This is a followup to my previous posting on the infamous Kunduz air strike, where Oberst Georg Klein, a German ISAF colonel, ordered an air strike against Taliban terrorists who stole two fuel tankers, nearly a year ago. This air strike killed around 142 people who were surrounding the tankers at night, siphoning fuel. Among the casualties were 70 to 80 innocent civilian bystanders, including 24 children under the age of 18.
Continue reading ‘Kunduz, Georg Klein, and the Fog of War’ »
EPIC FAIL at The Pirate Bay. Journalist Brian Krebs has just reported that Argentinian security researcher Ch. Russo was able to exploit multiple SQL injection vulnerabilities to log in TPB’s admin interface and to expose registered user data, including E-Mail and IP addresses.
Continue reading ‘The Pirate Bay Leaks User Data Like A Sieve’ »
With the latest update of Firefox’s extension FireGPG to 0.8, Maximilien Cuony announced that he dropped GMail support, and that he discontinued this project altogether.
That’s sad news for all eMail privacy advocates. Fortunately, all is not lost: most regular MUAs (eMail clients) support OpenPGP compliant applications like GnuPG, either directly or through an extension. GMail account holders can use those PGP-enabled clients via Google Mail’s IMAP interface.
You thought World War II was ancient history and definitely a thing of the past? You may want to reconsider: two days ago, an old 500 kg (1,000 pound) WW2 bomb exploded in the German city of Göttingen, killing 3 specialists of a bomb disposal squad who tried to defuse it.
Continue reading ‘World War II Bomb Explodes In Göttingen, Kills Three’ »
A week ago, the biggest Japanese community outside of Japan organized for the 9th time the traditional Japan Day (Japan Tag) in the German city of Düsseldorf.
What a nice surprise! Germany’s sweet and funny Lena Meyer-Landrut (official homepage, free photos) won the Eurovision Song Contest 2010 in Oslo last Saturday, with Satellite, music and lyrics by Julie and Gordon Frost.
Continue reading ‘Lena Meyer-Landrut wins Eurovision Song Contest 2010’ »
In a previous tutorial, we wrote a simple Hello, World program in assembly language. While very small, the final version was still dependent on the FreeBSD kernel to execute the equivalent of a write(2) system call.
But what if there’s no kernel running? How about writing a hello world on the “bare metal”, i.e. without the help of an operating system?
Google’s explanation for leaving China was that they didn’t want to bow to Government censorship any longer. This courageous and bold move was tarnished by the fact, that Google already censored some of its search results in many other countries by request from and on behalf of local governments, but also for the sake of cultural localization. A newly released tool sheds some additional light on this widespread practice.
Continue reading ‘Brazil and Germany Leading in Google Data Removal Requests’ »
A jury of the District Court of Utah has just issued its verdict in the SCO Group vs. Novell trial w.r.t. the ownership of Unix copyrights. According to Novell:
The jury’s decision confirmed Novell’s ownership of the Unix copyrights, which SCO had asserted to own in its attack on Linux.
Continue reading ‘Unix copyrights belong to Novell, not SCO’ »
Operative branches of intelligence agencies are, by the nature of their mission, often involved in operations of questionable legality, including targeted killings in foreign countries. That’s certainly not news, and surprises nobody. Even if we put legality issues aside, and skirt the question of legitimacy, those killings also raise questions of ethics, when performed in an amateurish way that puts innocent bystanders in harm’s way.