Cancelled my Holiday Trip to India

For those of you assuming that I'd be gone from Apr 3 to Apr 18: I have to disappoint you. I just cancelled that trip: Too much work at the moment, can't afford to take off for two weeks.

Finally committing Pablo Neira's optimization patches

Subject says it all... I've found some time to review his patches. With some luck, DaveM will receive them later today.

revived the dropped table

After about two years in deep freeze, I revived the idea of a dropped table. For those of you who haven't heard about it in the past: The idea is to gather all packets that are dropped at any place within the network stack. This is very useful for auditing and debugging.

Userspace support is included in libiptc/iptables for ages, so all you need is patch-o-matic-ng from >= today.

Settlement with ASUS

ASUS has now signed a "declaration to cease and desist" on their infringing use of GPL licensed software in their WL-500g product. More news to be announced soon.

Initial version of gpl-violations.org website up

Today I found a couple of spare minutes to bring an initial version of the www.gpl-violations.org website online. The biggest and most important task, the database of known violations, is not yet present. What's also missing is a nice logo... any volunteers?

Survived a day of CeBIT

I generally don't like trade shows. As their name clearly indicates, their main goal is trade. You will have to try very hard to find really technical people. All you find is vendors who try to sell you solutions. Who's interested in solutions? I want some nice equipment and tools, then solve the problems on my own.

Anyway, I had an important appointment, so I went there. Despite the truckloads of consumers, gamers and the like, I was able to wade through the masses. Luckily Astaro and Balabit were friendly enough to offer me shelter in their booths ;)

Let's hope I won't have to do it too often.

Another GPL Violations settled out-of-court (Securepoint GmbH)

Securepoint was offering software-only firewall products based on Linux and netfilter/iptables without correctly reproducing the GPL license terms or a written offer for the source code.

An agreement has been reached now, watch out for the press release on netfilter.org later today.

Allnet source code offering incomplete

According to an email I received yesterday, the Allnet source offer does not contain the full sources for the product. As an example, uClibc seems to be missing. Luckily, I'll be meeting their CEO on Saturday, and I hope we can resolve that issue.

FSC sources corrupt

As I found out yesterday, the sources offered by Fujitsu-Siemens are corrupt (and thus incomplete). Seems like one really has to check every single bit, otherwise they are unable to comply. *sigh*

I'll keep you updated.

A black day in the history of EU legislation

In an undemocrating manner and without public discussion, the European Parliament has passed a "IP rights enforcement directive" to "counter intellectual property piracy".

How can it happen that the wife of the head of one of Europe's biggest Media Companies (Vivendi International) can propose a Directive in January, that passes the Parliament in early march, when usually this process takes half a year to years?

This makes me sick and angry. I start to completely loose faith into European lawmakers. While fighting another EU directive on the patentability of software for years, another directive gets proposed and passes so quickly, that no public reaction can take place, nobody can even contact their representative MEP's.

For more information, see

• IP Justice press release
• FSF Europe Press Release

Why is it so quite over the last couple of days?

I'm mostly working on some paid-for commercial/proprietary software during the last couple of days, there's not much time left for free software at the moment. I expect this to change until the end of the week.

German Constitutional Court rules in favour of privacy

According to this article (in German) the German constitutional court ruled in favour of privacy and declared some recent changes in law as illegal. The respective changes made it much easier for law enforcement agencies to wiretap.

Another iptables GPL infringement resolved

Today it is my pleasure to announce another resolved iptables infringement case. The netfilter/iptables project and Fujitsu Siemens Computers have reached an amicable agreement. For more details see the article I wrote for LWN and the corresponding press release.