Berlin FAQ Blog

Living in Germany is a poor replacement for Japan - at least as far as English abuse goes, but looking around you can still find the odd howler. Evidently this dough-based product retailer in Schöneberg's Hauptstraße was inspired by the "Internationale Presse" sign which stretches across his (or her) storefront to advertise in something resembling English. However, as you can see it is marred by inconsistent use of apostrophes: I presume it was meant to read "Bakery's and Snack's".

A former colleague of mine, who was a citizen of GDR until the bitter end, once made a comment to me along the lines that "compared to the technology available now, the tools methods the Stasi had available to them were like children's toys", and every Stasi Museum is full of exhibits which might have been vaguely high-tech around 1972. Data processing revolved around index cards, and the one main-frame computer I have seen probably had about the same processing power as a modern-day digital camera.

Now, of course, we are living in the Age of Terror, and anyone is a potential terrorist (me! you! the little old lady across the landing!), and the Internet is an ideal place for sharing all those bomb-building plans and coordinating hijacking activities. So wouldn't it be a good idea if you could check up on people's computers (bona-fide suspects and anyone sharing the same surname initials only, of course) to see if they're up to no good (logging on to alqaeda.net, downloading burkha porn etc. etc.)? As you've seen from the movies, all it takes is a couple of hacker-type (good) guys to type frantically for about 2 minutes, and already they're logged on to the suspect's computer and have found the detailed 3d wire frame model of the bomb.

So, the computer boffins in the Federal Interior Ministery (proprietor: Wolfgang Schäuble) have come up with a couple of brillo wheezes. Like a law which would allow the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt, sort of like the FBI) to sneak into people's computers without having to get any of those tedious warrants etc. They've come up with a simple solution which will avoid them having to employ any hackers from Hollywood: just have the suspects download a "trojan horse" style program which will sneak itself into the inner workings of the computer and start collecting data right away. This has become jokingly known as the "Bundestrojaner" (Federal Trojan), as anyone who has any idea of computers is having a good laugh about it.

Firstly, they're going to have to find a program or variants thereof which will work on the wide range of operating systems available out there. One which will fly below the radar of all anti-virus software and the like, and which will be able to comb through the vast amount of data on modern hard drives without causing suspiscion ("what is this bkamonitor.exe process which is slowing my system down?")

Then they will have to get it to the bad guys. The current thinking is that they will send a fake official email with the program as an attachment, which the bad guy will unthinkingly click on, and already his every keypress will be winging its way to the BKA supercomputer.

Then there's the slight problem of the legal validity of any data collected by such methods, as there's no way to prove forensically that it hasn't been manipulated. And a whole load of issues such as what if the bad guys (or another nation's "good guys") work out how the software works and use it for their own nefarious purposes.

And finally there's another slight problem in that any terrorist with half-a-brain will store their bomb-making plans on a computer which isn't connected to the Internet, and excercise the same level of caution any normal person or business (not however German government departments) would use if they don't want their communications to be intercepted by the FBI or the Chinese government.

Some useful links on the general subject of data protection or the increasing lack of:
http://www.bundestrojaner.de/
http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
http://www.dataloo.de/stasi-20-525.html
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/inhalt/stasi.html

So, after years of procrastinating we finally get round to buying a cordless telephone because the bleatings of the existing telephone are not always audible throughout all corners of the PenguinSphere, and cordless telephones have long since entered the realm of "pile'm high and sell'm cheap". We now have a model which claims it has an operational modus of 300 metres, which is further than the outer limits of the PenguinNet, so it must be good.

Except... nowhere to plug the damn thing in. OK, mains electricity is not the problem, another extension cord won't make any difference. No, it is the rat's nest of cabling which emanates from the telephone socket which is the problem. You see, PenguinHQ has been online since pre-DSL days, which means ISDN, which means between the actual Deutsche Telekom socket and half-way sane telecoms equipment there is an ISDN Thingy, a DSL Splitter Thingy (or possibly the other way round, I haven't dared look down there for years) and an Analogue Converter Box Thingy (because ISDN-compatible equipment never really took off). Alas, the analogue converter box thingy only has an 'a' socket and a 'b' socket, which are already occupied by the Normal Telephone and Answering Machine, and the Fax Machine respectively. A frantic search through the Big Box of Cables'n'Stuff brings to light various items of Telecoms Socketry, but none which would allow the addition of a Secondary Telephone to the Primary Telephone, unless the Secondary Telephone could be persuaded to pretend to be an Answering Machine, but won't, though it did come with an alternative socket adapter which fits into no other socket I possess.. (If however you are in urgent need of a USB -> PS/2 converter however, please let me know, I seem to have an insane number of them).

Being a Technical Person, it doesn't take me long to find out that the Fax Machine has a socket which will connect to the Cordless Phone, and actually works without further modification, animal sacrifice etc. etc.. However, being ISDN, the Fax Machine has its own number, and by extension any attached item of telecoms equipment, which is pretty pointless because anyone actually wanting to talk to an inhabitant of the PenguinSphere would call on one of the other two numbers which ISDN provides. Alas, it appears impossible to persuade the Analogue Converter Box Thingy to work together with the Fax Machine in such a way so that Real Person telephone calls get passed on to Cordless Telephone and Non-Cordless-Telephone without having the Fax Telephone ring at the same time, which would rather invalidate the point of the whole operation, and makes a Whole Lot of Bloody Noise to Boot.

Through consultation of the Interweb I have learnt that it may be possible to attach two F-Machines to the same TAE socket, which might solve the problem via a trip to a specialist equipment store. In the meantime I recommend carrier pigeons should you have anything of import that the PenguinSphere should know, because in completely unrelated news I'm about to migrate some of the Penguin Legacy Domains to a new server, and I'm thinking it might just be easier to give up on the whole darn thing and buy a sheep farm somewhere.

Update thanks to Conrad I have now acquired a TAE NFF / 1 x RJ11 ("Western") adapter plug (that's another 10 Euros I won't see again) and the whole caboodle is now working as planned (though I should probably make some sort of diagram should we ever have to move).