Ja, ebay ist schon eine sichere Plattform… behaupten die Betreiber. Sicher? Wirklich sicher?

Seit Jahren werden meine Mails mittels PGP signiert, um so dem Empfänger die Möglickeit zu geben, meine Identität über einen Keyserver zu validieren. Bis heute war das Feedback hierzu zumeist neutral, gelegentlich auch positiv.

Nicht so bei eBay.

Folgende Antwort schickte mir eBay beim Versuch, eine signierte Mail an einen anderen eBay-Nutzer zu schicken

Wir haben diese Nachricht gesperrt, weil sie verschlüsselt gesendet wurde. Wir lassen verschlüsselte E-Mail-Nachrichten nicht zu, um unsere Mitglieder besser vor Identitätsdiebstahl und unerwünschten E-Mails schützen zu können.

Durch Ihre Unterstützung tragen Sie dazu bei, dass eBay auch in Zukunft eine sichere Plattform für seine Mitglieder bleibt.

Ach so, klar! Eine Signierung ist also eine Verschlüsselung? Wieder was gelernt, danke! Und eine signierte Mail, die ein höheres Maß an Validierung des Absenders erlaubt, ist also ein Sicherheitsrisiko. Also hilft die Reduktion der email-Sicherheit dabei , die Sicherheit zu erhoehen.

Logisch ist das ja nicht, oder?

More a personal note, yet may be useful for others to know….

Today, our new printer, a HP Photosmart C5180, arrived. This printer combines printer, scanner and photocopier in a single unit, i. e. it is able to do any of these three tasks more or less. Well, good enough for us, is seems after some initial tests.

This printer can be connected to a router and hence scanning and printing is possible via the network. Nice, if you only have laptops and wireless lan. And here, the problems started….

Running the printer with a dynamic IP provided via DHCP from the router does not work reliable. Either the printer is never detected from the software installation process or is lost if the printer’s ip changes or the windows firewall blocks the address information send by the printer. It simply doesn’t work.

Workaround?

1) Assign a static IP to the printer

2) Print the network configuration of the printer via the corresponding menu option

3) Edit the /windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file and add the following line

192.18.x.x HPXX123

Here, replace the 192.18.x.x with the ip of the printer and HPXX123 with the printer name as shown on the configuration printout.

4) Then install the driver software. The basics are enough. The other applications are next to unusable or extremely bloated. 160 MB for a document viewer? Come on…

And in case you want to know, how to do this using dynamic ips, have a look at this german thread. (There is a translated version on the HP website somewhere)…. Mind boggling complex, no more comment…

Some nice gibberish at the end of the week… not really necessary to know but surprising…

While I am well aware of the differing communication types from technology oriented and business oriented people, but what should one make out of the following statement?

The value chain integration challenge represents a high business value opportunity and chance for competitive advantage.

Not only does it include the word value twice – with different meaning btw – it is completely devoid of any content as far as I can see. And, well this is the first paragraph of the JBoss SOA platform page.

Dear interested potential customer please move on…

Tired of paying for data feeds to get stock data into quicken? May be QDL might help.

QDL, the quote downloader, is a set of python scripts for the automatic cron-based download of end-of-date quote and stock information. QDL offers a command line interface only.

Run with the symbol to retrieve, the current quote for this stock or fund is retrieved and printed to the command line. Different back end drivers for quote retrieval are available to that a multitude of stocks can be queried. The output format is customizable.

But how to use it? E. g. create a batch file that calls QDL for all quotes you are interest in and let it run every night via a cron job. Redirecting the output via:

  python QDL-Client.py >> myOutput.log

appends the new information to your file. Later on you can import the gathered data into quicken and other tools.

Voila, no more data subscriptions, but still historical data. More information on the QDL Project Site

Peronsal note: As I do get most of my RSS feeds as mails via rssfwwd seeing images in these posts is very important.

Two options are available:

• Enable images globally (not good) via the config editor::

  mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image = true

• Add the rssfwd@rssfwd.com email address to your address book and enable “Allow loading of remote images”

Openoffice is quite nice once you know what you have to do. Personal note about one of my issues follows 🙂

Borders: One of the nice features OpenOffice copied from the Redmond company is the abilty to add a vertical line under a parapgraph. Comes quite handy if you are writing down some simple calculations. But how to delete this line?

Well, as written in this Document, the line is declared as bottom border for the preceding parapraph. So, to delete the line do the following:

To delete the created line, click the paragraph above the line, choose Format – Paragraph – Borders, delete the bottom border.

There are also nifty features available for generating different line styles etc. Just play with —-, ***, ###

Headers on different pages: If you want to add different header for the first page the page templates in the stylist are your friend. For the page template to edit open the stylist, select the page template section. Either define your template to use "first page" as first page and default page for the following pages or do it the other way round. Doesn’t matter actually.