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I fixed a small bug in the simulator of thesnark. With that, the simulator shows that the defense against the Pitch Black Attack works: A small number of attackers can no longer kill parts of the keyspace and can also no longer make certain parts of the keyspace inaccessible.

Attackers can still limit the convergence of the network towards a reproduction of the small world network, but since we know that Opennet works quite well with 30% backoff, this limited convergence should suffice for efficient routing.

Python is the first language I loved. I dreamt in Python, I planned in Python, I thought I would never need anything else.

  Download “Python to Guile” (pdf)

You can read more about this on the Mercurial mailing list.

 - Free: html | pdf
   preview edition
   (complete)

Yes, this means that with Guile I will contribute to a language developed via Git, but it won’t be using a proprietary platform.

I just spent half an hour on finding the references for this, so I can spend 5 minutes providing it for others on the web.

I wanted to name Transcom Regions in my plots by passing their names to the command-line tool, but I only had their region-number and a lookup dictionary in Python. To avoid tampering with the tool, I needed to translate the dictionary to a bash function, and thanks to the case statement it was much simpler than I had expected.

This is the original dictionary:

So you get excited when you hear about surviving a power-outage during updates without a hitch and you want to give Guix a try — but woes, you only have 5 minutes of time?

Fear not, that’s enough to get it up and running — all the way to per-user environments and package install as non-priviledged user!

The instructions here are from the official docs, specialized for a GNU Linux host and cut to what I need in a working system.

as user:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/guix/guix-binary-0.8.3.x86_64-linux.tar.xz

py2guile is a book I wrote about Python and Guile Scheme. It’s selling at 14.95 €](https://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/47692) for the printed softcover.

To fight the new german data retention laws, you can get the ebook gratis: Just install Freenet, then the following links work:

• py2guile.epub
• py2guile.mobi
• py2guile.pdf
• py2guile-0.9.0-fn.tar.gz

Escape total surveillance and get an ebook about the official GNU extension language for free today!

This is the biggest news item for free culture and free software in the past 5 years: The creativecommons attribution sharealike license is now one-way compatible to the GPL — see the message from creativecommons and from the Free Software Foundation.

• Blender rigs under cc by-sa which use libraries under GPL are safe against suing, even if a Blender code contributor goes crazy,
• 3D models like the self replicating 3D printer RepRap and libre hardware designs under cc by-sa and GPL can be combined,
• GPL-compatible Free Software can utilize all content from the Wikipedia and
• On the personal side: we can merge art from Ryzom and Battle for Wesnoth and use both in the Pirate Party RPG.

Some license compatibility legalese might sound small, but the impact of this is hard to overestimate.

Python is the first language I loved. I dreamt in Python, I planned in Python, I thought I would never need anything else.

 - Free: html | pdf
 - Softcover: 14.95 €
   with pdf, epub, mobi
 - Source: download
   free licensed under GPL

Australia gets mandatory data retention — with unchecked access by roughly any local or federal police agency and “Any other agency the Attorney General publicly declares”. (So much for separation of powers)

And they can use that in court.

→ » Australia: Now is the time to go dark « ←

Dear Australians: This is what we have been talking about the past 10 years. The tech for confidential communication might still be cumbersome to use, but you now need it.

If you want to use Freenet for that, I’ll gladly help you set it up.

I repeatedly stumbled over needing bibtex entries for the IPCC reports. So I guess, others might stumble over that, too. Here I share my bibtex entries for some parts of the IPCC reports.¹

IPCC 1990 WG1 (physical science basis)

@BOOK{IPCC1990Science,
  title = {Climate Change 1990 The Science of Climate Change},
  publisher = {The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change},
  year = {1996},
  editor = {J.T. Houghton and G.J. Jenkins and J.J. Ephraums},
  author = {IPCC Working Group I}
}

Chris Double (bluishcoder) changed his main website to be served directly from Freenet:

• bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-static-websites.html

Thanks to this, the same article is now available from my inproxy.

And, naturally, from Freenet:

USK@1ORdIvjL2H1bZblJcP8hu2LjjKtVB-rVzp8mLty~5N4,8hL85otZBbq0geDsSKkBK4sKESL2SrNVecFZz9NxGVQ,AQACAAE/bluishcoder/20/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-static-websites.html

On 2015-08-27, Researchers from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology reported that in 100 reproduction studies, only “47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size” (RPP SCIENCE 2015, an overview of the results is available in Scientific American; in german from DLF Forschung Aktuell).

I take this worrying result as cue to describe current challenges to scientific publishing and measures to address them — including reproduction experiments, and what to do if they contest previously published and referenced work.

For or about scientific work.

After 4 weeks of downtime my sites are online again.

Written in the discussion about a pull request for Freenet.

When I look up a commit, I’m not searching for prose. I’m searching for short snippets of information I need. If they are long-winded explanations, I am unlikely to even read them.

To understand this, please imagine coming back home, getting off the bike and taking 15 minutes to look at the most recent pull-request.

Samantha Cristoforetti reads the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the International Space Station

This is the world we live in: The Hitchhikers Guide read from Space.

If you don’t get goosebumps just thinking about it, envision it again: The old visions are becoming real step by step, and now those who actually venture in space read the works of visionaries from their temporary home beyond the atmosphere.

New traditions form from a reality which still seems

How E-Mail with GnuPG could hide when you talk, where you talk from and what you talk about.

or in technical terms:

E-Mail with perfect forward security, hidden subject and masked date using GnuPG and better frontends.

Update 2018: Some of these ideas are becoming real and widespread now with pΞp (pretty-easy-privacy) and the autocrypt-standard.

# freenet -> local
hg clone freenet://ArneBab/life-repo
# local -> freenet
hg clone life-repo real-life
hg clone real-life freenet://ArneBab/real-life
# send pull request
cd real-life
hg fn-pull-request --wot ArneBab/life-repo
(enter message)
# check for pull-requests
cd ../life-repo
sleep 1800 # (wait for confidential delivery)
hg fn-check-notifications --wot ArneBab

If you like this, please don’t only click like or +1, but share it with everyone who could be interested. The one who knows best how to reach your friends is you — and that’s how it should be.

Update 2024: Infocalypse is still recovering from Python 3 breakage. Most of it works again, but there may be rough edges left. Contributions to fix these are very welcome: hg.sr.ht/~arnebab/infocalypse or github.com/hyphanet/infocalypse.

→ New Link: draketo.de/kreatives/strong-kerrigan ←

When you win Starcraft 2 Heart of the Swarm in brutal difficulty without losing Kerrigan even once, you get an ending with a truly strong Kerrigan.²³⁴

Clearly you are my greatest failure. Now at long last, you will die.

Again Mengsk activates the Xel'Naga artifact. As the lightning from the artifact tears at her flesh and cracks every part of her body, Kerrigan rasps an answer:

A religious leader is nothing more than a media-star who managed to convince people that the tale, in which he or she is special, is actually true.

Just like aristocrats managed to convince people that what their ancestors did gives them the right to control the lives of other people.

And like the rich convince people that money gives them the right to control a larger part of the world than others.

Afraid that the NSA could steal your DickPic? Freenet to the rescue!

(mirror via Freenet)

• Install Freenet
• Connect to your friends
• Share your DickPic (or anything else you want to keep private)

I asked myself: Are the most popular articles on my site the ones I like best?

Morning has broken
        beyond repair

the words are spoken
        now do you dare

to absolve of the error made
or will you die in your own shade?

Bitcoin is often treated as a haven for black market buyers and people who want to avoid illegitimate laws. However 3 simple steps would suffice to mostly obliterate Bitcoin for black market usage of ordinary users.

Breaking Bitcoin

Three steps to break Bitcoin for small scale anonymous usage: