A fellow student decided to apply to the federal police, after talking with then at a job fair on the campus. The police strongly stated that they had a high demand for new people.
He did not get an answer for the next two months - not even an acknowledgment - so he quickly found another job in the mean time.

After the two months he got an answer stating that the application deadline was over now and it would be great if he'd come for a job interview. Unsurprisingly he declined..

Can't believe we still use fax in 2021. Instead of migrating it away for our customers, we virtualize it.

Instead of the old ISDN fax cards we will use virtual serial fax modems. 🙃

disableSslVerification()
download("https://...", "update.exe")
execute("update.exe")

In a license reporting software, took them 1,5 years to fix!
If we hadn't specifically requested how to run this software with lesser privileged accounts, it would have had access to all our customer's machines.

The German constitutional court (BverfG) declared many part of the law regulating the German secret agency "Bundesnachrichtendienst" (Federal Intelligence Service; BND) for unlawful and unconstitutional.

The key points:
- The freedom of press and the right for privacy are human rights, not just for Germans
- Uncontrolled and targetless, without protection for e.g. foreign journalists
- No independent control institution
- Lawmakers completely did not mention why they see a reason why human rights can be restricted, but intentionally did not respect them
- There must be specific reasons to give data to other countries' secret agencies

Sources (in German):
- https://spiegel.de/netzwelt/...
- https://golem.de/news/...
-

The amount of meetings has been drastically reduced to a minimum.

Company makes you doing end user support additionally to your (dev) job, so you have no time to do the latter.

!dev
Deutsch Bahn, again: A delay of 8 minutes (the DB officially recognizes this as late) results to an impossible to reach connecting train leading to a total delay of ca. 2 hours, as I cannot use the Inter City train anymore, but have to use a "Regional Express" instead.

Out of 5 times travelling this route, I arrived 2 times 2 hours later.

Moscow police raided the Nginx offices after a copyright complaint.

The former employer of Igor Sysoev (= the Nginx founder), Rambler, made a copyright complaint and claimed they own full copyrights on Nginx, as it was created at the time of his employment Rambler sold the copyright enforcement rights to Lynwood Investments (which is connected to the Rambler owner) on Cyprus, which tried to enforce it now.

Nginx was created as project during the employment of Sysoev at Rambler and was published as ioen sourxe - interestingly Rambler became the first user of it and did not try to enforce copyright after Sysoef left the company and founded (together with a few other) the Nginx, Inc. in 2011.

Since this year Nginx, Inc. is owned by F5.

Sources:

https://golem.de/news/... (German)
https://zdnet.com/article/... (English)

The lights in the data center broke.
Everything else is working.

After a court ruling, the privacy focused email provider Tutanota has been forced to create plaintext copies of emails.

In the future, a court can order copies of emails, before they are saved encrypted on the email servers. Tutanota says, end-to-end encrypted emails would remain secure and they would "rather want to implement extended privacy enhancements for customers instead of extended access for government entities", but they would follow the law.

A few months ago, in a similar case, the constitutional court ordered another mail provider - Posteo - to save IP addresses on court request, even if they do not save them regularly.

Interestingly, the law the court based its decision on, might be not longer relevant for mail services.

Source (German): https://sueddeutsche.de/digital/...

In addition to being able to lookup DNS queries over Twitter, telegram (even literal ones), devRant, HTTP(s), TLS and even the DNS protocol itself - Cloudflare will now offer DNS-over-HAM in London.

Sources:
- Heise Online (German): https://heise.de/newsticker/...
- Original Tweet: https://mobile.twitter.com/jgrahamc...

'Get a smart device', they said.
'Unlimited media experience, internet powered!' they said.

What they didn't say, most of the apps are just webpages with an expiration date.

[Talk by a security expert. The main point was, complexity kills security.]

7 minutes later a friend via IM: Hey, let's use OpenStack! Just 33 micro services to install!

The Firefox issue has been resolved: https://bleepingcomputer.com/news/...

Travelling by train in Germany shows the 'great' status of the mobile network here.
Even emergency calls aren't possible sometimes...

I hoped I would write about other things than EU internet regulation... But I hoped wrong.
The new online antiterror regulation is flawed, too.

What will the new regulation change?
The EU plans stricter anti terror laws for online platforms. In a nutshell, reported terroristic content has to be removed in <1 hour> after reporting. While automated filters are not required (the EVP party and the EU commission wanted those, but couldn't get a majority in the perliament), but it is unclear how to fulfill the regulation without.

What is the current progress of the regulation?
The EU parliament approved the draft, the trialogue will begin after election. The parliament has to approve the final trialogue result again and might reject it then. The characteristics of the regulation might change, too.

Who (platforms) will be affected?
All platforms, "offering servicd in the EU, independent of their business address" (free translation from German).

Will there be exceptions (e.g. for smaller or non commercial platforms)?
No.
At the very first report, the platform will have 12h time.

What are the consequences of not following?
Regularly breaking the law _constantly_, up to 4%/of the total yearly revenue.

Sources?
- The "fact sheet" of last year (upload filters were still a requirement): https://ec.europa.eu/commission/...
- The law proposal itself (also outdated): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-con...
- Proposed changes by the EU parliament (I'm not sure which ones were approved): http://europarl.europa.eu/doceo/...
- German news article: https://golem.de/news/...

Got my first 1000 "++"!

Demonstration in Rostock against article 15-17 (formerly 11-13).

devRant on a HoloLens!

The HoloLens is really cool, I was allowed to use it after a short hackathon. I am still surprised, but it works great and the concept feels natural after a short moment - web browsing is not recommended as no website is optimized for mixed reality (yet?).

Sorry for the low quality photo (it is not the compression algorithm's fault this time).

After protests have been announced against article 11/(12/)13 on 23.03. German EVP politicians want to move date of the final vote before the protests.
It seems those politicians are simply saying "fuck you" to the protesters.

Source (German): https://netzpolitik.org/2019/...

Now the new EU copyright directive is getting closer, Google does A/B testing to comply with article 11.

The new EU copyright reform (article 13, etc.) is getting comical.
After even the big copyright holders retracted their support for the law, it seemed to have no chance and was "put on ice".
After short while it was warmed up again by negotiating some trade offs (which are apparently hated by everyone) and it may or may not be passed in the next few weeks.
So far so idiotic.
It seem that even the initiator - Axel Voss - will not vote for the law. Unfortunately for wrong reasons. Why? It is not strict enough for him.

Anyhow, the longer text he used to present his view he he seems to - copy - his argumentation from Bertelsman (German media group).

It could be funny, if all of that wasn't so sad as there is still the possibility that this stupid law passes.

!rant
Pathfinder (D&D 3.5E fork).

I'm glad (but not surprised) not being the only one here.

My current character is a untalented half orc bard with huge knowledge who was forced to be a barbarian.
It's an interesting combination and fun to play.

age+=1

!rant but history

I found this old micro controller: The TMS 1000 (from 1974). The specs: 100-400kHz clock speed, 4-bit architecture, 1kB ROM and 32 bytes (!) RAM. According to data sheet, you sent the program to TI and they gave you a programmed controller back - updates to the once upload program were impossible, but an external memory chip was possible.

I'm glad we have computers with more processing power and storage (and other languages than assembler) - on the other hand it enforced good debugging before deployment and and efficient code.

Data sheet: http://bitsavers.org/components/ti/...

After moving, I don't have DSL yet so I have to use mobile data to get internet access. Additionally I had to finish a freelancing job. In Germany you have one of the most expensive and least reliable mobile networks in europe.

I had to upload my develpoed software to a remote server

So I suddenly was sent back in time. A single call would have disrupted the download (I can't use internet and phone at the same time, might be a phone issue). While my phone has "high speed" volume left and showed at least HSPA, but I still, the upload rate was prehistoric:

Interesting password recommendation here...

Translation:
- A form with to fields: Surname and password.
- Below the form is a text: "For signup please enter your name and a password (e.g. your email address). With your name and password you can change your data anytime and may get access to the memberlist."

Bonus: There is a "help"-button (outside of the cutting) which even *recommends* the use of the email-address as the password!
Extra bonus: The password field is a normal text one.

IF THE EMAIL ADDRESS HAS TO BE SUBMITTED, WHY NOT JUST ADD ANOTHER FIELD OR AT LEAST LABEL THE FIELD CORRECTLY!

Update: After this form, you get to another form, to enter you email address...

Not only Windows can show this "strange" error messages: Today I got this beauty while importing an SQL-dump.

(Translation: "Error on import: error on statement #1: not an error. Execution will be aborted and the db will be reset.")

Relatively often the OpenLDAP server (slapd) behaves a bit strange.

While it is little bit slow (I didn't do a benchmark but Active Directory seemed to be a bit faster but has other quirks is Windows only) with a small amount of users it's fine. slapd is the reference implementation of the LDAP protocol and I didn't expect it to be much better.

Some years ago slapd migrated to a different configuration style - instead of a configuration file and a required restart after every change made, it now uses an additional database for "live" configuration which also allows the deployment of multiple servers with the same configuration (I guess this is nice for larger setups). Many documentations online do not reflect the new configuration and so using the new configuration style requires some knowledge of LDAP itself.
It is possible to revert to the old file based method but the possibility might be removed by any future version - and restarts may take a little bit longer. So I guess, don't do that?

To access the configuration over the network (only using the command line on the server to edit the configuration is sometimes a bit... annoying) an additional internal user has to be created in the configuration database (while working on the local machine as root you are authenticated over a unix domain socket). I mean, I had to creat an administration user during the installation of the service but apparently this only for the main database...

The password in the configuration can be hashed as usual - but strangely it does only accept hashes of some passwords (a hashed version of "123456" is accepted but not hashes of different password, I mean what the...?) so I have to use a single plaintext password... (secure password hashing works for normal user and normal admin accounts).

But even worse are the default logging options: By default (atleast on Debian) the log level is set to DEBUG. Additionally if slapd detects optimization opportunities it writes them to the logs - at least once per connection, if not per query. Together with an application that did alot of connections and queries (this was not intendet and got fixed later) THIS RESULTED IN 32 GB LOG FILES IN ≤ 24 HOURS! - enough to fill up the disk and to crash other services (lessons learned: add more monitoring, monitoring, and monitoring and /var/log should be an extra partition). I mean logging optimization hints is certainly nice - it runs faster now (again, I did not do any benchmarks) - but ther verbosity was way too high.

The worst parts are the error messages: When entering a query string with a syntax errors, slapd returns the error code 80 without any additional text - the documentation reveals SO MUCH BETTER meaning: "other error", THIS IS SO HELPFULL... In the end I was able to find the reason why the input was rejected but in my experience the most error messages are little bit more precise.

!dev
So I finally registered on this great community to rant about something - now I forgot what to rant about.

Instead have a picture of Ubuntu Mate showing an unrealistic battery time.