Whoosh. The new Camp teasers have arrived. Select the pictures for higher resolutions.

For those like to prefer to read documentation in a web browser, manserver might be a helpful little tool. It is a simple CGI that you can install on your UNIX system to read display command line „man“ pages in HTML. Added benefit: hyperlinked manual pages.

There is an additional notes on how to customize the script for Mac OS X at Mac OS X Hints.

Frank reports on a cool new standard called HomePlug that does Ethernet over power.

NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu of the International Space Station is maintaining a diary on the NASA web site. He shares his views from above in a more direct way than press releases ever will.

We don‘t have a real kitchen up here, but we do have a kitchen table. You might wonder of what use a table is if you can‘t set anything down on it, but we have bungee straps and Velcro on the tabletop so you can keep your food containers, spoon, napkins, etc. from floating away.

Hope he is going to share his experience with the specially modified toilets some day.

The Fink project is one of the more popular and useful package porting projects bringing the wealth of UNIX tools to Mac OS X. They now provide a RSS 1.0 feed for updates on their stable tree and the unstable tree of their package database.

1. Mac OS X: Make the AddressBook autodetect your Bluetooth phone
2.  Mac OS X:Send SMS messages to mobile phones from iChat
3.  Internet: Messaging over IPv6 Destination Options
4.  Algorithms: LZW Data Compression (it‘s free now!)
5.  Processors: History of PowerPC architecture
6.  Internet: Distributed Reflection Denial of Service (DRDoS)
7.  Programming: Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software

Did you know that? If you didn‘t, this web site tells you all about it [via Ben].

AVIT is a community of Video Jockeys (VJs) that unite for reality based adventures. Behind the buzzword is a very active scene of visual artists that just love to come together at any possible occasion. The AVIT home page lists various events in the USA and the UK where the movement has its strongest roots.

But they are going to join the Camp: OpenAirVit is taking visuals outside for collaboration, celebration, and camping . In their own words:

OpenAirVIT will form part of the art and beauty village – the place for the creative hackers – right next to the GIMP programmers and lots of very good live electronic musicians. We will have their own 50m2 tent for hands on training, workshops and speeches. Right in front of the tent will be the food and recreation area with some outdoor screens and a small PA system suitable as showcase for collaboration work with the musicians or whatever you feel like you want to do with it.

There is not much to add. There is of course a OpenAirVit project page on CampWiki where you can get and post more information if you are interested. In addition, there is also a forum on VJForums.com that invites further discussion.

Many web sites want to use SSL to encrypt the transfer of data to prevent transmission of authentication data or to make sure the data is not modified during traffic. A good example for the latter was the operation of the insert_coin proxy server at Easterhegg. Because it was modifying all incoming http traffic, modifications to our CampWiki system became inadvertently corrupted. In addition, my password got sniffed as well. Using unencryped tools at a hacker con is a bad idea anyway :-)

If you want to do SSL you need a Certifying Authority (CA) to sign your certificate, giving proof to your claim that you are who you pretend to be. The problem is who this CA should be. Typically, web browsers and https subsystems only have a small selection of trusted CA‘s. Getting signed by them costs money. So what if you just want the encryption to prevent the above mentioned attacks but you don‘t care about the extended trust principle behind it and you don‘t want to spend the money?

Well, you could open your own CA and sign your own certificate. Many sites are doing this, including the Chaos Computer Club and this is valid for CampWiki and the Camp Registration Server as well.

Usually this is not a big problem. Mozilla allows you to store the CA file locally and is therefore ideal. But on Mac OS X applications like Safari, Kung-Log and NetNewsWire actually use a system-level protocol service to do http and https and have no direct influence on which CAs are accepted and which are not. Unfortunately, Apple does not yet provide a tool to change the list of trusted CAs accepted by the operating system.

But there is a workaround. A helpful article a Mac OS X Hints (a very useful resource anyway) shows a way how to do it. Although the article just mentions Safari, it should work with all compliant programs using the same subsystem.

This is what you have to do on the command line (using an account having administrator privileges):

1. Get a copy of the original CA certificate.
   
   You find the CCC CA here: http://www.ccc.de/ca/cacert.pem
2. Copy the system keychain file containing the trusted CA certificates to your home directory keychain area:
   
   cp /System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors ~/Library/Keychains/
3. Add the new CA certificate to this keychain in your home directory:
   
   certtool i cacert.pem k=X509Anchors
4. Move the modified file back to it‘s system location:
   
   sudo mv ~/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors /System/Library/Keychains/

And you are done. Now you can read the CCC‘s web sites without having to accept warning messages first with Safari and you can subscribe to RSS feeds via https that are using self-signed certificates with NetNewsWire (since version 1.0.3). Unfortunately, this trick does not (yet) work with the current beta version of OmniWeb (4.5b2) but this might be just temporary.

Interesting to see that the big companies are catching up with the blogging hype: AOL has been presenting their debut in the Blogosphere. Very interesting to see they are integrating it with their AIM service, allowing people to fill their weblogs using an instant messenger client.

We are actually hoping to have some IM/Weblog integration available at the Camp as well: we are currently setting up a central weblog server for every registered participant and hopefully it will be possible to subscribe to RSS feeds via Jabber. Let‘s see how it turns out.