Is it me or are these colourful web sites with their round edges spreading everywhere? Those sites with cute names ending with double-Os or at least with double-Os inmidst the name. Here's a new one: www.atoolo.de where you get a virtual desktop for free and some applications running on that quasi-OS. Nice idea, but I'd never store my letters or tax declarations on servers I don't own (*own*, not "0wn" :-)

StudiVZ, Germany's biggest dating portal for students student Web2.0 community site was obliged to do a password reset for all accounts, because hackers were able to read various account data. Offline for a couple of hours (To update their system? Watch the degree of this catastrophic event?), they're now online again. Since the site makers improved their security measurements I just hope that their improvements flow directly into the development of SchülerVZ.

This is Don Alphonso's recommendation for Shanghai's stock exchange today. The NEMAX, to be recalled, was Germany's celebrated stock index for New Economy companies that deceased in 2004. Financial scandals aren't a privilege for the Western world only, so if they want the full Monty, they should have a dance like we had a few years ago.

...is Firefox, of course! But did you know that it's also the best porn browser (link is work-safe)? To be honest, I didn't know until now. You live and learn.

Alcatel-Lucent sues Microsoft for breaching their MP3 patents and wins. This decision will come expensive to Microsoft because they have to pay an absurd amount of 1.5 billion $ - though they licensed MP3 from German research institute Fraunhofer.
Lessons learned: forget all these emails with their "get rich quickly" receipes. All you have to do is to invest in software patents. You may use six main strategies:

• Be quaggy: invent a "useful machine" that may save the world, heal the sick ones, brings peace on earth.


• The submarine trick: claim as many patents as possible and use dummies to conceal your patent strategy.


• The World Formula Patent: Make your patent specification as complex as possible and create freedom for large-scale interpretation.


• Avoid any definite solution. Be as indefinite as possible.


• Don't use terms that everybody else uses. Be creative and call a keyboard a "haptic device". This will keep your patent undercover and you can strike back when somebody really invents the keyboard.


• Let your machine do everything to virtually solve any problem in the world.

Sometimes I'm just astounded. The search term "virtual printer" gets listed on the first Google result page. Pretty steep! This software had its last update three years ago!

Perhaps it was the SL model that gave a brilliant consultant the idea that it would be a cool idea for Mercedes Benz to have a branch office in Second Life. Like every other company has its subsidiary there. Considering racing games way cooler than a 3D model of some buildings and cars, I've never felt encouraged to buy the car that I've driven in virtual reality. But maybe I just don't get it.
"Oh Lord, don't you buy me a Mercedes Benz..."

It's always been a special thing to be a German. Our ancestors ruined the Roman empire, we demolished the holy land in the time of the crusades and depredated Constantinople, we fought against and than later we destroyed Europe and million lives during two world wars.
Now it's about so-called killer games. In order to protect our youth, german politicians try to ban censored software completely. A lot of articles have been written about the pros and cons of this measure and I don't want to sum it up here.
Dear politicians: aggression needs more than a "killer game". There's a big transition from playing a game to killing people. Blaming games for the recent school attacks is just another example for the superficial treatment of a complex topic and nothing but a populist measure.
An interesting amendment of the proposed law to ban aggressive games would be a complete prohibition of rental of indexed / censored movies, including porn and action flicks. Goodbye, video stores (at least those for adults only)!
O-kay: what's next? When will they control people's mail for unwanted material?

Edit: Here's a very good (german) blog discussing this topic.

Moving to a new domicile is a teacher in humility. Consider cardboard boxes, those boxes you put all your things in. There are good and bad boxes, most of them being very bad. We took relatively cheap ones and most of them failed under weigth of our books (the Mabuse library consists of several hundreds of books). Since almost 50% of all our boxes went havoc we now know that there is no better cardboard box than that offered by transportation companies. They're thick, higher than broad, they won't bend and they're virtually indestructible. Don't buy those cheap ones! You've been warned!

Today's lesson: if you ever want to install a VPN on a Windows box make sure that you have a running TAPI service. Otherwise, you'll see disabled radio buttons on the various wizard dialogues. Took me quite some time to fix this.

George Ou writes about a possible exploit of MS Vista's speech recognition system, describing a scenario where spoken words played by an application (or web site) were able to engage the OS's voice recognition system. So if your computer reacts on spoken words - beware. Don't use these:
"Shutdown."
"Encrypt / Wipe / Format disk."
"Send mail to all known users."
"Quit, don't save."
"Activate Windows."
"Change Password to #%+&$#-§$)."
"Switch on web cam. Publish."
"Make share c$, allow for everyone."
"Run http://badwebsite.com/badsoftware.exe".
"Say: I must not let my Windows speak!"