I am on the road again. Or, to be a bit more precise, I am on air: flying to Dublin. But right now, I am stuck. Stuck in Stansted. The connection flight of Ryan Air is delayed. Three hours.

London Stansted is the place where you don‘t want to spend more time than necessary. While this is true for most airports, it is especially true for this place. As you might expect there is NO wireless Internet available. Even you were willing to pay for it, there is none. Instead, Internet is provided only on telephone-cell-style public terminals. Of course, these boxes only give you a Windowish mail and web interface, which I am not interested in. These features would have blown me away in 1995. Maybe even 1996. But for today, this is an embarassment.

I don‘t get why Airports don‘t get it. Maybe it is because they want you to stroll the malls but I guess they just don‘t understand the advantage of offering Internet in the same style they offer toilets: ubiquitous, naturally and for free.

So many companies now try to set up so called „hot spots“ on public cafés and other areas offering Internet with prepaid cards or other modern obstacles charging you a fortune for every minute without taking account on how much data you actually send. Selling air time for a data path that is not used at all during that time is WEGELAGEREI.

Well, we know how this will end: it won‘t work. People won‘t accept it. At least they won‘t be able to accept the cost that is created by choosing such a complicated way of accounting and payment. So finally nobody is happy: neither the companies offering the „service“ nor the „customers“.

Restaurants, bars, airports… they should finally get it: put Internet on the same ilst where you find electricity, water and toilet paper. People consider Internet to be an ubiquitous resource and prices are so low now that it is no problem offering it at no charge as it will attract people to come to this places because they know they can stay connected.

So I am siitting at the cold spot now. No internet, no connection flight. Frustrating. But then again, a good chance to write a longer entry for this blog in peace :-)

Spam Mimic seems to be a useless project converting hiding information in spam-like messages. I wonder how this can work if spam gets filtered out before it reaches the destination. But the author has a point: not everybody is using encryption today so any encrypted mail is somehow suspicious. But I guess this is just a matter of time: once encryption integration moves forward and gets easier to use, this problem will go away, I think.

CryptoPhone is the name of a new PocketPC-based phone that provides state-of-the-art encryption technology for everybody (who can pay the price). The phone is based on a combination of two recognized encryption standard named AES-256 and Twofish using just a single dynamically generated key per phone connection.

What makes this phone outstanding is that its source code is going to be published in full for peer review. This a strong difference to other commercial products that do not disclose their encryption underpinnings which makes independent review impossible. The CryptoPhone people have a completely trustworthy approach. Check out their great FAQ to get more information on the details.

Best of all the product comes with a free windows telephony application using the same encryption allowing secure phone calls from PCs to the CryptoPhone. Hope there will be a Mac port soon.

Read more at Wired.

The Easter Egg Archive site has a nice listing of funny RFCs that have been published over the years. While RFCs are meant to provide standards for the Internet, this listing shows the main difference between the RFC process and other standards bodies like ISO: it‘s an open process and leaves room for fun which is a good thing (TM).

Well, here he is.

Yet another tour: Michael Moore is in Germany right now. Sunday he will be in Berlin.

Polvorosa is a group of three gifted musicians (some of you might know them as Niños Con Bombas from earlier days). They are singing in spanish and make great ElectroLatino music. Well hidden in their Flash site is the funny video of their new song „Behind De Mi House“ (QuickTime 5 format). Watch the Twin Towers dance and fall!

This is the prelude to their first CD coming out later next year (as far as I know). Congratulations to Daniel, Norman and (especially!) Trillian for this success. They have been doing great music for a long time and was time for them to be drawn before a wider audience. You deserve it, Trilly. Un beso!.

What the web site does not provide is the schedule for their upcoming tour through Germany and Austria, so I provide that here for you with links to the venues as well.

• 14.11.2003: „Bunker Ulmenwall“ (Bielefeld)
• 16.11.2003: „Tanzhalle St. Pauli“ (Hamburg)
• 20.11.2003: „Bastard“ (Berlin)
• 22.11.2003: „Stubnitz“ (Rostock)
• 27.11.2003: „Kulturbunker Mülheim“ (Köln)
• 28.11.2003: „Schlachthof“ (Kassel)
• 29.11.2003: „Motte“ (Siegen)
• 30.11.2003: „Rauch Club“ (Feldkirch)

I can only recommend going to one of these concerts if you can. I am sure you are going to have a great time with Polvorosa.

David Thomson has created a series of customized RSS feeds aptly named Tapestry that give you direct access to the most popular comic strips on the net on a daily basis. Now Dilbert is just a click away. Plain simple, really great.

In case you Powerbook users out there haven‘t bumped into uControl yet, you should. For me it does at least two invaluable things: first, it makes my trackpad act as a vertical and horizontal (!) scroll wheel. Second it gives me my function keys back as I can swap the behaviour: Apple‘s added functions (dimming the screen, controlling the volume and keyboard lighting) now are only accessible with the fn-key and I got 12 extra keys for my personal use without hitting any modifier keys.

Well, to find out if you are a geek, this test might help. It is a bit american and doesn‘t cover anything I could think of but it is fun. I scored over 25% and may now call me a Total Geek. And you?