CouchSofa.org - Ob Stadt ob Dorf, was du brauchst ist couchsofa.org

I saw Melaamory's Memoirs in my feed reader and checked out her DeviantArt profile.
She's got some very nice works, you should check it out!

Das musste ich einfach mal hier reinpacken, weil es einfach nur genial ist!

Am Samsatag, also gestern, war in Berlin die "Freiheit statt Angst" Demonstration. Unter 116 Kameras fand die Demo statt. Und natürlich nahmen auch die meisten Demonstranten eine Kamera mit um die Kameras zu fotografieren.
Ziehmlich viele Linsen bei viel Frieheit und so wenig Angst ...

Die kraftvollste Rede kam wie üblich von Monty von der Hedonistischen Internationale, der seine drei Minuten für eine ausgiebige Publikumsbeschimpfung genutzt hat, dass die ganzen Datenschutzkämpfer dann ihre Fotos mit Namen und GPS-Koordinaten getagt bei Google oder Yahoo hochladen. Monty rockt!!

Aber die "Gegenfilmaktion" lieferte auch interessante Situationen zu Tage. Wie z.B. diese Aktion der Polizei als ein Demonstrant einen Polizisten anzeigen wollte, der seinen "Kumpel" wohl unsanft abgeführt hatte. Das Material viel dann dem CCC in die Hände:

Alle paar Monate packen wir im Wohnheim den Kompressor der Netzwerk AG aus. Warum man einen Rechner öfter von Staub befreihen sollte wird bei diesen Bildern meiner beiden Tower schnell klar.

 

The scenario was rather unspectacular. A IT company had some call center in South Africa and they need to sync them every week or so. Since the ADSL Broadband connection could not match the maximum speed and it always took hours to transfer the data one member of IT Unlimited (the ISP) got frustrated

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.
He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

The company wanted to be innovative and gave the bird a chance.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe [...].

They set up some ground rules:

They included "no cats allowed" and "birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within".

After that was clear, they chose the 11 month-old pigeon Winston to carry a 4GB USB stick.
It took Winston 1 hour and 8 minutes to reach his destination and another hour to copy the data from the thumb drive.

Mr Rolfe said the ADSL transmission of the same data size was about 4% complete in the same time.
Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.
"Winston is over the moon," Mr Rolfe said.

And now comes the real WTF! There is a RFC standard for that kind of transportation called IP over Avian Carriers (IPoAC).

You may have heard that there will be a censoring mechanism for the Internet. This will be realized by censoring certain domains on the DNS servers. So if you try to look up 'howtobuildabomb.terror' the DNS server won't return an IP address but a warning (like the STOPP sign on couchsofa, which is a spoof, in fact). But since the government can only censor German DNS servers a address could still be looked up at a different server.
On GNU/Linux you can do that by the following command:

dig [type] [domain] @[server]

[type] will be the DNS record you want to read: A, PTR, SOA, NS or AXFR.
[domain] is the domain name to look up, for example 'Google.com' or 'howtobuildabomb.terror'.
[server] specifies a DNS server. If your local DNS servers are cencored you could use open DNS server. For example 4.2.2.2 or one from the lists you can find on google or at the CCC:

• 85.214.73.63 (anonymisierungsdienst.foebud.org)
• 204.152.184.76 (f.6to4-servers.net, ISC, USA)
• 2001:4f8:0:2::14 (f.6to4-servers.net, IPv6, ISC)
• 194.150.168.168 (dns.as250.net; anycast DNS!)
• 213.73.91.35 (dnscache.berlin.ccc.de)
• 80.237.196.2
• 194.95.202.198

The open DNS servers will resolve the domains and return the IP addresses. Now you can enter the IP in your browser:

http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

This has nothing to do with hacking or doing something illegal. It is just the way you can use the system!

I had a look at my archive and found two old lightwritings.

The blue graffiti is featured by Cuse (first piece)

Cross by Cuse

You can also see the pictures in larger scale in the gallery.

'Fail, Win, Pwnd and Owned' is a history lesson on web memes. Rocketbooms 'Know your meme' is a series of explanations of popular memes.
And for former education I recommend 'Mr. N00b loves Ms. L33t'. The young Mr. N00b loves the young lady Ms. L33t. And the parents say: „This Relationship is heading for an Epic Fail“ and „We don’t date N00bs, we pwn them!“

Phew, so we've come to the point where I have to put this up! We had some discussions about optimizing the couchsofa template for the Internet Explorer. There are a few fixes by Joomla and the great guys who made the Js-Purity template but still the IE manages to mess up CSS.
I really thought about recoding the CSS files although it is a real pain in the ass.
But I do not want to flame on the IE (because that is what I am basically doing all the time ;) )

So let's have a look at the statistics:

83.6% of our visitors use FireFox and only 2.4% IE, even the RSS Reader Lifearea is used 5 times more often.
So I do not think that there is a urgent need for 100% IE compatibility.

And there was one thing that really struck me:

91.9% GNU/Linux! Woohoo! No wonder we have so many users with FireFox.

After there have been some D/M mashups Worth1000 has put up a contest. Most of the contributions are not very amazing but there were three that caught my gaze!