Steven Weinberg in “The Atheism Tapes”

Via Theoretically Speaking!:

Usually I’m not engaging in the “Science vs. Religion”-debate. I find this whole conversation utterly stupid because it’s a contradiction, I don’t feel that there’s really something to be said about. My opinion is that science and religion are just not compatible. Science is about finding a truth whereas religion is – how I understand it – obeying dogmas, not questioning “the ultimate truth” from some acient scrolls. Science is alway questioning their theorys, trying to find evidences if the theory matches to the observations we make – and if you don’t find any, search further or dump it for another theory which fits more to reality as we observe it.

However, via Cpehlevan’s Blog I found this very fine interview with Professor Steven Weinberg, a distinguished physicist who got the Nobel Price for discovering the electroweak force, with the BBC about Science and Religion and why he thinks they’re incompatible too (although for plenty of other reasons compared to me – he’s smarter than me after all:)

The interview is lengthy, about 30 minutes, but it’s a good watch.

Search Engine Term roundup

Alright, I’m regulary inspecting with what search engine terms the people show up on this site. The search engine terms became quite interesting in the last couple of months, especially after the TOR-news broke.

I’m going to discuss today’s terms.

1. chlid pron
I have no idea why he ended up here, but i guess that this is because of my TOR-rant quite some time ago.

2. +”It is NOT certain that the key belongs
OK, this is a GPG-related question. If you import a an GPG/PGP/whatever key to GPG and when you’re about to sign the public-key GPG will ask the question: “It is NOT certain that the key belongs to the person named in the user ID. If you *really* know what you are doing, you may answer the next question with yes.”
What does this mean? This means that GPG wasn’t able to verify the key until some certain level of trust. For you, as the user, it has one important consequence: You really should check the key’s fingerprint for correctness. Let’s say your buddy sends you his public key via email. How can you verify that the email wasn’t deleted before it was forwarded to you and replaced by another key, from the evil BND or NSA? This is where fingerprints come in. Every keypair – means your public- and private-key-pair – has a fingerprint which can be inspected using the “gpg –fingerprint $id” command. What you should do is: Your friend uses “gpg –fingerprint his@email-address.com” and give you the fingerprint via the phone, or on paper, some other means of communication than email. If you receive his public-key via email you just check if the fingerprint from the import command – which gives you the nasty question “If you *really* know what you are doing, you may answer the next question with yes.” – with the fingerprint your gal gave you on the phone. If they’re equal you can be sure that this is the key she or her created.

3. SOCKS tunnelling through TOR
Well a bit far off; TOR implements SOCKS. Just point your browser to localhost:9050, set SOCKS5, go for it.

4. tor howto
I didn’t write one, but there are plenty of howtos on the net.

5. danted no methods enabled (total block)
Hm, not sure what that means, but this seems to be related to the danted SOCKS-implementation.

6. HPC
Come on in, have a seat and take a cookie.

7. tunnel tor
Yeah well, whatever that means, but you might want to look into all the TOR-topics I’ve covered so far.

8. childporn
Oh come on, bugger off. Not here.

9. tor site:itnomad.wordpress.com
You can also use the tag-search feature for Tor, that’s more reliable :)

10. socks5 theory of operation
Oh, that’s an interesting one and i could talk for hours and hours. However, Wikipedia has quite a nice and understandable article about that topic.

OK, that’s it for the search-terms. Interesting what stuff shows up in your logfiles. Where compromising as well if you consider the child-porn crap. That information in the wrong hands… Evil.

Mini-LBW roundup, random notes

Hello from Luxembourg. Had quite a nice day here with some hiking, lots of beer, a very nice dinner (duckbreast with honeysauce, Yum Yum) and more beer. Eventually (like at 01:00AM) the rest of the gang started to wimp out, muttering words i wouldn’t have expected (“tired”, “no more beer for me”, “sleepy”). Uh come on! :-)

Whatever, I’m sitting in my hotelroom updating myself and giving in to my obvious internet-addiction. One of the other attendees has his room right next to mine and he has fucking Ethernet in his room! I haven’t! But he was so kind to share it with us and rigged up an accesspoint which he brought with him (from all the way down from Sweden to this place: That’s what i call absolute geekyness and devotion!).

Well, we’re all having a great time, got drunk, went to that “Quetschefest” (“Plum Fest”), had more beer, went onto two hikes (you just wouldn’t believe it!), went to the bar, got kicked out. Yay! Fun, fun, plum!

Some random links:

• The food in that restaurant where we had dinner this evening is really decent and not too pricy considering the quality of the food. Two beers, tomato-soup as a starter and chickenbreast in honeysauce for 25 Euros. Name is “Grand Hôtel de la Poste Hotel du Chateau”.
• “Battin” Bier by Gambrinus is piss.
• The whole Tor-situation with redirected/hijacked traffic seems to escalate; however, It’s my free not-really-IT-weekend and I won’t bother about it for today.
• Larochette is a very nice small village, although a bit expensive. It could be a possible location for an LBW in the future, but we’d have to investigate a bit more; there’s not much here.
• The castle “Fels” up the hill in Larochette is worth a visit. Will post pictures later.
• The hotel “Op der Bleech” is nice too: They even got Ethernet in some rooms. Single rooms start at 55 Euros/night.
• I opened yet another bottle of Battin-piss and just say good night – and let’s hope that my buddy next door doesn’t complain again about my snoring.

Music: Lost known good configuration

I just bought – via Paypal – the latest Paniq-album. “Lost Known Good Configuration” is a nice album, i really liked it; it’s not as good as Paniq’s former album – “Neurons: Fire at will” – but still a pretty good hear. And it’s CC-licensed!

Well anyway, I like the music so i decided to buy the album. Clicked on Paypal, 5 Euros, not to bad – clicked on “buy” – YIKES!!!! I almost pissed my pants! Could it be possible, that *I* became victim of a phishing-attack? :-)
Apparently not. However, funny as shit, that guy has style.