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De Engelse voetbalfans moeten het straks op het WK in Duitsland niet riskeren John Cleese na te bootsen. De Duitse autoriteiten waarschuwen Engeland al dat nazi-symbolen illegaal zijn bij onze oosterburen. Dus ook niet de beruchte nazi-pas die de hilarische Basil Fawlty in Fawly Towers demonstreerde toen hij Duitse gasten over de vloer kreeg.

“Het maakt niet uit of iemand de nazi-pas nabootst, een Hitler-groet maakt met zijn arm of swastika’s uitdeelt. Dat zijn allemaal misdaden in Duitsland, ook al zijn ze ludiek bedoeld, die kunnen bestraft worden met een celstraf van drie jaar. We zullen de Engelse fans behandelen zoals de aanhangers van extreem-rechts”, zegt Christian Sachs, woordvoerder van het ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken.

effe oefenen?

The Internet is for Porn

(and for publishing movies shot with a game engine, but that’s a side effect)

link is safe-for-work as far as pictures go, but does contain a catchy tune.

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Italian police have arrested one of the country’s best-known priests on charges of raping a nun at his religious centre in southern Italy.

Father Francesco Bisceglia, an avid football fan, has won praise for his work with immigrants and prostitutes.

The 69-year-old is one of the most colourful characters to wear the drab brown habit of the Franciscan friar.

He denies the all the charges against him and has said he feels he is being persecuted like Jesus.

Oh dear. First they nail his savior to a stick, and now this…

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A huge beached whale has been dumped outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin. in a Greenpeace anti-whaling protest.

The controversial environmental activists hauled the fin whale to Berlin from the Baltic coast after finding it beached on a sandbank.

The dead whale measured 17m (56ft) long and weighed 20 tonnes.

Activists are trying to demonstrate that there is no need to kill the mammals for research – as Japan does – because cadavers can be found.

More info, in German, is here, here and here

The last stage of grief isn’t acceptance, but exploitation.

- Lewis Black

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As details poured out about the illegal and unseemly activities of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, White House officials sought to portray the scandal as a Capitol Hill affair with little relevance to them. Peppered for days with questions about Abramoff’s visits to the White House, press secretary Scott McClellan said the now disgraced lobbyist had attended two huge holiday receptions and a few “staff-level meetings” that were not worth describing further. “The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him,” McClellan said.

The President’s memory may soon be unhappily refreshed. TIME has seen five photographs of Abramoff and the President that suggest a level of contact between them that Bush’s aides have downplayed. While TIME’s source refused to provide the pictures for publication, they are likely to see the light of day eventually because celebrity tabloids are on the prowl for them.

Most probable source of these pictures: Abramoff himself.

via
Iraq – All oil, no gas.
A consortium of 34 Turkish companies have joined together to stop all exports of petrol / refined oil products to Iraq, because Iraq’s government owes them over $1 billion that they have so far been unable to pay. Iraq’s largest refinery was forced to shut down in December, after its truck drivers walked off the job due to insurgent threats. They reopened ten days later, only to shut down again after an insurgent swarm attack killed and wounded more drivers. The refinery has once more ceased activity, as their reserves of refined fuel are full and there is no way to get them to their customers. Iraq’s diesel-driven power plants are undersupplied too, leading to worsening outages.

Q: How do you know the USA has invaded your country?
A: Two years later, there’s a shortage of your single, previously abundant, natural resource.

Freely adapted from a similar Chechoslovakian joka about the Soviet Union. Those ungrateful Checkoslovakians.

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The BEAST 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005

Check out number 4.

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This is the pitiful carcass of the legendary Calypso, the former British minesweeper that for nearly half a century plied the oceans with the French undersea adventurer Jacques Cousteau, taking a starring role in his celebrated films and television programmes.

Nine years after the commanders death the ship has fallen victim to a bitter family feud, and its chances of a new life as a museum or research centre — let along taking to the sea again — appear to be receding into the depths.

“We had an experts report done recently and they said it was no longer a question of repairing the boat, but of rebuilding it,” said Marc Parnaudeau, who is in charge of the Calypso dossier at La Rochelle’s town hall.

[..]

Some have suggested the Calypso should be towed out to sea and scuttled. It could then be used as a training area for deep-sea divers. Compared to yet more legal wrangling and years of painful decay, it could prove to be the more fitting end.

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The Canadian MP whom copyfighters loved to hate has lost her job and the election. Sam Bulte was the Liberal Party Member of Parliament for Parkdale/High Park, my old riding, and she was embroiled in a scandal when it was revealed that she had financed her election campaigns at the entertainment industry’s expense, and subsequently brought down proposal for extremist, US-style copyright laws.

In last night’s Canadian elections, Bulte lost to New Democratic Party opponent Peggy Nash by 2213 votes. Nash lives in Parkdale/High Park (Bulte lives in a posh uptown neighborhood that’s kilometers away) and ran a very good campaign on a progressive platform; she also had the endorsement of Toronto’s much-beloved mayor.

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If you’ve been reading here lately, you know that I’m no fan of the Sensenbrenner/Conyers analog hole bill. The bill would require almost all analog video devices to implement two technologies called CGMS-A and VEIL. CGMS-A is reasonably well known, but the VEIL content protection technology is relatively new. I wanted to learn more about it.

[..]

After some discussion, the company helpfully explained that I could get the spec, if I first signed their license agreement. The agreement requires me (a) to pay them $10,000, and (b) to promise not to talk to anybody about what is in the spec. In other words, I can know the contents of the bill Congress is debating, but only if I pay $10k to a private party, and only if I promise not to tell anybody what is in the bill or engage in public debate about it.

Worse yet, this license covers only half of the technology: the VEIL decoder, which detects VEIL signals. There is no way you or I can find out about the encoder technology that puts VEIL signals into video.

The details of this technology are important for evaluating this bill. How much would the proposed law increase the cost of televisions? How much would it limit the future development of TV technology? How likely is the technology to mistakenly block authorized copying? How adaptable is the technology to the future? All of these questions are important in debating the bill. And none of them can be answered if the technology part of the bill is secret.

Which brings us to the most interesting question of all: Are the members of Congress themselves, and their staffers, allowed to see the spec and talk about it openly? Are they allowed to consult experts for advice? Or are the full contents of this bill secret even from the lawmakers who are considering it?

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A judge nominated by President Bush to one of the highest courts in the nation apparently violated federal law repeatedly while serving on the federal bench. Judge James H. Payne, 64, who was nominated by Bush in late September to join the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Denver, issued more than 100 orders in at least 18 cases that involved corporations in which he owned stock, a review of court and financial records shows.

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QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use –

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the –

GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable –

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says –

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard –

GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.

[..]

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order.

Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me — and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is “reasonable.” And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.

The actual text of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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Thompson spoke recently with Computerworld about e-voting reliability. Diebold declined to make anyone available for an interview on the topic, but a spokesman dismissed the concerns raised by Thompson. Diebold’s response follows Thompson’s comments below.

Can you tell us about some of your e-voting machine hacking activities? On Tuesday, Dec. 13, we conducted a hack of the Diebold AccuVote optical scan device. I wrote a five-line script in Visual Basic that would allow you to go into the central tabulator and change any vote total you wanted, leaving no logs. It requires physical access to a machine, which in many counties isn’t very difficult to get — you have elections offices full of volunteers.

[..]

Diebold has publicly denounced the Leon County tests as being invalid. In fact, the vendor contended that Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho’s decision to sponsor the hacking attempts were potential violations of licensing agreements and intellectual property rights.

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For Windows Vista and later versions of the Windows family of operating systems, kernel-mode software must have a digital signature to load on x64-based computer systems.

[..]

For any kernel-mode component that is not already signed, publishers must obtain and use a PIC to sign all 64-bit kernel-mode software that will run on x64-based systems running Windows Vista. This includes kernel-mode services software.

a PIC is a Publisher Identity Certificate. Microsoft says they won’t charge for it, but they require that you have a Class 3 Commercial Software Publisher Certificate from Verisign. This costs $500 [EUR 412] per year, and as the name implies, is only available to commercial entities. So Open Source hippies can go fuck off. It also means you can’t have party drivers from start-ups. It effectively prohibits anyone new from entering the hardware arena.

But there’s more! Although Microsoft’s license is “free”, they aren’t necessarily going to give a license to everyone. Thus, they can effectively ban technology they don’t like.

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I figured out a way to get in to the EFI menu on the new Intel iMac. I was attempting to install Vista, which did not work. As I discovered from poking around in the EFI there is no support for UDF or El Torito volumes. It seems only GPT and APM is supported. Writing a driver for EFI to support UDF should be easy enough for someone who knows how, one might even exist already. I’m going to give step-by-step instructions for getting in to the EFI so that some enterprising people will get to work on installing Windows.

[..]

(lots of comments)

[..]

**WARNING** The following instructions will render the iMac Core Duo (Intel) TOTALLY USELESS. There is NO KNOWN METHOD OF RESTORING the iMac Core Duo to a previous functioning state. **WARNING**

I AM NOT KIDDING. THE FOLLOWING METHODS WILL PUT THE IMAC IN A STATE OF DISREPAIR BY AN END USER, EVEN WITH ACCESS TO THE INTERNAL HARDWARE.

With that said, here is how I killed the iMac Core Duo:

1. Downloaded EFI sample implementation and unzipped
2. Moved the ‘Binary’ folder to the hidden EFI partition (sudo mkdir /Volumes/EFI; sudo mount_msdos /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI)

*NOTE: this partition appeared EMPTY*

3. ‘blessed’ /Volumes/EFI/BIOS32/Bin/GraphicsConsole.efi
4. Rebooted in to GraphicsConsole
5. Attempted to load an EFI ‘Driver’ via GraphicsConsole (I forget the process, but it was a submenu. The drivers I attempted were AtapiPassThru.efi and Partition.efi)
6. Reboot and stare at your new broken iMac Core Duo. It’s dead, Jim…

It could been worse – he might have ended up with a computer running Windows.

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Microsoft Corp., the world’s biggest software maker, will spend $120 million a year on an advertising campaign to fight its image as “a huge American company.”

And in other news, the US announces to world that it wishes to be seen a small Eastern Bloc country from now on, and will so give the impression of financial hardship and military weakness from now on.

All you ever wanted to know about the Turkish variant of the Avian Flu