More and more Media Players running Linux but don't offer source code

There's a recent uprise in the availability of handheld media player devices. Most of them come with a 240x320 / 16bit colour screen, FBAS output, USB, 20GB hard drive, etc.

A big part of them seems to be running based on Linux and other free software, which is great. However, the vendors once again forget about their obligations under the GNU GPL and do not tell their users about the GPL or make the source code available.

The first device I ran into was the iRiver PMP-120/140, on which I have reported earlier in this blog. It was based on a TI DSP with embedded synthesized ARM core.

Now we're seeing similar devices from iStation, iUbi, Sitecom and some other vendors hitting the marketplace. They are all based on the SigmaDesigns EM8511 chipset. Rumors have spread that Sigma actually tries to bind their customers under an NDA not to release the GPL licensed source code, which they would obviously have no right to. Please keep in mind that that's rumours, and I don't have any confirmation about this yet.

ct_sync, kernel 2.6.10, NAT and masquerade

Following up some thorough testing and debugging, I finally got both (SNAT, DNAT) and MASQUERADe to work with ct_sync on a 2.6.10 kernel.

Apart from forgetting to disable TCP window tracking, there were some subtle mistakes in #ifdef/endif of the code that actually prevented whole sections from being built ;)

Debugging the problem however has forced me to update the ct_sync ethereal plugin (screenshot) to parse almost every bit within the ct_sync protocol.

David Miller has a blog

I just received news from David Miller (the Linux kernel networking maintainer) that he has started a new Linux Kernel Networking Homepage.

Even more interesting to me personally is his blog. I hope to convince him to use some tool [or write one] that can generate RSS and have him listed at kernelplanets.org.

Fighting with Docbook-Website

Almost all homepages I maintain are built using docbook-website.

Unfortunately I'm not a big XSLT guru, so I'm having a hard time finding and fixing bugs in them. For that reason especially the netfilter.org homepage was suffering from problems with olinks.

Luckily, the 2.6.0 release of docbook-website seems to have fixed all the olink-related bugs I was experiencing. I just re-built the page and now all the cross-linking (including #localifo) is working fine now. Thanks to whoever fixed it :)

netfilter patch-o-matic-ng cleanup day

Just a quick status update:

I've tried to make most of the patches in netfilter patch-o-matic-ng work with 2.6.12 today. It's amazing how fast the code bit-rots there.

I've also applied tons of cosmetic cleanup fixes, such as %zu and %ti format strings to avoid compiler warnings on 64bit archs.

Now it's time to head back to the PPTP-conntrack-nat port for 2.6.11+. Once that is finished, I'm back to ct_sync work.

Oh, and yes, I almost forgot: ftp.netfilter.org will have start having daily snapshots of conntrack and ipset.

Adding missing features to libctnetlink and "conntrack" program

I'm back to netfilter hacking, and it's more fun than ever :)

libctnetlink was extended to provide an API function to add an expectation. Also, the cool new conntrack control program now has preliminary support to add expectations from the command line.

This means there is now the full chain in place (from kernel to userspace library to command line tool) to allow expectations to be created from userspace. I wonder how long it will take to see the first userspace ALG's to show up. It would be a pleasure to finally see complex protocol handling done in userspace rather than the kernel side.

While hacking at conntrack, I also added a man page and fixed some other bits and pieces. Once the "do we want an ID, and if yes which kind of ID" discussion has concluded on netfilter-devel, we can submit nfnetlink and ctnetlink to the mainline kernel and make a first libnfnetlink, libctnetlink and conntrack release.

Network Access at LinuxTag (and Vodafone hotspots)

Same procedure as every year. One of the hardest things at LinuxTag is to get Internet access. My experience this year is a follow-up to long discussions in the previous years following-up to my complaints. However, the problem seems to be persistent.

First of all, the WLAN is not working. WLAN access is provided by a different organization than wired Ethernet access, and nobody from the WLAN team was around to comment on why.

Wired access is almost impossible to get, since there are only _three_ public Ethernet ports available at this time - apparently due to a lack of multi-port Ethernet switches. The network admins were nice enough to allow me access at one of the non-public infrastructure switches, though.

Even after finally having access to an Ethernet port, I wasn't much more excited. The only thing that worked was HTTP via a proxy, and SSH. So no way to do speak commonplace protocols such as IMAP-over-SSL on port 993. Or to access Subversion-over-Webdav servers on non-standard ports. Or to build up an IPsec tunnel :(

Luckily I'm in the situation to be able to do SSH tunneling, but not everybody has shell accounts on their mailservers...

Then I tried the Vodafone hotspot available in the Conference Hotel. Not only do they charge ridiculous EUR 24,95 for 24h access, but they also offer something that barely can be called "Internet access". So far, I've only been able to establish HTTP(s) sessions and IMAP-over-SSL. There's no outgoing SSH working, and also no IPsec.

This leaves me now with the option to run between the two adjacent conference and hotel buildings. SSH works in one place, but IMAPS only in the other. Surprisingly, I never have similar problems at any other conference that I attend - and if you look at my schedule, you notice I travel to a lot of conferences.

I've already decided to have my bank cancel the Vodafone credit card charge since they promised me Internet access, but all I got was WWW-and-IMAP. They should have told me before, then I wouldn't have bought their services.

Cisco GPL violation

I've just confirmed yet another GPL Violation of Cisco Systems. This time it's not a consumer class product sold under the Linksys label, but an enterprise-class "Cisco" product.

More details will follow as soon as Cisco has been informed. I regularly don't make any details public before the respective opponent has received the first letter from my lawyers.

Sitecom did it again

Sitecom apparently _again_ violates the GPL. This is now the third product in little more than a year.

Again, more details will follow soon, stay tuned.

Arrived in Karlsruhe

I've just arrived in the south-west German city of Karlsruhe for three days Astaro and two days of LinuxTag.

In addition to that, there are several scheduled GPL-related meetings. The most important one is probably the meeting with Cisco Germany. I'm really interested in what they want to say with regard to the recent uprise in GPL-issues inside Cisco.

Unlike a lot of my recent travel, I have Internet access every day. This means there will be little [additional] delay in responding to email.

Just finished three days of teaching intensive netfilter/iptables course

I just finished my first three-day-in-a-row training for quite some time. Seems like I almost forgot how exhausting it can be to talk for three full days. However, it seems like the biggest part of the training went quite fine, and the attendees were satisfied.

The most interesting part for me was to learn about the practical "real-world" setups in which those users were actually using packet filters, NAT, bridges, routers, etc. So basically it put me in touch with some of the more advanced users, and taught me about their particular requirements. This will definitely help during the further development process.

Browsers and large HTML tables

What is wrong with browsers displaying large HTML tables? Well, I had to look at a "CISCO global price list" (looking for the price of their latest alleged gpl violation). Of course that list is only available as .xls, so I used xlshtml to convert it to HTML. THe result is a 12MB HTML document.

Opening that HTML in w3m took quite some time on my dual Opteron 246, and I was wondering why it took so long (it indicated it was opening the file from the local hard drive at 9.6MB/s, though). Looking at top, I hardly believed my eyes. The total virtual size grew up to 760MB(!)

I then re-tried with Mozilla, and it did equally bad with 815MB. However, I would have expected something like this from Mozilla, being a monstrous GUI program... but w3m? I'm puzzled.

Using Centrino miniPCI in non-Centrino devices

Mostly out of curiosity, I recently bought one of the cheap Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG cards. I tried to install it in my (obviously non-centrino) AMD Turion64 notebook, and it almost worked immediately with the ipw2200 driver.

The only issue remaining is the hardware RF_KILL pin. It's intended for those hardware-switches that allow the user to physically disable any RF input/output [for airplanes, hospitals and the like]. Intel is using Pin 13 of the miniPCI slot for that, and even though the TARGA notebook (manufactured by MSI) has such a switch, it seems to be using a different pin. So what I did is cut a tiny strip of adhesive tape and glue it on pin13. This prevents any electrical contact and makes the 2915ABG card happy.

Now I have working wireless in that notebook. However, at the expense of Bluetooth, since the original INPROCOMM 2220 card implemented both, 802.11 and Bluetooth.

Just as a reference, I also tried a Winstron CM9 Atheros 5212 a/b/g card, and though it electrically worked, I was unable to receive anything with the latest madwifi-cvs. Played some time with the debugging options - at no avail.

Now the TODO contains checking out Jeff Garzik's latest wireless-2.6 tree and see how Intel and SuSE are doing with the new generalized 802.11 layer.

Oops, Linksys did it again...

For the third time, Linksys (now only a brand of Cisco) seems to be selling devices in a GPL-incompliant fashion. Following up the WRT54 case in early 2003, and the less-known WMA11B issues last year, they've now started to sell the ADSL2MUE.

I did a test purchase. It clearly contains the Linux kernel and other GPL licensed software. There is no mentioning of the GPL, no GPL license text, no source code, and no written offer anywhere in the package, manual or on the included CD-ROM.

I really don't get it. How could this happen again? Rumours say that the device was OEM'ed from somewhere else. Even in that case, Linksys should have enough GPL experience to include a statement like "if the product contains GPL or other copyleft-licensed software, the full corresponding source code has to be delivered" into their contracts with the upstream vendor.

Shortly after the warning notice had been sent by my legal team, some source code appeared on http://www.linksys.com/support/gpl.asp. I have not yet conformed that it is complete, but it looks like they even included the Texas Instruments' LZMA (de)compression bits, which no other vendor using TI's AR7 platform has been provided, even though they are a clear modification of the existing GPL licensed Linux kernel source code.

Linksys (Germany) officials have invited me to meet them. Due to restrictions of my travel schedule, the meeting will only happen in late July. I'm looking forward to that meeting and will remain curious about their interest in such a meeting :)

Thesis on Motivation of Free Software Developers

Some time ago I was interviewed as part of the preparation for a thesis on the motivation of Free Software developers. For those of you who understand German, the full paper (109 pages) by the Sociologist Thomas Breitner is now available online.

librfid news

After yet another break I'm now back at some librfid hacking. I've compiled the code from svn on my ppc notebook, and it worked straight ahead (as far as it is implemented). Quite surprising, since I didn't even think once about endianness so far. I suppose this will change when implementing the upper layers.

I've now also started work on libmrtd, which is to be a library implementing the functions typically required at a "border control application" of an ICAO-compliant MRTD (passport). This includes basic access control, encrypted communication with the MRTD, and parsing of the data (DG1, DG2) stored on the MRTD.

Trying to get new AMD64 notebook working

I'm trying to get all hardware in the Targa MT632 notebook working, and am running into serious problems with both audio and cardbus.

The Audio (atiixp and a realtek AC97 codec) is detected and initialized fine, you can see the DMA proceed while playing. You can even adjust all the buttons and levers of the mixer - but still there is no single bit of sound (or even noise) at the speakers.

I've tried to play with some of the ac97 quirks, but they also failed.

So after some two hours twiddling with various bits of the alsa driver, I'm at the end. I'll try to file a detailed bug-report with the ALSA developers, maybe they have some idea...

As for Cardbus, the PCI code fails to detect a device behind the cardbus bridge. If you plug in a card, the respective event is received and processed. cb_alloc() then (indirectly) calls pci_scan_single_device(), which aborts because of vendor id 0xffffffff :(. PCMCIA (16-bit) is working, though. but who wants slow 16bit ISA compatibility cards these days?

Missing 2nd day of reboot7

Trying to get some work done (and meanwhile all hardware items of my new notebook running) has prevented me from going to reboot7 in the morning.

While I then tried to get to reboot7, part of the metro train ride was supposed to be replaced by busses because of construction. The authorities somehow forgot to put any signs or instructions _where_ exactly the replacement bus line is supposed to go. After some searching I decided to go back to the hotel for some more stupid hacking.

I've already discovered the location of the main cemeteries here in town. I'm planning to start my mandatory cemetery tour tomorrow morning.

Arriving at reboot7

I just arrived in Copenhagen for the reboot 7 conference. Travelling went fine, actually the first time I was using easyJet (one of the new European low-cost airlines). The flight was in the evening, so I don't know if they also try to sell you beer at 6:30 am (like AirBerlin) ;)

reboot7 seems to be quite different from the usual conferences that I'm attending. It's way less technical, so I actually reorganized my gpl-enforcement slides adding some more high-level overview on the subject of the GPL, motivations for copyleft licensing, etc.

Started to work on PPTP helper port for post-2.6.11

I've started to port the PPTP conntrack and NAT helper to the 2.6.11-and-later API changes. Obviously that forced me to look at the code deeper than I did for quite some time. That in turn led me to the discovery of a bug. Obviously, the bug was not hit in most installations, because it's only a bug in the error path.

Expectations used to be kmalloc()ed, so the helper could directly kfree() them without a problem. Some time ago, we introduced a slab cache for expectations, so that would no longer work. Now the code in svn was changed to use ip_conntrack_expect_free().

Amazed by new QNTAL Album

One of my all-time favourite groups QNTAL has recently released a new album called "Ozymandias". QNTAL is known for their advantgardistic combination of medieval music with electronic sound. The medieval background is easily explained if you note that two of the three QNTAL members are well-known from the medieval ensemble Estampie.

Since I've just seen QNTAL live at WGT 2005, I wasn't expecting too much of the new album. IIRC they were playing three songs of the new album, of which one was the usual QNTAL style, the other two were way to "normal" for my taste.

Now that I've received my latest EUR180 CD order [seems like I'll be again spending more money on CD's this year], I'm amazed by this exceptional new album.

I think the songs can be grouped in three categories. One category (e.g. Flamma, Noit E Dia, )is what I would consider the "usual QNTAL style", which is in the spirit of the first two albums. However, I think it can be clearly recognized that it's no longer Ernst Horn at the synthesizers, and sometimes the digital effects just sound too "digital" compared to the old stuff.

The second group (e.g. All for one, Flow), reminds me a lot to the style of the "Futura" album of Cosmic Baby from about a decade ago. A single classical female singer dominating the overall sound, accompanied by electronic background sound. No strong percussion.

The third group (e.g. Amor Volat) sounds way more "normal" than the other QNTAL stuff. Saying this is not a negative judgement, merely an explanation of how I perceive the sound. More specifically: Less medieval influence, regular percussion, E-guitars, standard "wave" style rhythm.

My personal favorites of the new album are definitely the songs of "group two", i.e. All for one, Flow, Remember Me.

Taking photographs at Vienna's central cemetery

Vienna is well-known for it's historic cemeteries. I always wanted to take some pictures there. Now that I'm in Vienna for business reasons, I at least wanted to visit one of them, the Zentralfriedhof (central cemetery).

The first thing you notice is the magnitude of this facility. Coming from the next railway station, you enter through gate 11. Yes, that's _eleven_. Next curiosity is that there is a dedicated bus line taking you to different parts of the vast area.

I must have spent some four hours there, and it was definitely just a quick browse, I could barely scratch the surface of this beauty.

My photography was hampered by the weather. It was very cloudy, resulting at quite long exposure times even at 400 ASA films - and every so often I had to make a break because of rain.

After getting back to the hotel I discovered a most embarrassing truth. The pictures from the digital SLR turned out fine, but the chemical camera was lacking a film. I was (and still am) totally devastated.

How could this beginner's mistake happen to me? Well, I have two SLR cameras for old-fashioned chemical film. The one I took this time apparently advances the picture counter even if there is no film inside. Despite using that camera for numerous years, I didn't figure that so far. *sigh*.

This means that I definitely have to come back at some later point. Maybe I can manage to get some cheap flight tickets at a time when the weather is better, and I'm less stupid...

Travel season

Ok, now travel season has started. I'll start with a quick visit from 3rd to 6th of June in Sofia. 7th and 8th will be spent in Vienna, 9th to 13th in Copenhagen. 19th to 24th in Karlsruhe. 5th to 7th July in Dijon, 13th to 18th in Montreal, 19th to 24th in Ottawa.

If I'll survive that, I'll probably continue with WTH in the Netherlands - but I honestly fear that I'll be more than exhausted and wish to remain at home at that time. So don't count on meeting me there.

Peppercon remote KVM solutions

Peppercon "LARA eco" and probably other devices run Linux and other Free Software and do not ship GPL compliant.

Apparently they've been at Chemnitzer Linux Tage, where I've also given presentations for a number of years (including the subject of GPL violations).

It's a pity that a company involved with the Linux community still has license issues nevertheless :(

NaviFLASH, yet another personal navigation system

Following-up to TomTom (who have ever since our "GPL issue" been very friendly, helpful and cooperative) more than half a year ago, we've now discovered that the NaviFLASH personal car navigation system also runs Linux (and is not distributed GPL compliant).

As it seems, the same or a very similar device from THB Bury might be installed in Bugatti cars. Obviously we have no way to tell whether those cars were sold with a copy of the GPL or not. Anyone wants to do a test purchase? ;)

NaviFLASH have been contacted, let's see how they will respond.

Buying "gpl violations" at the local supermarket

Yes, it has come that far. I just wen to LIDL earlier today, making a test purchase of their latest notebook model, the Targa Traveller 826T MT23. It's a nice piece of hardware, no doubt. 1.8GHz AMD64 with 1GB RAM...

For those who don't know who LIDL is: It's one of Germany's largest budget retail stores (comparable to Walmart, although not in size of the enterprise).

However, I didn't buy the device because it was nice hardware, but because several people had informed me that this might be yet another incarnation of the ever-so-popular "Instant-On Media" devices. The idea is that you avoid booting into Windows by pre-installing a small custom-tailored Linux distribution with a media player (sometimes mplayer or xine, sometimes proprietary).

And obviously Targa is now the third notebook vendor offering such a feature without being GPL license compliant. I've recently figured that the Medion MD95500 and MD95800 (sold at ALDI, LIDL's biggest competitor) had the same issue. As had devices from one of the largest international notebook vendor, whose Name I shall not disclose at this time.

I cannot tell you how sick I am of all of this. Why doesn't anybody care to read the license? On a side note, I once asked an audience of lawyers if they had ever read the full MS EULA. Almost none of them did. Not even the lawyers(!).

SVN repository url has changed

I've now given the RFID stack project a new name "librfid". Therefore it now has moved to svn.gnumonks.org/trunk/librfid.

Not much progress over the last couple of days, had other work to do... but I've now a not-yet-committed T=CL transceive function including support for chaining and ack/nack retransmissions.