seems they will soon R.I.P.

Comment please don't mess with what you don't understand (Score 1) 4

by thetinytoon (#30591792) Attached to: Maintaining algorithmic secrecy
Either I don't get your question right or you have no idea about the basic principles of cryptography. One of those is that the security of an algorithm lies in the key alone. Every algorithm needs to be open to the public to be evaluated. Making your own modifications to an (already insecure) algorithm for "security reasons" will most likely result in a *weaker* algorithm than it was before. If you want to secure this messages, public/private-key cryptography is your way to go. But honestly, I'm very sure that your system will definetly not meet any necessary standards for any election whatsoever.
Security

Submission + - Password management in distributed networks

Submitted by thetinytoon
thetinytoon writes: As many of the readers, I'm one admin in a team running a network of servers, switches and client computers, with each and every system having some username and password to access the administrative interfaces. For obvious reasons, you don't want to have one combination for them all, but for still being productive, you don't want to look up some obscure 16-digit password in a secure container anytime you need to do something. Password generation rules are mostly so obvious, that you could use one password anyways, and most hardware devices don't allow the use of Challenge/Response-algorithms like OPIE. So I'm asking: how do you solve this dilemma in your networks?
Science

Submission + - Ginkgo Doesn't Improve Memory or Cognative Skills (cnn.com)

Submitted by JumperCable
JumperCable writes: CNN reports

Ginkgo biloba has failed — again — to live up to its reputation for boosting memory and brain function. Just over a year after a study showed that the herb doesn't prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease, a new study from the same team of researchers has found no evidence that ginkgo reduces the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging.

In the new study, the largest of its kind to date, DeKosky and his colleagues followed more than 3,000 people between the ages of 72 and 96 for an average of six years. Half of the participants took two 120-milligram capsules of ginkgo a day during the study period, and the other half took a placebo. The people who took ginkgo showed no differences in attention, memory, and other cognitive measures compared to those who took the placebo, according to the study, which was published in this week's Journal of the American Medical Association.

And of course, the link to the study. http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/302/24/2663?home

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