Thursday December 29th, 2011 02:47 am (UTC)
Today I want to share two interesting projects with you I took from the congress on the second day.
The first one is called “social swarm”. It is an initiative with the goal to choose and adapt one of the may open distributed Facebook alternatives and bring it to the masses.
The second one is called “secure share”, which is one of the most promising of those mentioned alternatives. Opposed to others they do not just provide a decentralized server network but aim to create a secure P2P communication system for data exchange. On top of this a social network could be created.
You can find the project pages here:
- http://wiki.socialswarm.net/
- http://secushare.org/
I briefly want to share my opinion without going too much into technical or political details.
Both projects are very promising and ambitious. I especially like the idea that we can only succeed if we go for a single solution. This is one of the reasons why open projects often fail in favor of proprietary systems. Also the secure share technical approach is well designed with current and upcoming problems mind. Whats missing is something in-between.
The main problem I see is to find out what people really want and need. What could be reasons for them to try a new social network or even switch from Facebook. Political as well as technical approaches must be based on this. I think they are on a good track, but still far away from a complete concept.
And the second one is the practicability. The technical approach must be usable with current technology. Over the last years you could see a big hype in web-applications and web-service based architectures. The reason for this is that you get HTTP communication through almost all NAT-Firewalls and Proxies. In fact it is desirable to come back to real peer-to-peer communication. But unfortunately this is not possible with our current infrastructure and we cannot rely on IPv6 and a (possible) law on net neutrality. But this is another story…
Nevertheless I hope those projects will very soon be able to come up with something to try out and get visible in the media. I would love to participate, but will only remain as a passive watcher, since other projects are more important for me.
Category Technical 
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Wednesday December 28th, 2011 04:55 pm (UTC)
My first impression of the congress was just a bit amusing.
On any other conference you would be handed a leaflet or something, containing the schedule, locations and all necessary information. This congress is different. After entering the conference hall you are completely lost.
The walls are full of scattered information that do not mean much for me, but I was searching for a schedule without avail..
Some of the rooms are named with letters and numbers, the talk rooms are just numbers and there are no direction signs at all. Some rooms have additonal internal names which are not posted on the schedule but are more visible on the door than the others.
The only source of some information is the wiki (also lacking a map). But it is really hard to get connection to the Wifi and the wiki was half of the first day down.
Well, this gently reminds me of the sources I have to read and change all the time. Noone can deny what kind of people organized this conference. 
But since I’m a software developer myself, I found ways to get acquainted with this code – sorry – conference.
Nevertheless, the talks where really great and exceeded my expectations. The main topic seems to be data security as well as surveillance. The session about the “Bundestrojaner” was fun as well as very informative. The group who analysed this piece of software gave an insight into their findings compared with the current legal situation.
They showed some of the history of the “Bundestrojaner” and proved why popular statements of politicians regarding this topic are obviously wrong.
Some talks also showed some really huge problems rising with surveillance and shows how they are already practice in germany.
Another presentation went into some opposite direction.
It was about how can you guess the spoken words in a Skype conversation without hacking the connection just by profiling the packet lengths. Eavesdropping at a very new level.
Category Technical No Comments »
Monday December 26th, 2011 11:33 pm (UTC)
Shame on me – I haven’t written a single post in my english blog for almost one year.
Well, there were not so much noticeable things this year. OFS is proceeding good. Not because of me but thanks to Peter who has improved support for NFS and cleaned up the code a bit.
Nevertheless, one of this years real highlights is just about to take place. I checked in to a Hostel in Berlin today to visit the Chaos Communication Congress starting tomorrow. I’m very keen on what’s ahead, since this is the first time I visit this congress – and the first time I visit Berlin.
Category Computer, Technical No Comments »
Friday December 24th, 2010 04:11 pm (UTC)
Photo by mightymightymatze
An exciting year is coming to its end.
I started being part of an ISO committee on behalf of AUDI and did a presentation about OFS at Linux Kongress, one of the most popular Linux conferences. These are just two of the opportunities I had this year. Another highlight again was the WillowCreek Kongress in Karlsruhe, where I was part of the technical production team. And I already got a invitation to join them again in 2011 and I accepted. I’m also very happy that I had the possibility to play music with many different people and varios bands.
With the end of this year my time as guitarist at the YouthEvent band draws to a close. YouthEvent will be discontinued next year and I decided not to change to one of the worship teams at JesusCentrum. It was a hard decision, but I’m sure something new is waiting for me.
It was a great year altogether and I’m happy to see what the next year is going to carry.
I want to wish all readers of by blog a blessed Christmas and a successful year 2011.
What would it be if Jesus were born these days?
Have a nice holiday with this modern story of the nativity.
Category Non-technical, Technical No Comments »
Monday September 20th, 2010 11:36 pm (UTC)
For a few weeks now I am participating in a working group of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). This group specifies an extension to the existing standard document ISO 22900 part 2.
At EB (Elektrobit) I am primarily engaged in vehicle diagnostics. Particularly in network protocols and vehicle bus systems such as CAN which are used for communication between a PC and the car. To abstract vehicle architecture and diagnostic protocols from the diagnostic application, a set of software components called the MCD-System has been created. The ISO 22900-2 document is about a software component called D-PDU-API which will be used as the bottom most layer of this architecture. As the name implies this is an API for constructing PDUs of Diagnostic protocols. Beside providing implementation of all relevant protocols it serves as an abstraction to the hardware interfaces.
As part of an international standard for vehicle diagnostics, called WWH-OBD (World Wide Harmonized On-Board-Diagnostics), Ethernet is being adopted as diagnostic interface in cars replacing the CAN bus. For this purpose the Diagnostics over Internet Protocol (DoIP) is being specified as ISO 13400. My college who is engaged in the respective ISO working group wrote an article about this standard on the EB tresos blog.
The purpose of the working group I am associated with is to bring this new DoIP standard into the D-PDU-API standard.
Working in a standardization committee is a new but great experience for me. We made good progress in the last weeks and it’s interesting to share knowledge and discuss highly technical details together with other experts in the area of vehicle diagnostics to prepare a document which finally will become an international standard.
Category Automotive No Comments »
Saturday August 7th, 2010 12:59 pm (UTC)
During some googeling yesterday I found that Linux New Media has translate our article about OFS into spanish language.
Here is the PDF: http://www.linux-magazine.es/issue/50/040-043_Offline50.pdf
Category Linux, OFS No Comments »
Thursday July 1st, 2010 05:16 pm (UTC)
I’m very happy to inform you, that I will speak at this year’s Linux-Kongress.
Some weeks ago I submitted an abstract for a talk about OFS. This week an e-mail from the chair of the program committee arrived, telling me that the proposal had been accepted.
Together with Prof. Trommler and Samuel Walz, student from the last OFS project group, I will prepare the paper as well as the presentation.
The Linux-Kongress will take place at the Georg-Simon-Ohm University – the home of OFS. You will find more information such as programm and abstracts on their website http://www.linux-kongress.org/
Our talk is scheduled for 1:30 pm on the second day of talks and here is the link to the abstract.
Now there’s much work ahead, but I’m looking forward to this event.
Category Linux, OFS No Comments »
Friday June 4th, 2010 03:46 pm (UTC)
Typo3 Backend
A few weeks ago I finished my first website based on the Typo3 CMS. The page of CJB (Christian Youth-alliance in Bavaria), which I took over webmaster position several years ago needed a complete redesign and in conjunction with this I decided to apply a content management system.
I’ve taken some time zu evaluate some others like Joomla!, CMS Made Simple and Redaxo but eventually got stuck with Typo3. I must admit it’s not that fast to learn but once you got the overall concept (and this is enough) you have a very powerfull system.
The software design of Typo3 is one of the clearest I’ve ever seen. Everything seems monolithic to me and it’s extremely easy to make it doing what you want. read on »
Category Web No Comments »
