Cryptome has posted some photography of the DHL aircraft that got shot recently in the heavens of Bagdad. Quite fascinating that they managed to bring the machine down to the ground safe when I look at the damage the rockets caused.

Leo and Moophius are doing it in the Meatrix.

I am going to make an appearance at today‘s edition of Chaosradio which is a monthly show by Chaos Computer Club Berlin on a local radio station called Fritz.

Topic today is the Blogosphere and I am going to do the show with fellow bloggers Max and Jörg. Maybe interesting for those of you who understand german. The show starts at 2003-11-26T22:00+01:00 and can be received via the Internet as well.

My dear readers may remember my recent entry on Dylan. It might be worth noticing that I ambiguously stated that multiple dispatch was an invention of Dylan which it isn‘t. I was corrected by P. Tucker Withington, one of the authors of the great Dylan Programming book.

If you are interested in more on Dylan, you might want to have on the slides of a talk by Chris Page given on the SmartFriends™ U: Languages and Libraries conference last September. The slides are available in PDF and Keynote format.

Why are all these guys using a Macintosh? In the Blogosphere, you forget there even exists a Windows operating system. Well, does it exist?

Arrived in Dublin yesterday. It‘s my first time in Ireland and I am happy being here as I always wanted to know more about this place and get beyond the clichee of Guiness and Irish Pub culture. I am going to be here just for two days so I won‘t see much, but it is a welcome break for me from Berlin.

On the first sight, Dublin is similar to many british towns. Brick houses everywhere, double yellow lines going along the border of the streets, people drive on the left. But everything is much smaller. Almost no house is more than two storeys high, just a few taller buildings mark the financial district.

As I arrived, the streets are packed with cars. Dublin has a transport problem and I was told that public transport is one of the hot topics right now. A tram system is under construction but still years away. There is no underground, everything is run by buses and taxis.

Ireland was long a forgotten place with not much money and therefore the infrastructure was way behind. There was never an industrial revolution and the country moved from an agriculture to modern technology in a rush in the last 20 years. Today, computer manufacturers (among them: Apple) and tons of call centers have settled in Ireland making use of the lower costs for personal (aka „Human Resources“) compared to the rest of Europe.

So things have changed rapidly in the last years and Dublin is getting a major facelift as a consequence. The Docklands area, the old harbour, is attracting business and entertainment venues like it did in London in the 80ies. So Dublin is a bit behind other cities in that respect but has the advantage of a lot less legacy structures as well. Without doubt, Ireland has benefitted a lot from the European Union in that respect and is certainly closer to the „Continent“ than Britain will ever be.

Ireland is bilingual. Apart from English, there is Gaelic being spoken in certain areas of the country. All sings are bilingual as well, although in Dublin nothing but English can be heard. I was told that this changes fast once you move westwards.

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.