For a very long time, this blog was run by WordPress 2.0.x – this was the current version when I started it, and I kept updating it for a while, but after I built the captcha, I stopped doing so. The reason is that I implemented my captcha as a direct hack in WordPress’ sources, not as a plugin, not even a my-hacks.php file. In the meantime, I some security holes appeared: I frequently found invisible spam injected into my posts. I have never found the actual hole through which they did this, but I disabled everything that could be problematic (all this Web2.0ey XMLRPC crap, for example). In particular, I excluded all hosts from a certain spam-friendly provider from my site. This helped a lot, until last week, when I suddenly found that my Windows 7 review has not only been altered, but replaced by invisible spam.

This was the point when I finally had enough – I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.7 yesterday. To my great surprise, the test transition, performed on a local copy of the site, worked absolutely flawlessly. I could even re-use my theme without changes, which was my greatest source of fear. On the real server, there was still the little problem of the PHP memory limit which was too low for WP 2.7 (why on earth do they use more than 8 MiB, even without plugins and locales?!), but this has been fixed with a simple mail to my friendly webspace provider (thanks, Rafayel!).

Everything worked, except the captcha, which I reimplemented as a proper WordPress plugin today and activated just now. By the way, in the 22 hours without the captcha, I already got over a dozen spam posts. Sigh. Let’s see how long this installment of the site works :)

Sorry, but this post has been vandalized by spammers that somehow altered the post text. If anyone has a saved backup of this post, please give it to me.

I want to apologize for the lack of posts here. I know that many people want to know the outcome of the Apple thing and the status of the two jeopardized programs. So, to finally break the much too long period of silence, here’s the current status of the projects:

The presentation program is online again under its new name Impressive: http://impressive.sourceforge.net. Currently, there’s only a rebranded 0.10.2 version, but I hope to move forward with a new version in the first quarter of 2009.

The iPod management tool has been renamed to rePear: http://repear.sourceforge.net/. Along with the rename, the brand-new and much improved version 0.4 has been released.

I find it unfortunate and unnecessary that the issue needed to be settled involving layers and lots of money. It would have been easier for both sides (and certainly more civilized) to simply write an e-mail to state the problem. I am willing to co-operate. You can still call your lawyers if I don’t comply, but I don’t see any reason why there should be money involved from the start.

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The short answer: Because Apple didn’t like the names of some of my programs.

The long answer

A few years ago, a fellow student and I had a great idea for a nice, effect-rich presentation program. We combined my own nickname and the name of a another popular presentation program to form the name of that program. The program itself did very well and became quite popular. That was possibly enough for Apple, the company who produces the presentation program whose name we took as a baseline, so they decided to send me a cease and desist letter. The result of this is that the program has to be renamed.

In the meantime, I also started another project: I bought an Apple iPod nano music player and since I’m not satisfied with iTunes, I wrote a program that made it possible to use that nice MP3 player without that not-so-nice-software. I gave it a name that was derived from a normal english word, except that there was one upper-case letter where a lower-case letter should have been. That might have been too much for Apple’s legal department, though, because they threatened to sue me because of this, too. That’s why this program also needs to be renamed.

In late 2008, the programs have been renamed to Impressive and rePear.

It could have been a nice evening today, but to my great surprise, I found a not-so-nice e-mail in my Inbox – and at the same time, my parents found the same thing as snail mail in their mailbox at home.

To cut a long story short: Apple Inc. sent me (via a German lawyer) a »cease and desist« letter. They believe that the names CENSORED and CENSORED-s (sic!) violate their trademarks »Keynote« and »iTunes«.
Frankly, I do have a little bit of understanding in the first case. In fact, I saw it coming. I couldn’t expect that the uppercase letter »J« I put in the middle of the name, radically changing both the look and the pronounciation, was enough to stop Apple from sueing me, or could I?
The other case is a little bit more awkward because there simply is no such thing as CENSORED-s. I have written a program with a name that looks like the one they’re accusing me to use, but there is no ‘s’ at the end of the name! In the first two pages of the lengthy mail the lawyers sent me, they even did spell it correctly. But then, in all places that really matter, like the cease and desist form itself (»Unterlassungserklärung«) and the explanation why they think I’m violating their trademark, they constantly write the name with the additional ‘s’. So, in fact, even if I would sign that letter, I would commit myself not to use a product name I never used! (That flaw aside, I also don’t think that there’s a sufficient amount of similarity between »iTunes« and CENSORED.)

To make things worse, they chose an insane amount in controversy (»Gegenstandswert«) of 50,000 € each in both cases. That seems to be quite a lot, considering that both programs in questions are FOSS, meaning that I did neither pay nor earn anything for making them. Out of these 100,000 € in total, they compute a fee (»Geschäftsgebühr«) of nearly 1,800 € I’d have to pay if I sign the form.
Also, they set up a ridiculously short time frame to sign it: If I don’t send it back and pay the fee until 2008-06-26 (this Thursday), they’ll likely be sueing me. Mind you, I got the letter this evening (2008-06-22), because they sent it late Friday (2008-06-20, the e-mail is dated 16:09) and I was neither at home nor did I have internet access this weekend. That’s 6 days of time, but since it’s around a weekend, it’s effectively only 3.

The great question is now, what could I do? I can’t just sign the letter and pay the bill, because it’s factually wrong. On the other hand, if I take myself a lawyer, it might be too late to change anything in the matter and would maybe double the fee (assuming that my own lawyer would also use the ridiculous 100,000 € value as a baseline for his/her payment). Seems as if I’m screwed either way.

The only thing that’s clear is that both my presentation program and one of my iPod tools will be renamed soon. If you have a nice new non-Appleish name for these projects, please let me know :)
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When I wanted to watch an episode of The A-Team in TV today, I was surprised by a black screen instead of Hannibal Smith and B.A. Baracus. What happened? At first, I thought the TV software couldn’t cope with the graphics driver I updated today to get a specific game working (we’re talking about Windows here, as you might have guessed :). I became skeptical when the same problem happened to another TV viewing program and even the Linux-based external DVB-T tuner box I have. Something has been wrong with my antenna feed.

Long story short, it turned out to be (most likely) a power outage in the attic where the antenna amplifier is located. For reason’s I’m not going to discuss here, there was no way to fix the problem in time, so I had to live without TV for a day – which would not have been a problem, if it hadn’t been for the boxing match between Henry Maske and Virgil Hill tonight. I really wanted to see this, but since there was no way to make the antenna system working again, I resigned. I phoned my father at home to have him record the fight, and while we were at it, he gave some tips on how to temporarily solve the problem. You know, stuff like »use some uninsulated wire«. Since I don’t have any uninsulated wire in my apartment, I tried the other suggestion: Use the antenna cable and put a screwdriver into it (this works because the center of the plug has a little hole in it). To my great surprise, this actually worked! After some experimentation, I found that the optimal position of this »poor man’s antenna« is close to the window. So I fiddled around a bit and hung the weird construction somehow into the window blinds. The whole thing works like a charm and now I can watch Maske’s (supposed) comeback fight in perfect quality even though the antenna feed is broken.

From December 27th to 29th, I’ve been in Karlsruhe-Durlach and attended The Ultimate Meeting 2006. It was again an awesome (and quite successful :) party, although the number and quality of the entries was somewhat below expectations. Read more …

For the following two weeks, a little guest is living here in my apartment: Karl-Friedrich. He is a small (20 cm) and cuddly plush penguin, and he’s here »on vacation« from his two owners, schrd and drosera. He seems to like traveling around in Germany: After he’s been in various places in Chemnitz and Leipzig, he was in Halle and at the Baltic Sea. Now he’s coming to my place and, of course, blogs about it:

K.-F. bei KJ (German)

Today’s long-awaited release of Ubuntu 6.10 »Edgy Eft« was a good opportunity for me to restore the inactive Linux installation on my main workstation. This computer mainly runs Windows and since the installation of Vista RC1, the experimental Linux installation there was inaccessible. In my distribution tests carried out for the LinuxTag, Ubuntu always was among the top three distros, so installing the newest and coolest fresh release seemed like the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the installer is so severely broken that I didn’t even manage to get the thing on my hard disk …
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Almost no one actually reads my blog, but spammers seem to like it anyway – I get from 10 to 50 spam comments each day. It could be worse, you might say, but nevertheless I grew tired of moderating all these comments and decided to do something about it. So I implemented a captcha – but a special one. The normal »type the text that is contained in this image« class of captchas IMHO is broken by design – either it’s so simple that OCR bots will easily get past it, or it’s hard to implement and even harder to read, so that regular human visitors will have problems recognizing the badly twisted letters. Also, an image-based captcha won’t work for blind people. Audio captchas are even worse, because it requires the user to active Flash or some other dubious plugin or even download a file and listen to it, which may be a problem if there are no speakers connected to the PC or you are in an environment that requires silent operation (e.g. a library). In other words, captchas suck.
This is why I chose another approach: A text captcha. It poses a simple, plain-text English question about basic common knowledge things that should be sufficiently easy to answer. Or, to put it another way: If you are able to read and understand the post and write a comment on it, you are surely able to answer the captcha question, too.
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