Paul Wouters is a programmer and system administrator in the Netherlands with a strong Linux preference.

His obnoxious freedom of speech ideas has resulted in a close bond with Scientology lawyers, spammers, various organisations involved with Internet Tapping in the Netherlands and the Linux IPsec community. At HAL2001, under the watching eye of the Dutch secret police, he lead the wireless networking team. He is also involved in the OpenTap projects providing GPL‘ed solutions to the dutch tapping laws to prevent undetected leaking of information to third parties like Israel. Read Dutch tapping room not kosher on this issue. He also gave a talk on wiretapping at 18C3.

At the Camp Paul is doing talks on wiretapping („Wiretapping in Europe: Update“ together with Jaya Balloo – a sequel to a talk at 19C3, on the spam problem (see Paul‘s spam statistics) and he is co-talker to John Gilmore and Hugh Daniels on opportunistic encryption using DNSSEC.

Mathias Bröckers is a famous name in Germany for quite some time now. He was one of the more visible people driving the acceptance of hemp in Germany with the opening of stores selling hemp textiles and pushing German politics into allowing the growing of hemp as it was done one hundred years ago before the big marihuana paranoia was pushed by the alcohol industry.

Mathias has recently done some books on conspiracy theories and has also reported on the whole 9/11 snafu since day one, especially by writing a series of articles for Telepolis (the most excellent news source in Germany in my opinion). The latest production on this topic is the book „Fakten, Fälschungen und die unterdrückten Beweise des 11.9“ (facts, forgeries and suppressed evidence of 9/11)

Matthias Bröckers is going to do a talk on this issue („Operation September 11th: Analysing Virtual Reality“) at the Camp. He will be accompanied by Gerhard Wisnewski who is author of the book „9/11. Angriff auf den Globus“ (9/11. Globe Attack) on the same topic and who wrote another book on the relationship of politics and terrorism focusing on the german terrorism movement „Rote Armee Fraktion“ in the seventies.

Aha. The USA is having look at Germany again. This happens every now and then. Let‘s see. This time it‘s CNN reporting that according to a poll, one-third of Germans under age 30 believe the U.S. government may have sponsored the September 11, 2001.

The outcome is not a real surprise to me and I support the claim that this is due to the „widespread disbelief about the reasons given by the United States for going to war in Iraq and suspicion about media coverage of the conflict had fostered a climate in which conspiracy theories flourished.“

It was fascinating to see how the US managed to eat up all the support they got from Germany within months. While tons of people were on the streets after the attacks to support the USA the same ton of people turned their backs after they noticed that now the real threat is now residing in Washington, has no clue and does not care about what the rest of the world thinks.

Stephanie Wehner is a renowned FreeBSD hacker and has contributed to various projects. She works and studies in the Netherlands. Her topics include FreeBSD kernel hacking, perl and privacy and anonymity among others.

At the Camp, Stephanie is going to provide an in-depth introduction to quantum computing which is something I have absolutely no clue of but which nevertheless is an interesting field to explore. Good to see the ladies are taking over the complicated stuff.

Obviously inspired by the tagline of the Chaos Communication Camp (which in itself was inspired by Her), 0x7f has produced a smooth song (MP3, 6.8MB) for the event. The style of his home page perfectly fits the style of his sound in my opinion. Thanks a lot!

Hopefully this is just the beginning of a whole soundtrack of the Camp. A couple of DJs and music makers have announced their appearance at the Camp and there will be an open music area at the Art & Beauty Village during the event as well.

The Core Audio subsystem of Mac OS X is very powerful beast. It deals with sound in floating point arithmetics lifting the limits on resolution. The Audio Toolbox allows for plug-ins on the system level. Also, software mixing has been on Mac OS for more than a decade (and still surprises Windows and UNIX users: you can play sound with two programs at the same time? — yawn), but OS X makes this even more flexible eventually circumventing tools like RealPlayer and the QuickTime PlugIn which do not allow you to save the audio streams you receive with these tools.

Laying the foundation for a future feature upgrade of their SnapzProX software, Ambrosia Software has released a little tool named WireTap as freeware.

What it does is simple: WireTap writes the output of the current sound output port to a file. You can choose from the available QuickTime compressions (unfortunately, Apple still does not provide MP3 compression on system level, only in iTunes). This works for every application, even DVD and browser plug-ins [via Der Schockwellenreiter]

Rogue Amoeba provides a bunch of shareware tools targetting the same area and adding extra value: Audio Hijack and Audio HiJack Pro are the more sophisticated version of WireTap. Detour allows to set the output volume depending on the source of the audio.

silverorange labs have done some experiments to test the HTTPS/SSL and HTTP Authentication support of RSS Readers. They also provide some feeds for doing your own tests.

Using HTTPS and HTTP Authentication together is an elegant and recommended way for setting up private and secure RSS feeds. This is very useful for getting updates on closed Wikis.

I am happy my favourite RSS reader NetNewsWire supports HTTPS and Authentication in the latest release but still lacks secure password storage in the keychain. Another problem persists on Mac OS X with sites using self-signed certificates. I have been talking about this issue before.

RotArcade is a one of the projects of the BlinkenArea at the upcoming Camp. RotArcade is based on the concept of PropellerClock and is essentially a cheap but clever simulator of our Blinkenlights Arcade project last year:

20 light emitting diodes spinning at about 3000 rpm will generated the illusion of a stationary (360 degrees) 512 * 20 pixel computer screen. Fast pulse width modulation will generate different shades of gray.

RotArcade is a project of Kai Gossner who did a clone of our first installation as well. XMasLights used ordinary christmas lights to simulate the installation at Haus des Lehrers.

But there is more: ArcadeMini is another clone by Sphara and Einsstein with a more traditional approach of actually driving the full set of 520 pixels (although with a 1:1 x/y ratio while Arcade actually was 1:2). The two authors also did a real Blinkenlights clone before: BlinkenMini is fully documented on the web. I expect the same to happen to the most recent project once it is finished.

These two projects will be showcased at the BlinkenArea at the Camp

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Hydra, a rendezvous-enabled text editor allowing you to collaborative work on the same document with multiple parties, has been updated to version 1.1.1. The update brings a cool new feature: when you edit a HTML page, Hydra can display a live (!) updating rendered preview.

Very useful for prototyping HTML but even more useful for teaching it interactively: everybody can see and make changes in the same HTML document and everybody can see the results of any editing action immediately. Hope BBEdit adopts this feature soon.

The fast pace in which OS X utilities adopt the new WebCore HTML renderer is amazing. It seems as if in the end there will be no application not making use of it somehow. [via Ben]

Wow. New York gets public toilets after 20 years of discussion. Maybe this means there will be once extra toilet every year?