After being ecstatic about the return of the engadget podcast and being disappointed about Eric Rice’s version of this once great show it is time to be ecstatic again: Phillip Torrone, the former mastermind of the engadget podcast, just published the first episode of his new show: The MAKE:DIYcast. I can’t wait to listen to it.

I hope he also will get Lenn Pryor (who just announced his move from Microsoft to Skype) to do the show with him again.

It always strikes me as funny (though not “haha”-funny) when a website devoted to computer security doesn’t display properly (check out the left hand navigation) in Mozilla based browsers .

Today is my last day at SAP. It has been a very interesting time. I learned a lot, worked on cool projects and met tons of nice people. And being a SAP employee is great for apartment hunting. Beginning April first I will join the Security in Distributed Systems Group at the University of Hamburg.

Leaving is always a sad thing but I am exited about my new job. I’m going to miss the wonderful view from SAP’s building on the harbor of Hamburg though. I won’t miss the weekly commute between Hamburg and Walldorf, that’s for sure.

I just recently discovered the online comic "nothing nice to say". It’s a wiseass strip about the state of punk rock in the United States. Needless to say, I fell for it right on the spot.

The comic already exists for more than three years now, so I’m quite late in the game. But how do they say? Better late than never.

Watching a wiki for interesting changes over a long period of time can be rather tiresome, especially when the wiki is rather large.

Fortunately a growing number of wikis are using the MediaWiki-software (the code that runs the wikipedia) nowadays. A little know fact is that MediaWiki supports RSS-feeds for the "new pages" and "recent changes" pages out of the box. Most Wikis don’t publicly link to them but they exist anyway.

To access the "recent changes"-feed just add either

/index.php/Spezial:Recentchanges?feed=rss [or] /index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss

/index.php/Spezial:Newpages?feed=rss [or] /index.php?title=Special:Newpages&feed=rss

This method works at least for all wikis which I am reading. Here is for example the recent changes-feed of the iPod-Linux wiki.

Two-factor authentication is the combination of

1. Something you can lose and
2. Something you can forget

[via Slashdot comments]

Following the second wave of podcatching clients (with the 2.0 versions of iPodderX, iPodder Lemon and Doppler) the podcasting community is greeted with the first wave of commercialization attempts.

After Odeo and the podcastnetwork finally Adam Curry and Ron Bloom entered the game with a site called podshow. It seems as if they are planning to be the missing link between advertisers and podcasters.

The exact business model of all of these ventures is still rather vague to me.

When I was looking for more information about botnets I stumbled over a fun presentation on "Life, Love and War in the Underground". It is from late 2003 but I think the basic facts are still valid. According to the findings of the Author Rob Thomas there exists a livid marketplace in the IT underground. Botnets, 0days and rootshells are swapped or sold for hard currency (e.g. a new exploit sells for about $100 to $500). But to participate you have to know how to speak 1337...

The German Honeynet Project just released a paper on the usage of honeynets to explore botnets: Know your enemy: Tracking Botnets. Besides the description of the use of honeynets to do the tracking, the paper also does a great job in providing insights to the “why” and “how” background information of botnets.

Interestingly a lot of the more successful bots (Angobot, SDBot, DSNX) adopted the GPL as development model. I wonder if they have sourceforge.net project pages?

The last three weeks of my life were pretty much dominated by one single issue: The Move (tm). After collecting innumerable banana cartons (which are btw perfect for moving), living in between half packed boxes, exploiting all our friends and hurting my back on a daily basis it is finally done – the move is (almost) complete. Yesterday we said goodbye to the old apartment.

There is still no telephone or internet in the new flat and 2 (out of 3 1/2) rooms are still inhabitable but the new place already feels like home.