Apparently, after stating that ‘this was his way of life’, the municipal office didn’t see no problem with it, and issued a passport an ID-card.

This is funny as fuck, because they thought of these new rules when you want a passport an ID card, one of the idiot rules is ‘you may not smile and your face has to be visible completely’ and some stupid shit like that. All because the white christian facist assholes in the government wanted the burqa banned…

As I said many times, it’s one thing to think of a new law… but if it’s impossible to enforce it why fucking bother. It would save us all so much money, time and useless effort.

Kudos to this guy for trying this… and succeeding!

It started with what we thought was a very obvious statement. We claimed on our website that
the Nedap was just another computer, and that as such it could just as easily be programmed to play
chess or to lie about the election results. We didn’t think more of it until Jan Groenendaal, placed a
document 9 on the Nedap/Groenendaal website to talk about our website “Wij vertrouwen
stemcomputers niet”. In it, he says: “[...] And with regard to the claim that our machine can play
chess: I’d like to see that demonstrated”.

So, obviously, these guys did it:

So obviously, one of our first goals now that we had access to the device was to make it play chess. Apart from proving our point, programming it to do this would also confirm that we knew everything we needed to know about the hardware before getting into the election fraud business. After having learned roughly how the hardware worked we used a gcc 68000 crosscompiler to create a Nedap IO-library containing functions to initialize the system, write data to the display, read the keyboard, and write debug messages to the UART. Together with newlib, a small clib implementation, we then managed to compile and run Tom Kerrigan’s Simple Chess Program (TSCP) 10. This was non-trivial only because we had to squeeze out quite a few tables to make it run using only the available 16 kBytes of RAM. Getting the chess pieces to magnetically attach (the keyboard is mounted at an angle) was also not that easy since the foil switches are stuck to a plastic base. We ended up using using 2 and 5 Eurocent coins underneath the paper, taped such that we could press the underlying foil switches with the edge of the coin.

Hahahaha, never tempt a technician…

BTW the whole report itself is quite an interesting read if you’re interested in that shit.

Voting Machines, Gaming Consoles

Example usage

• “If Bayer googled then we wouldn’t use the word ‘Aspirin’ for generic pain-killers.”.

Definitions, Humour

It should be obvious when what level should apply.

Humour, Homeland Security, War On Truth, Propaganda, Fear

WEB2DNA will take you website, analyze it, crunch it to little bits and spit it out as a graphic representation of a human DNA.

The brightness of the lines is determined by the importance of the tags in terms of structure.
[..]
Basically a semantically rich site will appear brighter than one with messy old-style code.

Using this website as input, I got this one (clicking on it will load the unscaled image):

Cool stuff because there’s bound to be a few related websites, if you know what I mean: there could be a twin-sister or -brother site of this one.

Interesting…

Web2DNA, Analysis, Rendering

Real funny, that.

Safe computing is impossible if the machines are worked by idiots, right? So why even try? The only way that this can really be guaranteed if you take away all liberties people have on their machine — just like, a truely safe environment can only really be accomplished if everybody’s repressed to the bone.

And that can hardly be called ‘good’, right?

Vista, Microsoft, Virus

Humour, Zune, iPod

Apparently, the kid was with its mother and it badly needed to ‘go’. As there was no public toilet in sight, she let ‘m pee in the bushes. Meanwhile, a cop saw all this happening…

I’m still not sure whether to find this news ‘sad‘, or ‘funny‘…

News, The Netherlands

Now I really wonder what they put in United States marihuana because, hell, I want some of that too!

Marihuana, Drugs, US, Funny

Me, with my nasty ways, couldn’t resist saying `So, where’s the foldable model of the Twin Towers to go with it?‘.

After further Googling I realised that, hell, the security implications of paper craft models are even worse than Google Earth!

One could practice terrorist attacks using various paper models. Heck — they don’t have to limit themselves to planes, either!

Argghh! The sky is falling!

Planes, Papercraft, Terrorism, Humour

Stupid buzzwords.

They forgot to put an extra 0 (zero) in front of those version numbers…

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Humour

Usually they just used generic English terms to name a product (think of things like ‘Windows’, ‘Word’, ‘Office’, etcetera).

But lately this seems to have changed:

Microsoft’s XBugs, err Xbox, the toy with which they hope to conquer all house-holds.

Microsoft’s Wimp, errr, WMP, the supposed (proprietary) JPEG killer. Sure.

Microsoft’s Wanker, errr, OneCare. This should protect you and your data. Sure.

Just by looking at those names, that company seems to have lost its creativity quite some time ago.

Humour, Observations, WMP, OneCare

The fun thing is, although broken, the laptop contains a gem of personal information. Information that this new owner now has happily posted on the internet as a form of pay-back.

The seems genuine, and pretty damn funny.

eBay, Laptops, Humour

Yeah it’s funny.

And yeah — it’s oh-so true…

Biometrics, Vulnerability, Security

Anti-War, Middle-East, Iran, Humour

Telfort, one of the many local mobile communications companies in the Netherlands, together with Radio 538 radio station, are organising this stupid championship.

Wow.

See, the whole idea here is that, somebody on the radio, reads out loud a Dutch sentence, and the first person to have sent this to the text-shortcode will receive the most points. At the end of the run, the winner with the fastest responses will have won.

Of course, none of these idiots realise that cheating is pretty easily done. And neither do they care: they’re are basically only interested to be able to send you billed messages back every time you have attempted to play.

So, if you really really really want to play — you might want to win, right?

I present to you:

How To Cheat And Win The Dutch Texting Championship

One thing: you have to be a fast regular typist. The fun thing is you will definitely be done quicker using a plain QWERTY-keyboard.

Catch my drift? Yes indeed: once you connect your mobile to your laptop or personal computer, and install the software that you can probably download from the vendors’ website, you will be able to type messages on your computer pretty fast. A hell of a lot faster than anyone with a mobile phone with an irritating T9 text-completion solution which, in those important cases, always seem to suggest the wrong words.

Anyways — of course the organisers of this championship wouldn’t really give a fuck how they receive the text-messages. Hell, here in Holland, the response message can cost you between 0 to 130 Eurocents. Believe me, they won’t do this shit for free.

They don’t mind that 150 people may be cheating using a PC.

They only want to send out as much text-messages as they can. (The championship itself runs from the 8th to the 19th of May — that’ll give you an impression how these money hungry wolves have set this shit up.)

Honestly, one shouldn’t even play these text-’games’ and quizes — they are frauds in 9 out of 10 cases anyways.

Fact that it will be impossible for the system to distinguish between a keyboard-typed message or one typed using the keypad on the mobile.

So this championship is all bullshit. Don’t let these suckers sucker you into taking part — they’re really only out for your money and if you win, you’ll be forgotten tomorrow.

The Netherlands, Cheating, Rigging, Fraude, Championship, SMS, Texting, Mobile Phones, Nederlands Kampioenschap SMS

If you know me in real life, you must have heard me say that I have always thought ‘Mozilla‘ to be the ‘Explora Killa‘.

Any self-respecting technician, which ought not to be locked-in to some brand of proprietary crap, should think so, too.

This initiative may be a bit ‘fanatic’ though: I can see Bill’ll say is that these guys are terrorists as they spread fear where, according to Bill, ‘t is not necessary.

But fuck it, I think it’s funny, so spread to word, if you weren’t an active Mozilla-advocate already.

Update 2005-05-02: Fixed the frigging link.
Mozilla, Firefox, Browsers, Internet

Now, of course, that alone isn’t all that interesting, but did you know this?

The Piero Umiliani version of the song was originally featured on the soundtrack to the Swedish soft-porn documentary “Sweden: Hell or Heaven“?

I didn’t…

It took me a while to find the original song, but I found a preview of it on this site if you want to listen to it.

It also seems that a certain Sesame Street version of the same song was shown on TV 2 years before the Muppets version aired. Don’t know if that same Sesame Street ever aired here in the Netherlands, but I only remember the Muppets-version.

Additionally, I also found out that:

Despite one of his previous creations, Big Bird from Sesame Street, having been on the cover of Time magazine the year before, Henson was unable to get funding in the US for his new project, The Muppet Show. Eventually, having made several distress calls, he was finally offered a deal by Lew Grade at ATV, on the understanding that Henson came over and filmed The Muppet Show in the UK.
[..]
And so Henson and his colleagues packed their Muppets in a series of giant trunks, and left sunny California for rainy, recession-hit Britain. That much of the story is fact.

Where it crosses the border into righteous apocrypha, however, is on the night that they landed in the UK, when Henson’s people started unpacking the Muppets. As they celebrated their new project, and discussed ideas for the forthcoming shows, they are said to have carefully removed from the heads of their Muppets a generous supply of the best psychedelic drugs the West Coast had to offer. Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem were devoted to prime West Coast marijuana while Kermit, apparently, had the acid.

It seems nobody can really verify whether the above story is really fact, but it sure would explain where some of their crazy (but funny) ideas came from.

Muppets, History, Music

Honestly, other than compatibility or inoperability issues I can see no real reason why one would want to run Windows XP on it anyways.

Although it must be a pain for them to be stuck in Windows — it sure’s funny.

Boot Camp, Apple, OSX, Windows

(Artwork blatantly stolen from Sean Coon)

Got flag? Got gasoline? Have fun!

Burn The US-Flag Day, Protest, Activism

This tale kicked off yesterday when Tuttle’s city manager Jerry Taylor fired off an angry message to the CentOS staff. Taylor had popped onto the city’s web site and found the standard Apache server configuration boilerplate that appears with a new web server installation. Taylor seemed to confuse this with a potential hack attack on the bustling town’s IT infrastructure.

“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???,” Taylor wrote to CentOS. “Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.”

Few people would initiate a tech support query like this, but these are dangerous times, and Taylor suspected the worst. (Er, but only the world’s most boring hacker would break into a site and then throw up a boilerplate about how to fix the hack.)

CentOS developer Johnny Hughes jumped on the case and tried to explain the situation to Taylor.

“I feel sorry for your city,” he replied in an e-mail. “CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website. . . . Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly.”

That response didn’t go over so well.

“Get this web site off my home page!!!!! It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!,” Taylor responded, clearly excited about the situation and sensing that Bin Laden was near.

Politics and technology can’t keep up with eachother…

Linux, CentOS, Technology, Operating Systems, Idiots

The name of the website is ‘www.hetgroenegoud.info’ (tr: www.thegreengold.info). Yeh, as if that is really going to work. Can these suckers be even more naive? Do they really think that somebody growing marijuana even minds that his name is posted on a website with actually a pretty cool URI? This is, like, getting their name on a billboard — free publicity.

I still think it is silly that a crop can be made illegal — but everything’s fair in love and war on a quest for a monopoly.

Marijuana, Netherlands

First, what can be labelled a ‘sex-toy‘? If one shoves a pencil up his arse, can the person who sold him the pen be prosecuted?

Oh well, I guess dildos and vibrators will probably be sold as ‘massage-sticks’ and nothing fucking changes.

If they’d outlawed dicks in government, now that’d be an interesting concept.

Laws, Mississippi, Dildos, Sex Toys

“You are a donkey, Mr. Bush,” said Chavez, speaking in English on his weekly Sunday broadcast.

“You’re an alcoholic Mr. Danger, or rather, you’re a drunkard,” Chavez said, referring to Bush by a nickname he frequently uses to describe the U.S. president.

A White House report released last week on pre-emptive force in national security described Chavez as a “demagogue” who uses Venezuela’s oil wealth to destabilize democracy in the region.

Of course, the US immediately found ties between Venezuela and Iran.

The current US administration should be terminated, ended, finished. When are the American people going to stand up against this fucking dictator?

Any American refusing to fight against this bastard may be even worse that the bastard himself! YOU ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE THAT CAN MAKE THAT CHANGE!

So change it already…

Bush, Chavez, Venezuela, USA

In the games, players can solicit “services” from prostitutes by driving their cars slowly near them. No sexual acts are in clear visible view, but during the “transaction,” the player regains health and loses money. Though the player cannot actively rape prostitutes in the game, a possible rape is alluded to once during the storyline of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The prostitutes, like every other character, are also subject to homicide at the hands of the protagonist.

So the prostitutes think that this game causes them to be treated more violently.

Excuse me? Get a real fucking job to begin with — also easy money has a price. I’d think getting raped is the least of their worries — what about AIDS and stuff like that? Or they gonna sue then, too? As if that would cure them.

In fact — prostitutes here need to sue those prostitutes because it has never even gotten to my mind to actually do the stuff they do in the game, in real life! What an interesting idea — I’m going out today to rape a prostitute to see if its really what its cranked up to be. (And that, of course, is a joke…)

Games, Ban, Prostitutes