My blog sucks. Whoever posts a comment here will get errors. However, each comment will be received although some might be hold back due to spam foo. I have to release these comments manually.
I will fix this mess when I find the time.
Seems like Blinkenlights is becoming part of a conspiracy now. Funny.
Disclaimer: Blinkenlights is not going to be at HOPE No. 6.
I finally managed to upload the Chaosradio International podcast with Whitfield Diffie. Yes, it is that „Diffie“ in Diffie-Hellman key exchange. I was happy to meet Whitfield at a security conference in PRag last week and while the interview started a bit confused (we both had a short nap just before the interview after a long day of activity and needed some time to re-awake) I am quite happy with the result. Whitfield gives some interesting insights into hacker history and should not be missed.
I haven’t found so much time to blog about the reboot conference because I have been preparing an interview with Peter from The Pirate Bay on the project and of course the recent raid by the police that shut down the site. So today we did the podcast and I just uploaded it to our Chaosradio International podcast channel: CRI009 The Pirate Bay.
The interview is a look behind the curtain of the project and explains a variety of details regarding technical aspects and philosophy of The Pirate Bay and the related pirates. I really enjoyed talking to Peter (and the rest of the pirate crowd that was at reboot) and you will have your laughs during the podcast. Just make sure you hear it until the end when Peter describes the police raid. You will also learn about Internet prices in Sweden. I am seriously considering to emigrate now :)
No. I am not serious. But I really hope there will be a chance to get to Sweden sooner or later. It is the only remaining scandinavian country on my travel schedule so far.
You might notice that, I actually posted episode 9 before I posted episode 8 which is already done. I just didn’t finish editing it but I wanted to make sure the Pirate Bay interview sees the light of day as soon as possible. But you should look forward to number eight which is an extensive interview with Whitfield Diffie, one of the fathers of public key cryptography.
Listen to this piece which is a part of the May 3rd episode of the Off The Hook radio show of 2600. They are talking about the case of somebody changing the content electronic traffic signs making them display stating that the prime minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, „eats babies“.
Later on they also report on somebody stating that „hackers“ are also know to get „inside buildings via the Internet“ using the internal lighting to play Tetris on the buildings facade. LOL. 2600 advises us to get to the Canadian magazine to make them redeem the statement, but right now nobody seems to know who the real originator of this statement was.
Podcast: Hacking Traffic Signs and Criminal Blinkenlights (MP3, 8.7 MB, 09:32 min)
I have been looking for this for a while but the time has come: the Xiph project released an important update to their QuickTime component that allowed to playback Ogg container files with Vorbis encoded audio.
The latest update (0.15) now includes Theora support as well effectively bringing free audio and video media codecs to the Mac throughout the system (read: all applications) including iTunes and all Web Browsers. I love the QuickTime framework for making this so easy and do appreciate the work of the Xiph team to have taken up on this task. With the Mac being the premier platform for doing media work, this is a wise move. It makes free media formats available on commercial grade systems which can lead to a wider acceptance.
The component seems to work fine for both playback and export which makes it easy to convert Theora content for the iPod or other uses. Unfortunately, the component does not yet contain the proper importer functionality so I can’t use it to create Theora content using standard QuickTime export which is sad. That way any video producing app could directly export to Theora without any additional processing.
Charming Miss Régine won the Webby Award for her blog We Make Money Not Art in the „Blog – Cultural/Personal“ category. Perfect time to point you again to the interview I did with her back in December at 22C3.
I spent the weekend ins Amsterdam, meeting Bicyclemark (whose podcast AudioCommunique i mentioned earlier in this blog) which was great fun. We have been discussing all kinds of topics in the last two days and produced some podcasts as well. One is going to be posted to Chaosradio International soon, the other has been posted to Mark’s AudioCommunique . And this one is just a random chat we did while floating the grachts of Amsterdam with Mark’s new boat.
Just to make sure I had my hands on it as well I uploaded the Blinkenlights-Dokuvideos to Google Video.
This blog is going to be offline on thursday for a day or two because the server is moving.