Another preliminary injunction was granted

About one week ago I had to apply for another preliminary injunction. Unfortunately the respective multi-billion company (name still undisclosed for strategic reasons) refused to sign a declaration to cease and desist before the deadline for obtaining injunctive relief has passed.

The injunction was meanwhile granted, basically banning the company from shipping their product in it's current form. I'm really sad that this happened, since I expect it to harm their business. However, I really see no reason why they couldn't just sign a statement "no, we won't do it again, and we will comply with the GPL from now on".

We're still waiting for their legal staff to get back to us, let's hope they have good news next time.

Work starting on ct_sync active-active

The swiss company dremalab wants to sponsor me to work on an extension of ct_sync for active-active setups. More detailed news will appear very soon on the netfilter page and/or on this blog. Stay tuned.

Allnet donates network switches to CCC Berlin

In very short amount of time, two 19" rack-mountable Ethernet switches went dead at the Berlin Chaos Communication Club.

The chairman of the friendly company Allnet was immediately willing to donate two replacements. Very kind of him :)

Keyframe-accurate mp4 file cutting

I've done some modifications to the mp4clip tool (part of the MPEG4ip software package) to do key frame accurate cutting/clipping of mp4 files. In general it seems to work, but from time to time it corrupts the source (!) files. Need to find time for debugging.

I'll release the patch as soon I consider it to be used safely. Don't want to be responsible for corrupting someones video collection...

SDSL line has arrived

About a week ago the QSC SDSL line was activated. This is great news, and I just cannot describe the amount of difference it makes if you suddenly have eight times the upstream bandwidth.

Conferences 2005

I'm a bit in planning mood for conferences in the first 6 months of 2005. So far I'm going to visit FOSDEM (Brussels), CLUC (Zagreb), CLT (Chemnitz), LinuxTag (Karlsruhe) and obviously OLS (Ottawa).

If you happen to be at any of those conferences and want netfilter T-Shirts, please contact me beforehand so I can make sure to bring the required sizes and quantities.

Coordination with Free Software Foundation Europe

Finally I've had the opportunity (and the time) to talk to Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation Europe. It's good to know that they're very supportive of my GPL enforcement efforts, and it seems like we're going to coordinate our efforts at some later point this year.

This comes exactly at the right time, since I really want to get more development done and deal less with those legal issues.. believe me.

Website now has a logo

The gpl-violations.org website now has a nice logo, thanks to it's designer Chris Huebsch.

Rusty producing more patches than I can review in fast time

There was s sudden surge in netfilter/iptables development in late December and early January. I'm still reviewing some of the changes, and am not yet convinced that all of them are the way to go.

Chaosradio 99 - Telekommunikationsueberwachungsverorndung

After about four months, the first Chaosradio radio show that I was participating in. Subject of the show was the telecommunications surveillance act (TKUeV) and the corresponding technical directive. Starting from 1st January 2005, any "provider of telecommunication services" has to provide lawful interception interfaces for government and police authorities.

The big issue is that it isn't only about providers, but about anybody who runs more than 1000 mailboxes on an email server, even if it is non-for-profit.

If you're interested in the full show, you can download it from the usual location on ftp.ccc.de.

New development version of grouter (aka linwrap)

Some time ago I started working on a small embedded Linux distribution. You will now ask yourself, why yet another one? Well, any free distribution you can find out there has either not a networking focus strong enough for my demands, or is using horribly outdated software (and especially no 2.6.x kernels).

So I'm now running that distro (still not sure whether I'll finally call it "gnumonks.org router (grouter)" or "Linux Wireless Router Application Platform (LinWRAP)") on three embedded production systems.

It's main features are

• Linux 2.6.10
• uClibc 0.9.27
• busybox 1.00
• iptables-1.2.11
• dropbear
• quagga
• openvpn
• iptraf
• siproxd
• dhcprelay
• in-kernel PPPoE
• fits in less than 15MB of flash

The only hardware supported so far is the PC Engines WRAP embedded x86 platform. More hardware support will be added over time, very likely candidates are IXP42x and probably even some of the Broadcom/ti/intersil consumer access point platforms.

The current state of the distribution can be followed in this svn repository. Please note that there is absolutely zero support or documentation.

Infrequent blog updates

The regular reader of this blog will have noticed the infrequent updates since december last year. There's a relatively easy explanation: lack of time. Or even more detailed: I used to write my blog at the time I went to bed. The data of the blog only existed on my notebook, and the notebook usually is in the bedroom.

However, during the last weeks I regularly don't go to bed before 2am to 5am - a time where my fiance, bound to university day schedule, is already sleeping. This means I cannot write a blog entry from the bed - you get the point.

This is set to change now, since the blog data will be checked into my personal subversion server.

Frame Accurate Cutting of MPEG2/MPEG4/OGG

Since I now have the job of cutting (cropping/clipping) the A/V recordings of the more than 200 presentations of 21C3, I've been looking for a number of days for available free software to do GOP / key frame accurate cutting of MPEG2, mp4 and OGG/Vorbis files.

As for OGG/Vorbis, the vorbis-tools package contains a program called vcut, which basically does almost the full job. However, it's a bit clumsy to use, since it always splits a original file into two halves, before and after the cut position. I've modified it a bit in order to accommodate my needs better.

As for combined audio+video containers such as MP4, it becomes a bit more difficult, since you need to find key frames for both audio and video as close as possible to the user-specified cut point.

However, after learning a bit about Apple Quicktime and the MP4 container, plus the help of libmp4v2 from the MPEG4IP package, I was able to create a small tool for key-frame accurate cutting, too.

For MPEG2, there is lve (Linux Video Editor). This program even provides a graphical user interface for navigation through the video, creating clips and a cut&paste interface. Unfortunately the UI is not intrusive in any way, and it even seems to use it's own toolkit. After playing with it for more than 45 minutes, I wasn't able to actually cut a single video using it :(

Since MPEG2 is not a priority at the moment (we need to make .ogg and .mp4 available for download ASAP), I deferred this problem for now.

Maybe at some point I'll find the time to put together all the pieces and create some generic media cutting/clipping/cropping tool for any kind of format. However, judging from the differences of the media formats, there wouldn't be much more common code than parsing the command-line options ;)

Putting together a conference schedule for 2005

After being invited to CLUC in Zagreb, Croatia and Chemnitzer Linux Tage 2005 I'm trying to decide which conferences to visit this year.

As usual, I'll be at LinuxTag, Linux Kongress, Ottawa Linux Symposium and Chaos Communication Congress.

Another likely candidate is this years hacker summer camp What the Hack in the Netherlands, even though it quite closely follows OLS.

www.gpl-violations.org was down

If it wasn't for some user sending me email about the gpl-violations.org web-server being down, I wouldn't have noticed it. Apparently I made a stupid mistake while adding a new vhost to the apache2 config on that machine that went unnoticed until apache was restarted.

I'm not going into the embarrassing details here, but I would like to reveal that it was related to a new web-page called gpl-devices.org which I am about to launch. Let's see whether I can turn my ideas about it into reality, or if I never find the time, like with other interesting projects :(

Anyway, I'd like to apologize for the downtime. If someone had sent me an email earlier... *sigh*.

SDSL is coming

After something like three years with asymmetric connectivity (less upstream than downstream), I've finally decided to order a SDSL line again. Even though it means I'll have to afford a 200% increase of ISP charges.

Back in Nuernberg almost ten years ago, I used to have an analogue leased line which ran at mind-blowing 33.600bps. Later I used the same line type with two Pairgain SDSL modems at about 1.5MBps... this is still the line where some of my old systems like coruscant.gnumonks.org, sungate.gnumonks.org and corellia.gnumonks.org are located.