Centroid.EU Blog

Mr. Seehofer I disagree, root cause is the EU

September 6th, 2018

In politics, Mr. Seehofer the Minister of Interior of Germany said quote "Mutter aller Probleme ist die Migration" (Root cause of all problems is migration). This is so wrong. Not just because I'd like it to be wrong, no. It is the EU and a relatively good economy that is the root cause of all problems. Why is it that Russia is looking to the EU with a distaste? We're doing well, we have a great free trade zone amongst all EU members, and everything we could ever want is produced here. Except one thing, personelled space products, like crew modules for space stations, or crewed orbiting capsules. Now because we "have everything" we are the scorn of all people who have less. Africans have figured out that there is a backdoor, and they're using it. The Russians are rattling our front doors with military might displays. The British who are weakening the EU by leaving are perhaps doing us all a favour by weakening us. And the Americans are possibly sleeping on what's happening. They have their own problems and have said this all along. Their new involvement seems to be Poland and the baltic states while leaving Germany permanently.

So has the EU ever heard of sharing? Or are we the greedy Europeans who don't care what happens a continent away in Africa. It is proper to share your wealth. While individually in Germany we may not have much but when we combine efforts (as we do) we have a great deal and a great deal more than any African nation could make up. If I was the African Union I'd put a carbon tax on Europe for all the cars that pollute the worldwide atmosphere. Pollution of the atmosphere is not bound by borders, it affects all. Then there is the tax to keep the backdoor closed. Sorry that's extortion. Yes damn right. We're being extorted, until the African can stand eye to eye to a European in wealth. This is just how it goes, noone said the world was fair. We are after all a global community, aren't we? Should a brother in Africa starve while we use up global resources in splendor? Or should we be sharing our wealth? If brother is happy, we're happy.

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Congratulating the 1/4 American Facebook Deleters

September 6th, 2018

Congratulations! You're perhaps over 60 million strong when I do a crude estimate of 18's and over. I left facebook in 2011 and am glad to have done so. What do I do to fill the void in time? Boredom perhaps :-).

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September Stroll

September 5th, 2018

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My Hotspot is alive

August 28th, 2018

Last Friday/Saturday I had a conflict of interests with Freifunk's proposed direction and I felt it was best to just do my own thing for a while. I have reflashed my routers to OpenWRT and have configured wireguard on one. It's a TP-LINK 1043ND v4. Today I made the password public by putting it in the SSID of this router. Everything goes through the wireguard tunnel to sweden and better yet it's all encrypted. So there is full WPA2 encryption to the router and from there through the tunnel to sweden and into the Internet. I am making use of the law that removed the Störerhaftung and I timed a download and it came out to 7 Mbit/s. This is fabulous! Just what I wanted to give out to this hotspot. So far I'm very pleased. I do hope nothing causes me to get on the radar of evil people with this but who knows? It's a hotspot. When the time comes, and someone in the neighbourhood gets freifunk in my reach, then perhaps I'll go back to freifunk. Until then there is no point in having a mesh, it's an island, it used the uplink to connect to the freifunk network, so really useless rather. Looking forward to the future.

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Got another VPS

August 27th, 2018

I have renamed usw.freifunk-schweinfurt.de -> upsilon.virgostar.net and put OpenBSD 6.3 on it. I also got a new VPS in finland with the same hoster, hetzner online. This new one is called tau.virgostar.net. Also OpenBSD 6.3. I now have five VPS's of which I will get rid of one at the end of its billing cycle. That one is psi.virgostar.net and it's FreeBSD in Toronto. It has about 2 more months left worth of operations. So I can count all my vps's on one hand per finger, omega, psi, phi, upsilon, tau. I intend to make tunnels from home again and have a routing algorithm that dishes routes out to omega, upsilon and tau from phi. I'll probably make a random source hash routing algorithm with pf. The latency from home to tau is 30 ms. And if I keep everything below 60 ms before I exit my tunnel network it'll be great. It's great that I can play with lots of hosts now for little money. Very convenient.

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Why I (seemingly) left Freifunk Franken

August 25th, 2018

In 2014 I joined Freifunk Franken and it gave me a new direction of what could be done with a wifi access point. I had believed that everyone should do this too, but it was obvious after several attempts in 2016 to contact neighbours that noone was interested in setting up a network even if I funded it for them. Back then we had the so-called Störerhaftung, so a law that explicitly forbid sharing your access point. I personally felt involved by signing countless petitions to end this. Freifunk was at the forefront of fighting the störerhaftung with the portal freifunk-statt-angst.de. Well then in 2017 the law was dropped. We won. But we were left with a system that was now outdated. Gateways, tunnels. All nicely channeling packets into foreign countries to avoid a law that was now non-existent.

Instead of discontinuing the centralized tunneling part Freifunk Franken embedded itself into a network of gateways and tunnels, and the leaders who ran these mostly founded an association called F3Netze to give each and every one of us a membership. However this was stalled with laws and lawyers who put forth topics like data protection laws yadda yadda. I never joined F3Netze because I was confused as to its purpose. Instead of decentralizing it unified but centralized us, in my opinion. I participated in what's called a mumble yesterday which is sorta like a telephone conference, only better. But I did not _really_ like what I heard coming from one end of the line. We were told we must give new users a Pico Peering Agreement (which I have maybe read once but totally forgot what it says), and then there was mention of a "memorandum of understanding", which I didn't read at all. Finally someone pointed out that the gateways, tunnel endpoints all hold the powershare in the unification of Freifunk Franken and thus there is a power vacuum with users.

That's how I understood it anyhow. I tried to tell everyone that we're on a path that leads us to the bleeding edge of a razor and it may hurt us and we may disband because of these ambitions that were totally new. In fact when you talk around something you don't understand and one person is trying to push it through even though you don't understand it, it's called spin mastery. I felt spin-mastered somewhat and I didn't like it. So I decided that I want a hotspot above all at first and not give anyone a pico peering agreement and a memorandum of understanding either. Not that I had to, noone in this neighbourhood cares.

I'm sorry, I wished I could be part of a community but I feel pushed out. So I'm gonna do my own thing again and if someone comes up with a freifunk node in my neighbourhood perhaps we can make a pico peering agreement and share the wireless ether. Freifunk Franken was great in opening my eyes in what technology can do, and that's why I have flashed my routers to an openwrt image instead of a FFF image. In the following months I'm going to make a tunnel myself (it doesn't cost much now) and offer people Internet too.

It should also be said that my purpose was to install a network that is resistant to power outtages. My setup is powered by solar and it will continue doing that. Just not with the SSID freifunk.net. I also don't have soooo much time that I could help the community much, anyhow. You're better off without me, I feel. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I firmly believe the sad situation of laws on German and European level failed us. We don't need more laws, we don't need threats of any sorts of liabilities, or data protection laws. If you think that I'm spying on you because you use my hardware and the software is misbehaving and I'M debugging it with tcpdump you're wrong. Come up to me and talk, send me an email and discuss. We don't need a law around this. In the end this is all perhaps FUD and I feel I'm a victim to it.

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Disabled HT on mercury(computer) this morning

August 24th, 2018

This message made it to my inbox this morning. I have one more computer where I can't turn HT off because it's a mac mini and I don't know how. Basically Hyperthreading/SMT is bad because it can be abused to read memory that is as I understand it remaining in the CPU cache of other processors. Turning SMT/HT off is a safety precaution. Since most of my computers are either off or idle anyhow this does not affect my experience with them, and if I want to do computing intensive tasks I may consider getting a GPU to do that for me. It all depends. My network here at home is real boring.

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I think I was censored in comments on Heise Online

August 23th, 2018

This article used to list the people that were chosen for the "digital counsel" for the german government. They used to list them by name and profession and I commented that these were only "social winners" ie. they were bosses, professors, company founders, scientists basically everything the academia and industry has in store. But they lacked the normal person, the hacker, the social loser. So it's a biased counsel. I commented that they did not chose someone who walked through the darkness, but they want that this counsil places difficult questions. Good luck! And boo for the censoring. Not too much disappointment in this, can't be much more disappointed in our government than already.

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My battery powered Freifunk Emergency setup

August 18th, 2018

I have finally set up my Freifunk Router with the newly purchased Vodafone Gigacube. The gigacube is an LTE router with 50 GB volume per month. It is on a flex plan so when I don't use it (I keep it off until I need it) I don't pay. I tested this setup on the battery just now and it works brilliantly. I have made you some photos:

I'm very excited right now. The two of them together suck about 8-10 watts but the sun was shining on the panel so perhaps it wasn't all battery suckage.

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New Keyboard

August 18th, 2018

I got a new keyboard after my old workstation keyboard gave up its ghost. Problem is that this is a USB keyboard and not console keyboard, oh well.

setxkbmap 'de(mac_nodeadkeys)' -print | xkbcomp - $DISPLAY

The above string configures the keyboard, I put this in my .xsession file.

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