Last Tuesday, a speed camera in a nearby Belgian town saw a car with my car plate driving at 105km/h where speed was limited to 50 Km/h. The problem is: at that time, I was at my office in Luxembourg, 50 kilometers away from the road where the picture was taken.

I have enough witnesses who can testify I was at the office and I trust the Belgian courts to finally come up to the conclusion it was not me, but rather someone who copied my car plate. This being said, this identity theft is the source of a lot of complications and it will cost me some time in the coming weeks in all sorts of paperwork. And I will not get compensated for the loss of time, money, etc.

Car plates, especially the Belgian ones, are easy to copy,  enough to fool a speed camera. They are by no means a reliable way to identify a car, much less a driver, just like e-mail addresses are not a reliable way to identify the real sender. For e-mail, we added things like S/MIME, PGP and DKIM to somehow make the process more trustable.

What could be done for cars ? Could we inbed RFID chips in the car so it can be traced by these cameras ? On the other hand, there have been reports that RFID chips are easy to crack and reprogram.

According to Google, the Belgian Official Journal may harm your computer …

If you are plain bored today, take a 5 minute break and check if you are a real nerd.

Thanks to Veni Markovski for the link

Arlon (Belgium) – for immediate release

The Next Net is pleased to announce the appointment of Betty, as its new Chief Gardening Officer. The appointment is effective September 14, 2007.

Ms. Betty brings more than 3 months of experience from the agricultural and gardening sectors. As the descendant of Dizzy, she will build on her family assets. She was very early in her carreer trained to the inticraties of cleaning up orchards and meadows from brambles and nettles. Prior to her appointment, she was a trainee at a family farm near Bastogne (Belgium).

“This is a tremendous and important development for us,” said family chair Patrick Vande Walle. “Betty is a talented professional, who is well-equipped to clean up the orchard. She is determined to make our property look good. She will also be in charge of bleating the family out of bed on Sunday morning. We are thrilled to welcome Betty to our staff and look forward to her involvement”. Ms Betty will form a team with Mr Flea, the CEO (Chief Entertainement Officer), a Labrador retriever puppy, pictured right.

Ms. Betty, who is a Mini Doe (Capra aegagrus hircus), has a MGA (Masters degree in Garden cleaning Administration) and is an undergraduate in cheese making from Goat University. She bleats in her own language, but understands some French.

Press Contact : Patrick Vande Walle.
Personal interviews with the CGO and CEO can be arranged on request.

There is a some parallel that can be drawn between the current dispute on the .EH TLD for Western Sahara and the .VL application. In both cases, the process is being used for political purposes to serve a goal for autonomy or independence. I am not taking sides on the .EH issue, as I do not feel I have enough information to have a meaningful opinion. On .VL however, I think that the 20+ years I spent in Flanders can give me enough background.

In the case of the .VL, there is a public image, posted in English on the ICANN web site, and a quite different one posted in Dutch on the proponents web sites. Some translated extracts, for the benefit of those who do not understand Dutch:

Why a .VL, according their web site:

It is all about being recognized, mostly by the international community. Flanders does have foreign affairs responsibilities, but try to explain simply to Israël that Belgium is made of regions and communities and that you are the Minister of foreign affairs for Flanders and not for Belgium. A specific TLD would enhance the visibility of Flanders in the world, and this can only be positive.

It is clear here that this is about political visibility and not about spreading a culture, like .CAT does. Indeed, this is well in line with the political agenda of the proponents, the Jonge Vlamingen group, which states on their web site (potentially racist humor deleted from the text):

Jonge Vlamingen wishes to promote the separation of Flanders (ed: from Belgium)… We want to build a network where young Flemings who choose for Flemish independence can meet.

As has been explained in a previous post on the subject, other organizations supporting the project have a similar agenda.

My advice to the ICANN community, should this proposal be formalized, is to be aware of the fact they would actually be used to serve a political agenda, rather than a cultural one. The issue of regional autonomy (and now independence) has been on the Belgian political agenda for nearly a century. This is a very sensitive and complicated matter. ICANN would be well inspired not to join the mess.

I finally decided to buy a a Nokia E61i PDA phone. This is a real nice phone. As usual with Nokia, the voice quality is second to none. I will not get into a detailed explanations of features, just google for it. Rather, here are some of the gotchas I ran into.

First, I needed to install the CACERT root certificate to securely access my mail server. Somehow, the Nokia does not like root certificates in either PEM or DER format. It wants the PKCS12 format exclusively. This post on the Nokia forum helped me solve this issue.

Syncing agendas and contact information works fine, both with MS Windows (at the office) using the Nokia PC Suite and at home using i Sync on a Mac. iSync requires a plugin to identify the phone, though.

Although the phone supports SIP-based VoIP out of the box, I also installed Fring, a Symbian application that lets you use Skype, Google Talk and MSN for VoIP calls. This is not yet tested.

The phone has WIFI built in and it connected with no problem to my home WLAN with WPA2. One thing you should be aware of is that the absence of a WLAN network will cause the phone to use GPRS to connect to the Internet instead. Although there is an indicator in the top left corner of the screen, it is small and you can easily miss it. Hence, if you do not wish to have an Internet enabled application to use the phone network, you need to tell it to use the WLAN only.

One thing I am missing on this phone (and other Nokias by the way) is a possibility I had on a previous Siemens S40 phone. I am living on the border of Luxembourg, Belgium and France. When at home, my phone keeps roaming on foreign networks, always trying to connect to the best signal it can get. Fine for quality but bad for the wallet. On the Siemens phone, I could create an ordered list of preferred networks. With this, it would try its home network first, only switching to another if there was no signal at all. I can force the Nokia not to roam at all, but it is a bit inconvenient.

More comments to come, I guess.

Now that Catalonia got its .cat domain, other regions are coming up with similar requests. One of those is lead by a group of associations from the Belgian Flanders region, claiming a .VL top level domain. The Jonge Vlamingen association is a nationalist group wishing to make Flanders independent from Belgium.

However, among these associations are also several hate groups. Voorpost is well known for its pro-nazi sympathies and propaganda. The Nationalistische Studenten Vereniging is an extreme right student group. One of its former members was Filip Dewinter, the current president of the extrem right party Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok). Those groups are known for their racist positions in Flanders (against the Turkish and Maghrebian minorities) and in Belgium in general for their intolerance against anyone not Flemish.

As for the Taal Aktie Komitee, I can testify I have been physically molested by some of its members because I dared speaking French to some of my friends in a street in Flanders. It was 25 years ago, but my back is still hurting on wet days because of that.

DomainNews.com reports that the Flemish group will team up with the applicants for .cym, .bzh and .gal GeoTLDs. A word of caution to the Welsh, Breton and Galician groups: watch out who you are teaming up with. Do you want racists and revisionists in your group ? If not, you should better think twice before teaming up with the current .VL team, unless they distance themselves from those embarrassing supporters. Actually, they do. Sort of. However, the disclaimer is quite vague:

“Het vermelden van en linken naar deze organisaties en hun website betekent niet dat Jonge Vlamingen en PUNT VL de standpunten van deze organisaties onderschrijven of akkoord zijn met de inhoud van hun website”.

The references and links to these organizations and their web site does not mean that Jonge Vlamingen en PUNT VL supports the positions of those organizations or agree to the contents of their web site.

So, it is not clear however which views they support and which they do not.

Update 20 August: The proponents of .VL point out on their web site (in Dutch) that French Réunion (.re), Guadeloupe (.gp), Martinique (.mq) and French Guyana (.gf) have their own ccTLD. However, none of these French departments or territories use this for the political purposes of separating themselves from their country, and their ccTLD is administered by AFNIC. They also point out to .EU.

They seem to ignore that all these entities have their own ISO-3166 codes. Flanders does not. And unless they convince the UN Statistics Division they are a sufficiently autonomous territory from an economical point of view or an independent state, the VL ISO code is not going to assigned to Flanders any time soon. With regard to ICANN’s policy on new TLDs, I think it would be dangerous for ICANN to assign two letter TLDs which could conflict with later updates to the ISO-3166 list.

I am in the process of buying a new PDA phone and would appreciate your input. After reviewing what is on the market today, I came to the conclusion that the Nokia E61i may fit my needs. I looked at the Blackberry and Palm offerings. The Blackberry seems to be a thing for large corporations. Palm Treos do not include WIFI connectivity. Further, the newer ones are built on Windows Mobile. Everything Microsoft touches ends up becoming proprietary so I would wish to avoid Windows Mobile as much as possible.

My main requirements are that the device supports quad-band GSM, WIFI, IMAP4, POP3 and their TLS variants as well as custom SSL certificates. The device should synchronise calendars and address books with MacOSX (and Linux ?) via Bluetooth.

Your opinion is most welcome, especially of you are the owner of a Nokia E61i. If you do not wish to post in the on-line comments, please e-mail me .

Groklaw points out to a complaint filed in California against Yahoo! by Shi-Tao and other victims of the Chinese repression. They claim that the fact that Yahoo! gave to the chinese police the information needed to identify them has caused them a lot of damage. And obviously, reading through these 30 pages describing the inhuman treatements they went and are still going through, it is difficult to imagine that a normal human being could not admit there is a limit a business should not go over in search for new sources of revenue.

Not so with Yahoo! Today, the shareholders rejected a plan that would have created a human rights committee within the company. The mighty dollar smells blood. Think of it next time next time you use the company’s services.

Also, write to Jerry Yang (jerry@yahoo-inc.com) and David Filo (filo@yahoo-inc.com) and tell them you disagree.

Thanks to Lucy Lynch for the Groklaw link.

We all know some countries heavenly censor what their Internet users are allowed to see. The reasons are many. Some point out the mistakes of the Great Dictator (or “Liberator”, as they usually call themselves) or critize the annexion of territories or denounce the use of torture (sorry, this should read “physical pressure”) by the regime, etc. Usually, this means censoring newspapers, civil liberties association web sites, usually hosted outside the country.

Over here in democratic countries, we are often well intentioned in trying to help those who cannot access all information to still be able to. It usually takes the form of letting your computer act as a relay for the person wishing to access those banned sites. There are different technologies, one of them being Psiphon.

Forbes has an interesting story on the unwanted side effects of letting a remote individual use your connection to access banned content. According to Forbes, the Psiphon network is often used not so much to read the web sites of the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Guardian or the Washington Post, but also to access porn sites.

This has led some people to leave the Psiphon network, because they do not think they should offer bandwidth for looking at porn material.
Fair enough, but one hypothesis the Forbes story did not investigate is that those regimes which censor might be willing to poison the system itself. Rather than trying to block the use of the relaying technology by technical means, they may find it easier to fill the Psiphon network with fake porn lovers, thus disgusting those who offer uncensored access. A quite effective way to prevent their citizens to access the full Internet.