Paul Sebastian Ziegler

Some of you will know my concept of Phoenix computing from other entries some moths ago.

I did not plan to do so today, but the changes I made to the server would have required days of carefully readjusting configuration files and scripts.

So instead I wiped the server clean and started over from a data-backup.

Most of the systems and mechanisms should be back and running. If you encounter any problems, please let me know. The webinterface should mostly be working again.

Also please be aware that for about an hour today, mails that were sent to legitimate @observed.de addresses bounced. So if you sent me a mail during that time, please check for error messages.

I know this notice is rather short-timed, but I'll introduce some major changes to the server today. Everything should be alright, but in case something breaks, I will have backups to get everything up and running again.

However there will be some downtimes today - and some of them may get long and/or nasty.

So if the site should run unstably for a few days and all you see at the top of my blog is this message, then you know I'm still fighting with some major or minor problem.

As soon as all the changes are made, I'll post back to you.

Well, since this page has just had it's 1-year-birthday, the old SSL certificate which was signed for 365 also ended it's duty.

If you connect to this site through SSL, you will find that a new one is in place.

Maybe someday I'll get myself to either apply for a major certificate or setup my own CA.

Until then please just bear with me and the new certs from time to time.

I already announced something like this would come up soon during my last entry. But here it is. I just set pix.observed.de free. It is a subproject where I'll publish images, photographies and more visual material.

Right now it only contains a single gallery called Berlin Lights I. It is full of photos I took during my brief visit to Berlin. They all play with very slow shutter speeds to create some really nice effects.

pix.observed.de is not exactly google-friendly since I don't care how many people visit it.
However check out the license!

Being (among other things) a writer myself I know how much it sucks to find works on the internet that are not clearly licensed.

All the images, photos and other visual things on pix.observed.de are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 License. This makes it pretty liberal and free to use for about anything you want as long as some rules are followed.

But this is where the clue comes in. Even those few rules are breakable.
How?
It's easy. One Euro each.

Allow me to explain. For each rule you break you have to pay one Euro per picture you break it for. It's that easy. I won't even control it. The license is really liberal, so the only people who really need to break any rules here are the ones using the images commercially. And it will be hard for them to keep it secret anyhow.

So you can literally do anything you want with those images. Either you follow the license or you pay a minimal fee for breaking it.

Feel free to check it out and/ spread the word. Link to it, if you like it. But please remember, that when you include the images in your page directly, you are violating the license unless you give proper credits.

Well, it's a new year.
Kind of interesting, isn't it? All that time spent...

Lots of things have happened for me during those last 365 days. Articles for hakin9, my first book for O'Reilly, Defcon, Blackhat, returning to Japan...
Hard to believe all this fit into a single year.
(not to mention taking graduation exams sometime in summer)

But there is also something else to celebrate. Today marks the day that this site has been up online for a year! And it somewhat reflects on the crazy twists of last year.

When this site came up online I could count my monthly visitors quite easily. When I first scored a hundred visitors in a single month I was happy.

Thanks to the conferences, publications, some projects and some slander, the unique visitor-count is now up to an average of way more than a hundred a day. Overall, during the past 12 months more than 17000 people visited my blog. And since the RSS-feed is in place the numbers are still rising.

I am working to expand this homepage a little. Add a few sections. I just have some more traffic to burn.

In other news, I gave a speech on general computer security at the Leuphana university in Lueneburg some days back. It was fun for me, since I never sat in a university myself.
It also ended up in a local newspaper. The speech has been recorded, mastered and uploaded to the university's servers. You can check it out here. I must warn you though since it's in German.

My more frequent visitors will already have noticed this, but I made a few changes to the stylesheet of this page. Most of all the text should be a lot larger on most screens and operating systems. This makes it easier to read - even though I hope everybody figured out how to zoom text by now.

Also I extended the length of the messages displayed by the RSS-feed. I will give that feed a lot more tuning in the near future. It is still incredibly popular.

Some of you may have noticed the downtime this server experienced today. I am still not quite sure what exactly caused it, but thanks to my access to a serial console and some quick debugging I am now pretty sure that the problem was located somewhere in between the server-farm and the SP's connection to the internet.

It resolved itself after about an hour. Sorry for the inconvenience.

After yesterday's post dealt with the sudden increase in Chinese traffic obviously many of those from China visiting this page have read and understood what I said.

How do I know? Well even though there is still increased traffic coming from china the new No. 2 on my list is now "unidentified/unknown". The users from the gray IP zones are showing the same behavior, so I guess we understood each other.

Have fun surfing (more) safely!

During the past 4 days a lot of Chinese IPs have been hitting this server. At first I thought it was some sort of attack, but after observing it for a while the traffic seems rather legitimate.

Unfortunately none of them have left good referers, so I am a bit at a loss to guess what attracted them. However I have the unfortunate feeling it may have something to do with HayNeedle.

I don't want to scare you away, but -
If you are Chinese and/or surfing from within China this page might not be the best place to visit. HayNeedle will not protect you from the Chinese government's censorship. It will much rather get you into a lot of trouble in China. Also the other contents of this page might get you in trouble. So please be careful.

I don't want anyone to end up in jail for visiting this page. Use Tor or Psyphon to cloak yourself instead.

Well, when I started programming the code that generates this page's newest feature (the RSS feed) I was hoping for a big turnout. But you people are just blowing my mind. The feed instantly shot to the top on my list of the most accessed files served here.

The only thing that beats it is the index, which kind of doesn't count. Well, what a nice surprise. I am not such a big fan of newsfeeds myself since I prefer the old-fashioned way of just visiting the pages, but obviously publishing the feed hit the spot. (And before anyone mentions to me that all the requests might come from a single individual with a feedreader that updates every few seconds: Even though some of those experts can be found in the logs, still most of the requests come from unique IP ranges.)

This blog has become somewhat low-frequency lately. Maybe the RSS feed will be a little help to keep everyone updated.