Author Archives: Robin

EU shares police data across the board

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Against the wishes of the EU European Data Protection Supervisor, police will share data about DNA, fingerprints and licence plates all over the EU. The problem is that whichever country has the least security on their systems, will be an automatic easy entry point to all this data. I don’t want my DNA in any databases for starters, but I certainly don’t want the Greek cop trying to pin something on me after I got drunk at some beach party having access to it either!

Quercus: PHP in Java

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Quercus is Caucho Technology’s fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language. Quercus is a feature of Caucho Technology’s Resin Application Server and is built into Resin – there is no additional download/install. Developers using Resin can launch PHP projects without having to install the standard PHP interpreter (http://www.php.net) as Quercus takes on the role of the PHP engine.
What is Quercus

Quercus implements PHP 5 and is internationalization/localization (i18n/l10n) aware. Quercus natively supports Unicode and the new Unicode syntax of the up-and-coming PHP 6. Quercus implements a growing list of PHP extensions (i.e. APC, iconv, GD, gettext, JSON, MySQL, Oracle, PDF, Postgres, etc.). Many popular PHP applications will run as well as, if not better, than the standard PHP interpreter straight out of the box. The growing list of PHP software certified running on Quercus includes DokuWiki, Drupal, Gallery2, Joomla, Mambo, Mantis, MediaWiki, Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, PHP-Nuke, WordPress, and XOOPS.

Winston Churchill

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Yes, this man was fabulous. Recently I’ve taken (parts of) two of his speeches to heart:

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.

The Churchill centre has quite a few of his speeches and quotes in text form.

Earthstation1 has them in audio form – magnificent and powerfull stuff from IMHO one of the greatest statesmen of all time. (but in real audio format)

Freeinfo society has a great collection of a whole load of mp3 versions of great speeches made through time.

Monitor Hacking

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It’s been known for a while that CRT monitors leak radiation which makes them easily duplicable on an external monitor, leading to insane amounts of shielding.

Now it’s the LCD’s turn.

Using a radio antenna and reciever, Markus Kuhn can duplicate your LCD on an external monitor, in some cases though up to three walls away, depending on the type of monitor. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to defend against.

He’s also found a way to reconstruct what a monitor is showing by looking at the flicker reflected through a window or on a wall.

Markus Kuhn has a few other interesting articles on his own site.

Xuuk Eyebox

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Tracking how many people look at your products is an expensive thing to do. Sony has a system that tracks people in stores and detects where they are looking and for how long, but expect astronomic prices.

Xuuk is offering the Eyebox, a pinhole camera that connects to your PC through USB2. Install some software and voila it counts the amount of people actually looking at the product / advertisement up to a distance of 10m away. The software links into Google’s pagerank technology for revenue models on a how many times your product was seen and gives you loads of statistics. And this for only $999,-

Using this camera you can measure or track how many viewers your poster has.

Encyclopedia of life

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This huge project is to attempt to put all biological information ever collected into one website for the useage of scientists but also the general public. Many major institutions are joining in, including the London Natural History Museum, the greatest repository of biological knowledge in the world. The problem for biology students currently is that in order to access the knowledge they have to travel to London as it isn’t available any other way yet. This huge project will take some years to complete, but it’s a great step.

SWIFT hates your privacy

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Yup, if you want to make international bank transfers, you have to use Swift. If you want to use swift you have to sign a waiver saying that it’s OK for them to do whatever they want with your personal details for any random reason (OK, to fight terrorism is what it says, but that comes down to the same thing). And why? Well, mainly to allow the vierten reich USA direct snooping lines into the Swift system.
Yes, this is illegal, but it’s looking like Europe will bow to the pressure and cave in and change our private data rights for the US Nazi’s.