While I grepped through my access log, I stumbled over this site referring to me (obviously via the Blogplan for Hamburg). Seems to be the weblog of Thomas Bethe. He doesn’t have too much text there but some very nice photos. He even made the Dorint Hotel near the Telemichel look less ugly. Respect.
This month Anonymizer began providing Iranians with free access to a Web proxy service designed to circumvent their government’s online censorship efforts. In May, government ministers issued a blacklist of 15,000 forbidden “immoral” websites that ISPs in the country must block [...]
The U.S. responded to the filtering this month by paying Anonymizer (neither the IBB nor Anonymizer will disclose how much) to create and maintain a special version of the Anonymizer proxy which only accepts connections from Iran’s IP address space, and features instructions in Farsi.
So far so good. But then follows:
The deliberately generic-sounding URLs for the service are publicized over Radio Farda broadcasts and through bulk e-mails that Anonymizer sends to addresses in the country. The addresses are provided by human rights groups and other sources, says Anonymizer president Lance Cottrell.
Uh, I don’t know what the “other sources” are but I really hope that those guys didn’t just buy a bunch of harvested addresses and spammed half Iran.
Found via Northern-Web-Coders: There’s already a German version of Mozilla Firebird. Good to know, finally a free, fast and lightweight alternative to the Internet Explorer in German (which I can install on my Grandpa’s PC 
)
Heh. When the lights went out in New York, CNN interviewed some guy from PowerGen UK who said something like “this is very unlikely to happen somewhere in Europe”. And what happened today? The power grid around London, owned by National Grid UK, went down, causing chaos in London. And some guy called Alan Basford said what we all thought in the first moment but were afraid to say aloud:
This disruption seems very similar to what happened in New York, and it’s also a bit strange the two events have happened close together.
Tinfoil hats up, folks!
P.S.: If anybody knows who sang the song with “New York, London, Tokyo” in the refrain, please mail me!
Now I know why I couldn’t find the song for that refrain: Because it is “New York, Rio, Tokio…”. Doh! 
This page is rather nice. It lists and demonstrates how Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text input on computers work. Should be especially interesting for those who never used an Asian word processor and wonder how people in the Far East actually input their plethora of strange looking characters on a standard QWERTY keyboard.
Whoa, interesting stuff. Not only that page but also the rest of the series “Japanese in the Age of Technology” which sheds some light on the Japanese language itself and the history of eastern type setting.
Been at the Logo yesterday night to see/listen to a gig of Lumasurfer, the band of a good friend’s boyfriend. BandMatch.de announced the gig with:
Lumasurfer will raise the roof with their return from the summer recess.
They really rocked the house even though there were only about 50 people listening (the nightlife in Hamburg on Tuesdays simply sucks — even in semester break). They call their music “Funkrock” — whatever that is, it’s pretty groovy 
After Lumasurfer’s encore Luxusreisen entered the stage. Their music was pretty relaxing (but good) — when they started I immediately looked around for a cosy lounge to sit down All in all a pretty nice (Tuesday) evening. On September 28th they’ll be at the Schlachthof, together with Luxusreisen and blender.
Heise reports the announcement of The Bat! 2.0. The release date is September 1st, main improvement is the full IMAP support and registered users of the 1.x series will get a 50% discount till December (exact prices not yet available). A beta is available.
Version 2 was first announced by Stefan Tanurkov in an interview with Leif Gregory on January 10th 2000. It was said to be released in February 2000 but in May 2000 Stefan Tanurkov wrote in a mail to me:
Version 2 will not be released so soon. The next release will be 1.42. Second, even when version 2 will be released, we will continue to develop version 1.xx line for quite a long time… Version 2 will be a completely different program…
And time went on and no The Bat! 2.0… I switched to Linux and KMail in between but still recommend The Bat! to Windows users.
Ok, I’ve got to be honest: The Bat! 2 is no Duke Nukem Forever. As Marck D. Pearlstone said:
90% of the features discussed at that time were instead built into last year’s v1.60 of TB (a major feature jump from 1.53) since the crew realised they’d have to go a different route to actually produce the full version 2 feature set. This they are now doing.
And Stefan Tanurkov stated on the TBBeta mailinglist:
[...] we decided to go the other way. Also - since I made that statement in the interview, more than 70% of the core code has been changed by now. This is why PGP/MIME and IMAP implementation become possible.
Ok ok, so this was no real vaporware, the features were all available with time, they just didn’t rewrite it from scratch. But hey, there’s already RITLab’s next vaporware: The Bat! Browser And I’m still waiting for The Bat! for Linux. From the interview:
We are planning to make the Linux version when Delphi for Linux will be available
Kylix (”Delphi for Linux”) is available for some time now and writing cross-platform code with it is relatively easy. At least as long as you build your apps with the Qt based CLX instead of VCL.
What’s this? A Very Stupid Spammer or a joe-job? I just received this spam via KDE-Devel (seems like it was sent to several other lists, too). It has the name “Ashton Rampersad” all over it. From the headers:
Received: from adsl-64-166-87-30.dsl.sntc01.pacbell.net (HELO Ashton?Rampersad) (64.166.87.30) by kde.informatik.uni-kl.de with SMTP; 25 Aug 2003 00:21:50 -0000 Message-Id:
The HTML was created with Word 2000 and carries the following meta information:
Luis Benitez Ashton Rampersad 19 63 2003-07-28T21:46:00Z 2003-07-28T21:58:00Z 2003-07-30T04:52:00Z 1 346 1975 The American Resolve 16 3 2425 9.3821 9.0.2111 1033
Who is Ashton Rampersad? Who is the original author Luis Benitez? The whois information for theamericanresolve.com contains:
Registrant ID: COCO-1288970 Registrant Name: Luis Benitez Registrant Organization: Luis A. Benitez Registrant Address: 55Murray Ct Registrant City: Redwood City Registrant State/Province: California Registrant Postal Code: 94061 Registrant Country: US Registrant Phone Number: +(6.50)3670721 Registrant Fax Number: +(6.50)3670721 Registrant Email: luisb80@hotmail.com
Are they really the authors? What does SBC (formerly known as Pacific Bell) think about spammers on their wire? And did it really take those dumbasses more than an hour to write that crap?
An advertisement on Mailinator led me to Spamotomy:
Owned and operated by independent publisher Aai Sites, Spamotomy reviews anti-spam tools for use at the home, enterprise, or ISP level. Additionally, we provide a searchable catalog of anti-spam software to help users select the perfect tool for their needs.
Hmmm… SpamAssassin got a pretty good review so it seems (but did I expect anything else? ).
Danny Aldham, Brian Read and Timothy J. Schutte almost simultaneously announced another review of various anti-spam solutions on the SpamAssassin-Talk mailinglist. I haven’t read it yet but Gary Funck answered:
The test was uniformily unfair. The author trained the Bayesian
spam detector programs with something like 70 messages of spam
and ham each. Thus, even if SA had been run with Bayes enabled,
it might’ve yielded atypical results that fell short of how SA might
perform in a production environment. As others have mentioned, the
network tests were disabled as well.
And Kristian Köhntopp added:
Actually, networking was also disabled. That is, SpamAssassin ran with
almost anything disabled. Adding Bayes, RBL and *zors should improve
SpamAssassins performance greatly.
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