When I started in SEO business almost have a year ago, I have been shunt into Matt Cutts, head of Google's webspam team. Reading his blog articles, i did not only get insights into Google, but also in his person. I got to know, that he starts challenges which would endure 30 days, usually. For one of those, he decided to switch from Windows to Ubuntu, and he eventually he kept using it. The latest challenge was to replace his iPhone with Android based Nexus One, and he does not seem to roll back, too.

In our time, when everything is, goes and is going to be more and more web based, my impression is that many users do not think about where they put their data, how secure the provider is and which control they have. Especially with the rise of software-as-a-service models you need to be sure to know what happens with your data, somewhere in the cloudy somewhat. Who is you email provider and who can read your mails? Are there Backdoors? Should i upload my pictures to flickr? Where can i safely send private and possibly sensitive messages?

Meanwhile it is the day before yesterday, when the KDE Community released KDE SC 4.4 and yesterday, when Kubuntu published the packages. It is great to see how the desktop environment matures and still getting new and terrific features. One of the finest features – i think – is window tabbing. It is as simply as that: you pick some single applications and group them in one window.

Actually, i enabled it only few hours ago, but generally i am thinking of grouping applications for a certain, specific task, but also grouping applications for a superordinate purpose. Like communication. In the following screenshot i arranged all real-time and micro-message programs, which are Konversation (IRC), Choqok (Identi.ca), and Kopete (Jabber and stuff). Great thing is that if I open a chat window in Kopete it is sorted automatically (like JR).

Can this be? The fourth day now? Time is going much too fast. Anyway, this day was a great final for this excellent event.

Relevance discussion in German Wikipedia

Two core Wikipedia contributors have been invited to take part in a debate in the long running and currently peaking relevance discussion in Wikipedia. They were Kurt Jansson, associated with exclusionists, and Mathias Schindler, associated with inclusionists. And additionally there was Tim Weber, founder of the Levitation-project, which aims to provide personal and VCS-based Wikipedias. Beside them, Martin Haase and Fefe were in the podium as well as Andreas Bogk who did the moderation.

Today was a seat fighting day, because the year reviews (especially the Fnord) as well as the lectures about DECT and PKI are hot spots, which also lead to the strategic decision to go to the Manufacturing-talk and save a seat for Fnord (absolutely wise decision).

Review of 2009, Part I

Todays upbeat was the review of the passing year 2009 in Chaos Computer Club's point of view. Andy Müller-Maguhn, Constanze Kurz, Frank Rieger and Martin Haase gave a chronological overview of the remarkable events of this year. Besides events as Hacking at Random and the first performance of SIGINT in Cologne, many law topics has been pointed at, e.g. the adjudgement regarding voting machines or the enactment regarding the voting pen of Hamburg. Another sad point, which did not affect CCC directly, was the dramatic suicide of the 20year old, who crawled publicy available data from schuelerVZ. In this case some background details have been mentioned.

Somehow i caught a slight cold yesterday, but that does not lower my anticipation for this second day. Just like yesterday i'd like to share my experience of this day with you. Here it goes:

Voting Machines

Kathleen Wynn showed the audience a video of reports and interviews regarding the irregularities in US vote in 2004 and the general problems with voting machines. She concluded, that in US has been a wall between citizens and the elections and compared it to the Berlin wall. She points, that USA failed to realizise reasonable changes with the use of voting machines in contrast to Germany and calls for help.