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It would seem that the Germans and friends have done it again! At the 24th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, on the 28th of December Michael Steil and Felix Domke (Of Xbox-Linux fame) did a presentation titled Deconstructing Xbox 360 Security, and at the end of that, a person showed running his own code on the Wii, and also briefly explained what he and some friends had done (Pretty amusing, if you’re into security stuff), so do so.

I personally think this is fantastic, because the Wii is very very efficient in terms of power consumption, so running GNU/Linux or a BSD system on it, and essentially using it as the computer that it is, would be extremely cool. Plus one could possibly write some neat games for it. With GNU/Linux on the system, one could also use to stream movies and music, show pictures a little more efficiently than you can with the officially sanctioned functionality for that.

So hopefully, GNU/Linux and *BSD plus all sorts of homebrew will becoming to the Wii in the near future. Because the Wii is largely based on the GameCube architecture, it could be possible (If I’m wrong, I’d be interested to know why, I’m just guessing here since I’m not a programmer) to reuse some of the stuff done for GNU/Linux on the GameCube.

It’s gonna be a little interesting to see what Nintendo is gonna say about this, obviously they’re not gonna be happy about people potentially being able to easily run unauthorized copies of games, or write unlicensed games (They make money by charging developers wanting to make games). Although one would hope that they don’t pull an RIAA on the hackers, because since they make a fairly hefty amount of money on the hardware, more uses for it could potentially make them some extra cash! Heck, I’d be very interested in getting more than one Wii if I could use for things such as a small web server, IRC server or something like that.

You can see the Wii part of the presentation. that I mentioned earlier, on YouTube: The state of the Wii – 24c3.
As a free software guy, I encourage you to not use Flash, but use KeepVid.com to actually download the video, and then play it using something like MPlayer. This is also a very nice way to avoid the infamous “buffering …” of streaming video.

The phpBB developers just released version 3.0, codenamed “Olympus”, and Dann of The Linux Link Tech Show already updated the TLLTS forum. Been playing around with it a little bit, and the default theme definitely looks much fresher in my opinion, and there’s also various new interesting features here and there. The layout is also generally improved. The thing I am most excited about, is the fact that 3.0 is supposed to vastly improve the overall security of phpBB. phpBB has had some absolutely horrible security problems in the past, which sometimes have made me hesitant about either using it or recommending that people use it. Hopefully, with version 3.0, this won’t be as big a problem, I say “as big”, because there’s always gonna be security problems. No matter how much you audit the shit out of something, there’s always gonna be security problems. Although, even so I still believe that phpBB 3.0 is definitely a step in the right direction.

Congratulations to the phpBB developers on the release of version 3.0! Because of the TLLTS forum I use phpBB every day, so a new generation of this great software is always exciting.

Just added the complete source code of OpenVPN to my crypto page, if you have access to any sort of web space, I would encourage you to do the same. Show the governments of the world that surveillance, spying on citizens and censorship is unethical!

A few weeks ago, I sat in front of my computer reading about various new surveillance laws in Germany and the United States. Adding that to what I know is happening in China, Burma, Iran and similar places, in addition to the new controversial anti-terrorism law in Denmark (Allowing the police to monitor any telecommunications traffic they want to, in a few cases without a court order), I just got fed up with the whole thing, and got this interesting feeling of rebellion.

In countries like China, the websites of various political groups and human rights observers are censored. Wikipedia for example is blocked in China, and Google’s search results are censored. So with that in mind, I figured that for all I knew, China could be blocking the webpages of GnuPG, which the GNU project’s free implementation of OpenPGP, OpenBSD’s OpenSSH project could be censored as well. Also, the Danish government seems to believe that by subjecting every citizen to possible surveillance, they will automatically prevent terrorists from killing innocent people. Let me tell you something, the real terrorists out there, the ones you really have to be aware of, are smart enough to use stronger encryption than most banks use!! There’s an excellent, and famous (Rightly so) statement by American inventor, journalist, printer, diplomat, and statesman Benjamin Franklin, saying “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”. To me, freedom of speech and privacy are more than essential liberties, they’re human rights, and both are being violated by China, and now the government of Denmark, respectively mind you!

To sort of protest against both of these injustices, I decided to mirror a handful of programs for doing various sorts of cryptography operations. GnuPG for encrypting files, email, chat conversations etc. etc., OpenSSH for logging securely into remote systems (And also transferring files and doing authentication) and OpenSSL for embedding Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security into applications like web browsers and chat clients.

To everybody in countries like China, who might need encryption software, take a look at the “Encryption software” page in the menu to the right of this. It’s only the source code that I have mirrored, because it’s ONLY by having that, that you can be sure that your government is not embedding evil spy features behind your back.