For all of those who say: “you got to try everything once”. No, you don’t.

After the famous ‘to go Dutch’, ‘Ducth courage’ and a ‘Dutch wife’ we might need a new one: Dutch Trust. I guess the definition would be something like: to trust someone who can not be trusted.

What happened? The Dutch government in the past couple of weeks introduced the following new rule:

• All telephone and internet connection information is kept for 12 months, twice as long as European regulation dictates. The CDA, one of the ruling parties, even opted for 18 months, but this idea was refused because the costs would be to high(!). Link (in Dutch).

Apart from the new law the following two bits of information also came out in the last two weeks:

• The Dutch government is talking to the US government to have ISPs snoop on their own customers. The idea here is that ISPs will be made responsible for the pirate copies their customers download from the internet. Link (in Dutch).
• The minister of Justice announced today that in Holland every day 1700 phone calls are tapped. You might ask whether this is a big number or not. Compared to the US, where 2800 phones are tapped every year, one could argue it is. Link (in Dutch).

Now if you think the Dutch would go out on the street and demonstrate, you are right. There was a big demonstration today in Holland where the truck drivers honked 3 times to express their disapproval of the upcoming 3 cent tax increase on gasoline. The government was not impressed. Link (in Dutch).

Every year on the 30th of April the Dutch queen celebrates her birthday. The day is celebrated with bands, beer and kids selling stuff on the street.

I lived in Rotterdam from 1990 until 2000 and during those years “koninginnedag” has always been a pleasant party. I would normally watch a band, buy a beer and walk to the next stage to have a look at another band, buy another beer… Oh and there is (almost) always the added benefit of great weather.

That does not seem to be possible anymore. Due to some soccer related troubles, Rotterdam had in the past, you are now no longer allowed to drink a beer in the street. You are only allowed to drink beer in front of a bar surrounded by a metal cage. You are not allowed to leave this prison before finishing your beer (I admit, that is a nice way to spent prison time).

It seems that the beer cage only goes for Rotterdam. I think it is a shame that Rotterdam accepted these rules. Koninginnedag is a day for party.

I have been on my way in Holland again for the last 12 Months. A lot of things happen in this small country where I was born. When I left in 2000 the country was a pretty open society where people were proud to live together with a lot of cultures. Although Holland is still known for its ‘open atmosphere’ the reality has changed since then.

Due to a couple of incidents, most notably the assassination of Theo van Gogh and the planned attacks of the “Hofstad Groep” Holland is struggling big time with its multi-culture values. It seems like a lot of people I meet here have a hard time keeping up the old concept of tolerance, Holland was so proud to have. Things have even become so bad that the right-wing populist Geert Wilders has become salon-fähig.

When I come back home in Germany I often have a hard time explaining what exactly is going on and why I think Holland is changing. The German magazine Spiegel today posted an article about the state of Holland, in which they describe in a very clear way the changes that are happening.

Link.

With unendless wisdom the vatican today declared seven new (possibly deadly) sins. These sins basically make it impossible to live in any western kind of society (if you share the negative view that we are rich because they are poor).

The New “Social” Sins

1. “Bioethical” violations such as birth control
2. “Morally dubious” experiments such as stem cell research
3. Drug abuse
4. Polluting the environment
5. Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor
6. Excessive wealth
7. Creating poverty

For those who forgot, here are the original deadly sins:

1. lust
2. gluttony
3. greed
4. sloth
5. wrath
6. envy
7. pride

Link.

Yesterday I received an email from stopbadware.org. They reviewed my site and found no problems anymore:

Google’s most recent test of your website found no badware behaviors on the site.  As such, the Google warning page for your site has either already been removed or should be removed shortly.  In addition, if your site has been listed in our Badware Website Clearinghouse, we will remove your site from the Clearinghouse list.

So far so good, a bit late maybe since my site has been unblocked since about a week. However the last paragraph of the email reads:

Please note that we will be retesting your website at periodic intervals in order to monitor that it remains free from badware. If we find that you are hosting or distributing badware in the future, the reviews process may take considerably longer than the original review.

Now this really made me laugh. The next review process might take even longer? Due to the lack of information provided by stopbadware.org and Google, my site has been marked as a badware site for approximately 2 and half weeks. It took stopbadware.org another week to review my site, after Google found it was clean. But when I get hacked again, it even might take them longer to respond than they already needed?

Considering the cooperation between firefox and stopbadware.org I might have to switch to Opera, or god help me, even Internet Explorer.

Oberwelt e.V., a German artists collective presents a nice device which can protect you from all the infrared security cameras installed on public roads. It sends out an invisible infrared light that will make your face show up as a white bulb.

I-R.A.S.C is a device giving every citizen a reliable protection from governmental security measures. I-R.A.S.C. is security against security and therefore a response to the dissymmetry of the forces between state and individual.

Instead of showing and interaction among human-beings, or between man and machine, I-R.A.S.C. demonstrates an interaction among machines. This is part of an absurd situation – while the time and effort invested into protection measures aims at the alleged safety of the citizens, the individual looses importance in this safety concept.

I-R.A.S.C is an infra-red device working as a protection shield from infra-red surveillance cameras. Everybody can rebuild this device without special technical skills.

Link via Boing Boing

On February the 5th Wordpress released version 2.3.3 of their blog software. This release fixed the following issue:

WordPress 2.3.3 is an urgent security release. If you have registration enabled a flaw was found in the XML-RPC implementation such that a specially crafted request would allow a user to edit posts of other users on that blog.

On February the 10th I applied the version 2.3.3 to my site.

Three days later Ubuntu Hardy installed the new firefox 3.0 beta. This version of Firefox works very closely with stopbadware.org to prevent users from accessing malware or badware sites. I found this feature when I used Firefox to visit my own site. I was informed of the fact that my site actively distributes or promotes malware and Firefox will not allow access to it. Disabling one of the security features in Firefox restored the access to my site. I instantly understood that my site was hacked  (again) in the last couple of days.

Trying to find out what was going on I read a lot of information on the stopbadware.org pages. Stopbadware.org is founded by Google so it is not surprising they use Google techniques to decide which sites are badware (or malware). A google search for my site today gives the following result (I also tried the same search on Yahoo, MSN and ASK.COM. Those engines have no problem with my site since they do not try to block access to malware sites):

Doing some more research I found that Google’s webmaster tools will give me an option to let Google do a review of my site. The bad thing I found was that Google does not tell you what is wrong with your site. They only state that there is something wrong. This makes it very hard to debug the site and fix the problem. I ended up going through all the pages and have a look at the source of each.

I found two hidden links. The links were hidden in <noscript> tags, so they were not accessible for the visitors of my webpage, they were just there for search engines to enjoy (I guess the person who inserted the links hopes to gain more attention if his site gets linked to a lot). So I removed the links, did some queries on my database and decided my site was completely clean. Then I asked Google to re-evaluate my site.
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Here is a fine bloke who did what I have been dreaming of ever since I got my new Dell D830: he upgraded his Windows Vista installation to Windows XP.

Although my own Vista installation runs a lot better than his, I do see a lot of familiar problems he seems to have fixed with his upgrade.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec’s pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.
Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you’re surfing, a nice touch.

Link.

Amnesty International have just released a truly powerful film to coincide with the official launch of the unsubscribe campaign.

Link