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?

Exciting Jobbie-the-Juagar Stuff! Joy Of Tech does it again and again and again.

Talking about John, I‘d like to point you to an e-mail sent by him about his last flight on friday. John was ejected from the plane for wearing a „Suspected Terrorist“ button. Un-be-lie-va-ble. But true.

The funny thing here is that the button has been put on exactly to demonstrate that kind of action (discriminating people for voicing their opinion or being „associated“ with somebody who does).

It‘s so funny to see that this happens to John Gilmore of all people as he is promoting the fight against new flights rules at freetotravel.org for quite some time now.

John Gilmore is a „entrepreneur and civil libertarian“ (Gilmore about Gilmore) and can be considered one of the true old school hackers. He has announced his participation at the upcoming Camp already months ago. He participated in the first Camp as well.

John Gilmore founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks and the alt newsgroup. The was also Sun Microsystems‘ fifth employee.

Today, he is widely known for his activity in the civil rights movement. Among other things he raised his voice on copyright issues and other things. Check his home page for more.

At the Camp, John Gilmore is about to give a couple of talks. The first is called „Suing Ashcroft: Anonymity, Right to Travel, Secret Laws“ is focusing on the current situation in the United States serving as an update for Europeans. In „EFF – Lessons learned as a cyberrights NGO“ he will report on his experiences with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and finally he reports on „Opportunistic Encryption using DNSSEC“ including an invitation to hack his DNS setup.