Back home in Berlin

After one day for travel and sleeping-over-the-jetlag, I'm finally back on track at my home in Berlin.

I just decided to skip WTH, since it would require me to leave again in only two days (and I have another travel coming up on 1st August. So I'd rather spend the time to continue my current netfilter projects, taking care of accounting and tax declaration, etc.

Unfortunately I'm bound to using slower/older machines and my notebook, since the warranty replacement for my workstations' liquid cooling system has not yet arrived :(

Chaosradio on Electronic Health Card

Today I'll be moderating this months' episode of Chaosradio on the upcoming German Gesundheitskarte (Electronic Health Card, EHC).

This is the latest incarnation of the ever-increasing number of large-scale IT projects in public atministration. Following-up infamous examples such as TollCollect, the ALG2 software, INPOL-NEU, ELSTER, and last but not least the RFID enabled electronic Passport. And it will affect the data privacy and data protection of even more German citizens than any of the beforementioned systems!

I'm very pleased to announce Thomas Maus (ThoMaus), one (if not the) most prominent critical experts on the EHC as a live guest in the radio studio.

This subject is actually one that I think fits best into the idea of Chaosradio: Technical, but with vast implications on society. Even more than my last "favourite" data retention, but less than the upcoming Chaosradio show on "voting machines".

From my point of view there are too many issues currently at this border between technology, politics and society that need to be adressed. Too many to just talk about geeky technological stuff that is certainly also happening and woth covering it in Chaosradio.

Intel releases Development manual for e1000 chips

Finally, within years, at least one hardware vendor does The Right Thing (TM): Intel releases hardware documentation about their Gigabit Ethernet Controller chips (known as 'e1000') in the Linux world. (For the curious ones: you can get it from the e1000 sourceforge page)

Even more surprising, they are doing it _despite_ providing a high-quality GPL licensed Linux driver. And by doing this, they show that they have understood that the many developers who are playing with their chip will in the end help them to perform even better, but only if they can actually read the hardware documentation.

There's a group of Linux networking developers who are constantly trying to optimize the driver and come up with new strategies on how to deal with high packet rates.. And at least until now, all the big current Gigabit Ethernet chips did not come with any kind of documentation.

Broadcom tg3 and Syskonnect/Marvell Yukon2 now have a severe competitive disadvantage. Let's see whether they get the clue, and release documentation, too.

I'm not a big fan of Intel, but what they're doing with regard to Linux and their e1000 and ipw2xxx chips is really good. Thanks, Intel!