RapLeaf leaks?

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There is a company named RapLeaf, that collects all information it can find around email addresses in the internet, mostly from social-networks and similar sites. Others have already noticed, that at RapLeaf, your personals are public. Yes, it is quite scary what they do. But on the other hand they are right, when they say: “it’s only aggregating what’s out there”. They are showing us the data, that anybody could collect. In fact we should be thankful, that they prove that it is actually very feasible to do, what privacy advocates always warned about: if you correlate all the small digital traces we produce every day, it can become a very powerful and potentially unpleasant data mine.

As for every huge collection of email addresses, one can assume that spammers are, among others, highly interested in that data, although they don’t want to pay for them. So it is not really surprising, that another statement from RapLeafs privacy policies turns out to be very true:

“Despite Rapleaf’s efforts to protect your personal information, there is always some risk that an unauthorized third party may find a way around our security systems”

By some coincidences I found a link, which seems to give access to RapLeafs (probably huge) list of email addresses: http://thebes.drakkenterprises.com/rapleafsrch/getpage.php?TYPE=RAPLEAF

Congratulations, probably this will eventually reveal your email address as well!

Update: the link doesn’t seem to spit out email addresses anymore. But I can testify, that it did until today in the form “<largenumber>, user%40example.com”. Every time you hit the reload button, you got a new one.

Structured Procrastination

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Ich habe schon oft an mir beobachtet, dass ich keineswegs nur faul bin und gar nichts tue, sondern dass ich nie das mache, was gerade am wichtigsten erscheint. Somit ist die wichtigste Aufgabe die ich habe immer eine starke Motivation andere Dinge zu tun, die teilweise durchaus sinnvoll sind, wie z.B. Fenster putzen oder Blogeinträge zu schreiben. In Ansätzen kennt das vermutlich jeder ein bisschen, aber glaubt mir, bei mir ist das extrem. Dadurch kam ich auf die Idee, dass ich mir also, um mich zu etwas zu motivieren, einfach eine noch wichtigere und unangenehmere Aufgabe stellen muss, und schon würde sich die Blockade lösen, die bis dahin verhindert hat das zuvor wichtigste zu tun. Wie so oft war ich mit dieser Idee aber nicht der erste, und es gibt offensichtlich Menschen, deren Verhaltensmuster in erschreckender Weise dem meinigen bis ins Detail entspricht. Netterweise hat das so jemand mal sehr schön aufgeschrieben. Und irgendwie ist es auch beruhigend, dass man nicht alleine ist. Das bin ich:

I’m not wasting time.
I’m a structured procrastinator.

(Ich habe das natürlich entdeckt, als ich mich gerade erfolgreich um das Schreiben einer Veröffentlichung gedrückt habe.)

Dam 20 km from epicenter

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When I was just examining the area around the epicenter of the Sichuan earthquake, I discovered a dam very close to it (about 20 km) which is about 600 m wide and located next to D?ji?ngyàn (???). Interestingly it only appears if you zoom in, so it seems that it has been built recently or some of the image data is very old. I wonder how it can have survived that earthquake, if they even worry about the 760 km distant Three Gorges Dam. If it broke, this would be an additional disaster for the people there, but it is completely uncovered by media so far.

Update: The dam is the Zipingpu dam (???). According to reports it has severe cracks now and is not operational anymore.

(Click on the pictures for the original maps)

Wasser

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Wie Krischan schon bemerkte, scheinen Flüssigkeiten ja ein beliebtes Objekt für stilvolle Werbespots zu sein.

Quelle: http://www.unsubscribe-me.org/

C-Rätsel

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Das folgende Programm gibt “kaputtendorf” aus. Warum?


/*
* (c) Sven Anderson sven_at_anderson.de
* Creative Commons by-nc-sa
*/
#include <stdio>
int main(void) {
char x[22] = {'p', 'g', 'z', 'o', 'n', 'l', 'y', 'h', 'm', 'j', 'a',
'b', 'k', 'd', 'r', 'u', 'w', 'f', 'v', 't', 't', 'e'};
char* a;
int n=0;
char b = 'm';
a = (x - 'a');
while(n++&lt;6)
{
printf("%c", b=b[a]);
}
b|='b';
while(n++&lt;13)
{
printf("%c", b=b[a]);
}
printf("\n");
return 0;
}

Francophonie

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Da Kaputtendorf Radio derzeit ausschliesslich Heavy-Metal und politische Diskussionen sendet gibt es zum Ausgleich jetzt einen Beitrag für Freunde der französischsprachigen Musik:

Das hier ist France Gall, wie sie mit ihrer bezaubernd leicht überlasteten Stimme 1965 den Grand Prix D’Eurovision gewann. Ein Ohrwurm, den man vermutlich wiedererkennt:


Das Lied hatte Serge Gainsbourg geschrieben, aus dessen Feder auch der bekannte Erotik-Schocker “Je t’aime… moi non plus” stammt. Weniger bekannt ist, dass Serge obiger France in den sechzigern den nicht minder versauten Song “Les Sucettes” untergejubelt hat. Während die damals siebzehnjährige France angeblich gar nicht wusste, dass sie eigentlich nicht über Dauerlutscher singt, könnte man diese Ausrede den Machern des dazugehörigen Musikvideos nicht abnehmen. (Gab es da eigentlich schon MTV?).
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Hibernation Tool for Mac OS

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Hibernate Since quite some time Mac OS also has a hibernation mode, also known as suspend-to-disk. But as usual for Mac, you cannot select it by hand. In fact, a suspend-to-ram always does a suspend-to-disk as well, so that in a case of power loss (like empty battery) you can start the computer from the image on the hard disk without losing anything. Apple calls this suspend combination “Safe-Sleep“.

So far so nice. But sometimes you might want to go directly into hibernation mode. Therefore I wrote a little applescript, which in respect to similar scripts doesn’t need any administrator rights to work. In fact the icon was the most difficult part.

Download it right here.

For an easy access to the hibernation mode, you either move it to /Applications/ or somewhere else and drag it into your dock, or you put it in ~/Library/Scripts and activate the script menu with the Applescript Utility.

PS.: If your Mac does not support the hibernation mode, there is a chance that you can enable it. Look here.

PPS.: As a Mac OS X user you might also be interested in another tool by me: UpdateCheck (Software Update Notifications for Non-Admin-Users)

Troubleshooting: if you experience that your computer still goes into normal sleep mode, open Hibernate.app/Contents/Resources/Scripts/main.scpt and increase the delay to 30 at the end of the script.