All posts by Kic

Mophie!

Today I can report another story of excellent customer service!

Last year in November I have ordered a Hip holster directly from Mophie since it was not directly available within Europe. Unfortunately this raised UPS fees and import taxes which almost doubled the price.

Last week I found the holster was broken – and I asked the people at Mophie if they now had a German distributor doing warranty exchanges – and guess what, they asked for a more detailed description. Once they received that, they sent out a replacement for free which I just received today.

No need to send the broken holster back – which would have been expensive again.

This is what I call service. Extraordinary good service. Thanks, David Hertz!

Japan und das Moratorium

Jetzt muss mir mal jemand erklären, was hier gerade vor sich geht.

Letztes Jahr wurde die Laufzeitverlängerung der deutschen Atomkraftwerke beschlossen – mit der Begründung, dass unsere AKWs sicher seien. Jetzt haben wir eine nukleare Katastrophe in Japan – und die erste Reaktion ist, dass nun alle deutschen AKWs überprüft werden sollen. Hieß es nicht letztes Jahr, sie seien alle sicher? Warum müssen wir nun erneut überprüfen, was haben wir vergessen zu prüfen? In Japan liegt das Problem darin, dass die Kühlung aufgrund ausgefallener Notstromversorgung unzureichend ist. Wenn bei uns vergessen wurde, die Kühlung und die Notstromversorgung zu überprüfen – dann gute Nacht. Warum sollten unsere AKWs dann sicher sein?

Angeblich ist Geschehen in Japan nicht mit uns zu vergleichen, da es bei uns keine Tsunamis gibt. Aber Erdbeben wohl schon. Und Flugzeuge. Und evtl. sehr böse Menschen. Und trotzdem kann bei uns die Notstromversorgung nie ausfallen? Oder die Kühlung?

Egal, ganz neu ist nun ein dreimonatiges Moratorium. Das heisst wohl, dass die nächsten drei Monate die AKWs abgeschaltet werden müssen, die schon zu alt sind. Und nach den drei Monaten? Da ist dann wieder alles sicher und wir fahren sie wieder hoch? Also ist das eine Hinhaltetaktik des dummen Wählers über die Wahlen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Baden-Württemberg und Rheinland-Pfalz?

Ausserdem kann nach meinem bescheidenen Wissen wissen ein AKW nur abgeschaltet werden, indem die Brennelemente entfernt werden oder z.B. Bor als neutronen-absorbierender Stoff zwischen die Brennstäbe gefüllt wird. Die automatische Abschaltung durch Einfahren der Steuerstäbe hat in Japan schließlich funktioniert – und es kam dennoch zu diesen schweren Explosionen. Wenn das Einfüllen von Bor so einfach wäre – Japan hätte es bestimmt getan!

Mein Fazit – wir sind genauso gefährdet wie die Japaner. Dort wurde nicht mit einem Erdbeben der Stärke 9,0 oder einem so heftigen Tsunami gerechnet . Aber womit rechnen WIR nicht?

Temporary IPv6 address not MAC based

If you want to get a temporary IPv6 address which is not MAC based (so you do not always surf with the same address and can be tracked), you should enter

sudo sysctl -w net.inet6.ip6.use_tempaddr=1

on your Mac’s commandline. You will then get an additional temporary IPv6 address which does not reveal your network card’s MAC address as part of it. This gives a bit more privacy!

Should also work on iPhone/iPad in case of a JB!

Closed PayPal account because of their attitude towards WikiLeaks

Yesterday I closed my PayPal account because of their censoring attitude towards WikiLeaks.

They pretend to be a bank – but a bank may not freeze accounts just because of the opinion of some US senators. They are bound to laws and have to wait for court decisions, especially within Europe. They do not only reside in the US, but also at

PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A.
5. Etage
22-24 Boulevard Royal
L-2449 Luxembourg

And I am not aware of any law WikiLeaks has broken within Europe!

This does not mean I am supporting all that WikiLeaks has done. But what I cannot accept is censorship, be it from PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, Amazon, PostFinance, … These institutions do not show a democratic attitude. They do not wait for court decisions.

The only person who has obviously broken the law was the American soldier who stole secret documents and sent them to third parties. But well, what do you expect if you tell thousands of national secrets to about 3 million people – that it will stay secret? Nobody of the 3 million people will tell a friend? And a friend? And another friend? Or tell the newspapers? Not one of the 3 million? ROFL!

By the way, I also asked Amazon to close my account (online), they said they needed a written paper, either via mail or fax. Faxed that on December 7, 2010. No reaction so far. Maybe they want to sit it out. So I will just do, what Richard Gutjahr is doing – not use it anymore.

Great support for my Berofix ISDN-to-SIP card

Today I need to tell you about some great support experience I had with a Berlin company called beroNet. They are manufacturing all kinds of telecommunications hardware, I personally run multiple ISDN BRI cards at home and at work for years now, no problems at all.

Yesterday, on Sunday, I plugged in my currently unused berofix card to try it out with new versions of Asterisk or FreeSwitch. This card appears like a network card (from the OS point of view) and does all the work on its own (ISDN to SIP and back). All you need in your OS is a simple network driver which is available for all OSes I know of and usually already included. No special ISDN drivers and timing modules required under Linux.

The card is running its own (Linux-) OS which I haven’t upgraded for more than 15 months I guess – so I had a very early release on it. In fact I was beta testing the card before its official release and still had the beta software on it. I decided to upgrade the card to have a current version for my tests. Flashing the card is very easy, just upload the update file with a web browser, wait a bit – and – usually – all is done. My software release was so old that the current version just did not expect the very different file system structure from the beta test on my old card – and failed. No GUI anymore. And the entire card can be configured via its GUI.

After a trying around a bit (getting only GUI errors) I decided to ask the beroNet support for help – and got a first answer at noon today. I could have repaired the card myself (by following this procedure) but when I mentioned that my card OS was really very old, Christian Richter, one of their support specialists, offered to have a look at the card if I could just give him access to a special port. I opened my firewall for him – and an hour later my card was up and running again.

That’s what I call support. All I had to do was asking for help – and it was fixed the easiest way possible for me. Thanks for the fast and competent support!

iPhone Certificates

Today I was worrying how to get my own CA’s root certificate AND a certificate signed by my own CA into my iPhone.

After reading lots of stuff I finally made it:

First, send an email containing your CA’s root certificate (the .crt file) to an address which you will receive on your iPhone. Open this mail, click onto the attachment – and voila, you will be asked to install that Certificate. Do it 🙂

Your “Identity” – which consists of your client’s .crt and .key files need to be converted into a single PKCS12 .p12 file to be understood by the iPhone.

This conversion can be done by the following command (taken from http://shib.kuleuven.be/docs/ssl_commands.shtml):

openssl pkcs12 -export -in your_iphone_s.crt -inkey your_iphone_s.key -out your_iphone_s.p12 -name “name_of_your_iphone” -CAfile your_ca_s.crt -caname “your_ca_s_name” -chain

You will be asked for an export password which will protect your identity during transmission via email later. If your_iphone_s.key is protected with a password you will probably be asked for that one, too – but this was not the case with my file, so I cannot tell you.

Again, mail the resulting your_iphone_s.p12 to an address which you will receive on your iPhone. Open this mail, click onto the attachment – and voila, you will be asked to install that PKCS12 identity. Do it 🙂

You will be asked for the export password which you entered when creating the .p12 file.