According to PC-Welt, the Eee PC will soon have an internal UMTS modem. By 2010, this will be standard in every laptop, just like WLAN is today (not a bold prophecy, is it?).
The drones are coming
Some time ago I watched the video footage of the Chaos Communication Camp 2007, and in particular the recordings of the quadrocopter drones had impressed me. My fingers were itching to build a microdrone myself, unfortunately I currently have no time for such things. But what exactly is a drone and what can you do with it?
Source: Wikimedia
In this case, we are talking about a very small helicopter-like unmanned aircraft that flies with four electrically powered propellers and makes almost no noise. Drones are either remote-controlled or can move autonomously based on GPS data. They tow a photo or video camera whose images are transmitted live to the ground. Aerial photographs will soon be much cheaper.
Despite the fascination with technology, it wasn’t really clear to me what I was supposed to do with such a thing: I’m not interested in using the camera installed on the drone to look through my neighbors’ windows or monitor potential observers. For me, possible surveillance by drones outside of a military context was also more like music of the future.
Now I saw in the news yesterday that in Saxony, drones will be used to monitor fans in football stadiums in the future, a drone from the German company MicroDrones has already been ordered for 65,000 euros (the CCC model costs less than 1,000 euros when self-built), and Heise adds that the Federal Police already own two drones.
No one will deny that there are many good uses for drones, whether it’s to quickly obtain information about the situation during disasters or to check a terrain like a football stadium for suspicious objects before an event. This is about identifying potential dangers, for example, to provide rescue teams with an overview of a situation that is also dangerous for them, or to prevent a disaster. However, monitoring football fans during a game using drones is a different matter. Not that I have any sympathy for hooligans, but here people are being monitored – Orwell comes to mind. Of course, all of this is done solely for documentation purposes, according to the police, in order to enable proper evidence collection. No one needs to be afraid that drones will fly through the streets and look into windows, says a spokesperson for the state police department. Drones have already been tested in other EU countries, for example, in England.
However, if you read the other article on heise.de, which belongs to the customers of the company Microdrones, or look at some of the videos on the manufacturer’s page, then you can quickly think in a different direction (it must be credited to the company Microdrones that they provided a quadrocopter free of charge to the CCC). You can even rent drones, and here it is also discussed that this would be interesting not only for photographing landscapes but also for security companies. Do you want to know what your partner is doing when you’re on a trip? A detective agency can provide clarity with a microdrone.
According to Wikipedia
The Swiss Army made negative headlines when it became known that, for training purposes, they routinely tracked and filmed randomly selected private cars and civilians with their reconnaissance drones from an altitude of 1,500 meters using high-sensitivity thermal imaging cameras during their training flights.
This happened as early as 2004. And if one also considers that these drones can already be made much smaller and will certainly become even smaller, it is also conceivable that they may eventually be indistinguishable from an insect. Linking GPS data with registration office data should not be that difficult either.
But why should the state want to monitor its citizens in this way? Perhaps for the same reason that the state claims it already monitors all citizens’ internet and telephone communications. With telephones and the internet, most citizens didn’t notice or weren’t interested. Let’s see if it will be different with drones.
One question that has not yet been clarified is: How will self-built drones be treated in the future? Under 5 kilos of own weight, everything can take off without special permission. How long will this still be allowed? Will self-built drones be able to detect other drones?
Update: Wonderful video from the two developers from the Mikrokopter site
Another update: On Kai’s blog, it is being discussed that the increased sightings of UFOs can also be explained by the fact that these UFOs could simply be drones; additionally, miniature drones are being addressed.
Report internet disruptions via the internet
Yesterday evening, our DSL connection failed multiple times. The router seemed to be okay, but there was also interference on the phone. The announcement from the fault hotline was initially infuriating: “You want to report a fault? Here’s a brief tip: You can also report faults via the internet.” The nice lady at the fault desk had to laugh about it herself.
sendmail 8.13.3 and SMTP AUTH
(Warning: I’m not the big Linux sysadmin, so please take the following lines with a grain of salt!)
It always bothered me that the sendmail configuration of my root server (SuSE Linux 9.3) did not want to send mails to the outside, but instead all mails always ended up in /var/mail/(username). The following changes work for me, and maybe this is a terrible hack that can lead to nasty side effects, so all without guarantee.
Continue reading “sendmail 8.13.3 and SMTP AUTH”Virtual assistants affected by Internet disruption
Internet connections disrupted by damage to fiber optic cables in the Mediterranean, reports the Süddeutsche Zeitung, my virtual personal assistant kindly managed to write me an email that she has no Internet connection in the office. Supposedly, it will take several days to solve the problem. Let’s see how many people get problems because they now have to do their work themselves.
Asus eeePC: First experiences
This entry comes as a surprise to me as well, because on Thursday I had cancelled my order on Amazon due to the strange waiting time while other customers are being delivered, and actually I have something else to do this weekend than calling all the merchants or comparing exorbitant prices on eBay (I only have 46 hours in Germany this weekend). Of course, I followed Robert’s first conclusion with interest, as well as the comments on the relevant pages.
And then it happened. After an extensive family breakfast and the usual weekend errands, I was already walking slowly back to the car when I passed a shop window. And what did it say? A white Asus eeePC. Quickly to the door, crap, only open until 1 p.m., and 2 minutes later the door was of course locked. But there was still a nice young man in the shop, who opened the door for me. And yes, they not only had the device that was in the shop window, but also a wrapped one, which we both looked for and he finally found in a display case. 299.90 euros, not an exorbitant price. I raised the cash register again, pulled out my debit card, and then my sweetheart rushed into the store and asked what I had bought and whether it could still be undone, after all, I had been unsupervised. Too late. I have it.
I would now like to report how it is and so on. But I only had 5 minutes with the eeePC after it was unpacked. Tom and the strawberry jam bread with honey come first:
Asus eeePC: So close and yet so far
Johannes kindly provided the link to the Expert dealers in Germany in his blog, and after some phone calls and endless listening to monophonic music on hold, I finally found an Expert shop in Buxtehude, where the employee said that he had already seen such a small white device with Linux. The family was startled that we would have to leave IMMEDIATELY, and then we preferred to ask the seller again: Yes, of course, we have the Asus eeePC, but we won’t sell it until January 24th. No chance of getting it earlier. I can only pre-order it today. Amazon still shows March 8-11 as the delivery date.
In this bad weather, an unpacking ceremony would have been a nice change.
The beginnings of spam
Actually, SPiced hAM canned meat, but in this sketch, Monty Python used the term almost 100 times. Almost as often as we receive purchase incentives via email every day.
How a community arises
A colleague of mine had to be evacuated from her Manhattan apartment this week after the underground car park was flooded. Two days later, the blog of the Residents of 90 West Street (interestingly, they call it “Forum”) was born, and it is not the only one; previously blogging residents of the house also took up the topic, creating a community of people who hardly knew each other before, even if they lived in a house before. Information is exchanged and questions are discussed, for example whether the rent is now due if you are not allowed into the apartment and also have to advance the costs for the hotel. The exciting question is whether this community can be maintained if the emergency situation no longer welds those affected together. But nowhere is it written that communities must last forever.
The Whole Truth About Social Networks
Timo had recently wondered why there were so few registrations for the Lunch 2.0 September in Hamburg, where it was usually full faster than some would have liked; one explanation was that people in Hamburg already meet all the time and know everyone. Only at the legendary Gimahhot party would there have been other people. What Timo has experienced here is a fundamental characteristic of communities that can be observed in every scale-free network, and this is also evident in another example I mentioned in the Web 2.0 book, namely linking within the blogosphere. In the German blogosphere, not everyone is networked with everyone. There are many pages with few links and few pages with many links. However, having a lot of inbound links is not enough to be a multiplier. Because if you take a close look at the graphic, which I created using my own crawler and GraphViz, there are different centers in the blogosphere that are more or less well connected to each other. This means that a piece of information may be hotly debated in one region of the blogosphere, but does not make it to the rest of the blogosphere due to the few connections to another region. So what is more interesting are the nodes that have connections to several regions, as they are the ones that can act as multipliers (they are also called hubs). Let’s transfer this to a human network away from the blogosphere. How do you find a new job? Not through your closest friends, because they usually only have access to the information you have yourself. It is the less good acquaintances who have access to another (information) circle and can help them get a new job (this clever idea, as well as many others about communities and social networks, come from Albert-Laszlo Barabasis’s book Linked). And the more contacts they have with different clusters, the more likely they are to know someone who is looking for someone with exactly the same qualifications as you have. But doesn’t everyone know everyone over 6 corners anyway? What about the six degrees of separation? A myth has developed here that, if you take a closer look, seems sobering. There was actually this study that everyone refers to, and it comes from Stanley Milgram, who sent letters to people in the USA in the 60s asking them to forward them to a specific target person or to someone who might know this target person. And indeed, on average, the letters took 5.5 stations to reach the target person. The flaw, however, is that of the 160 letters sent, only 42 arrived. In some cases, it took almost a dozen stations for the letter to arrive. So is that not true with the 6 stations after all? You don’t know, I would say. After all, those who received a letter to forward always forwarded it to people they thought might know the target. So it could be that there were much shorter paths through the network. This or something similar happens to us when we look at XING through whom we could know a person if we didn’t already have them as a contact ourselves: “What, they know each other too?”. In addition, today, with modern communication methods and cheap flights, the number of stations between two people may actually have decreased. But we don’t know exactly. More on that in a moment. By the way, the term “Six Degrees of Separation” was never used by Stanley Milgram; it only became popular through the film of the same name. Why don’t we know today how many stations lie between us and another person, especially if they live in another country? (Milgram’s experiment took place in only 3 states in the USA) Because there is no social network on the web that really connects different social networks (across countries). There are thoughts in different companies about how to do this, but until then, the clusters of the various social networks are rather “manually” connected to each other. Example: I have some XING contacts, and I have some LinkedIn contacts. Two networks for the same thing. In fact? No, the overlap of my contacts in the two networks is low. Likewise, the overlap between this network and my Last.fm friends is low. I am a human being (like any other person) who is part of different communities, and I am the link between these communities. Does this mean that I can ensure that information gets from one community to another? Maybe, but not in every case, because not every community is receptive to the information from another community. And in some cases, I have to do “manually” to connect the two different networks. The digitally mapped networks still need analog connections in order to be able to map the connections in the real network. The people who can really help you (or bring you a PR disaster) are the ones who have the most contacts in as many different communities as possible, in real as well as in digital life, and actively cultivate them and don’t just let them rest in the address book. These are the people who make Hush Puppies fashionable again (see also Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book The Tipping Point). However, these hubs or multipliers or connectors are not the ones that produce innovations themselves. But they are the ones who help innovations break through by spreading information about them to the various clusters they know. And those who can help you get a new job. For Lunch 2.0, for example, this could mean that one of the participating hubs has to bring other people that no one knows yet. A blind business date, for example. XING is used to check whether the participants are in direct contact with each other, and if not, they are allowed to participate. This allows anyone to connect to another cluster.