Tear down the Wall
Yes, I am sorry for the title, but I come from Berlin and couldn't resist.. I just want to leave a note on chinesewall.ccc.de if you missed it in the news. The so-called "Great Wall of China" blocks large areas of the Internet. Additionally, Chinese versions of search sites like Yahoo or Google omit pages blocked by the Chinese firewall from its result sets. It is just another reminder that there is no point in bargaining with "Don't be evil"-Google as they never keep their promise.
The Chinese government said that there would be no limitations for visitors or journalists when they were bidding for the Olympic games some years ago. But - surprise, surprise - they didn't switch off their standard censoring machine. Even though China was granted the Olympics partially because it promised an open reporting environment, IOC officials only, ahm, negotiated with the Chinese. As if there are any ideals in the IOC. The hacker's motto always was: Help yourself! So we did. The Telegraph has the story about finding ways to bypass censorship. We even made it to GeekBrief.TV with the so-called Freedom Stick. (Click only if you saw GeekBrief.TV before. I don't want anybody to get hurt. *harhar*) And just for the records: This service is, of course, not only availabe during the Olympic games because censorship is something that also happens all year long and in other places of the world. ST: I'm sick, entertain me!
Monday, August 4, 2008
What you should read before starting your day
It's Monday evening, and the third cup of tea hasn't kicked in yet. It's been quite a while since the last time I posted anything, but I guess you are already somewhat used to it. Meanwhile - because whining and going back to the most loved ego-shooter is not an option - we have finished some work to mitigate the recent anti-competency legislation here in Germany: It is a report to the German Supreme Court that analyzes the effects of the so-called "hacker paragraph". The new legislation is going to stop security companies from opening up in Germany as well as obstruct hackers, students or professionals interested in IT security. And for the near future, any country without prying hackers and other hands-on-nerds programming, using, and learning hacker tools will be helpless in defending its IT-infrastructure. These tools are simply necessary in securing networks. All those arguments and more we tried to explain on 39 pages. Unfortunately, there is no English version yet. BUT here is a very kind review in English. Anyway, we're going to have to wait for the ruling in court for more clarification. And now: No more surrogate activities, like me writing this blog post while I should finishing up my dissertation.
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