Saarbrücken at 2am on a Sunday

I yesterday experienced how Saarbrücken feels like at a Sunday at 2am in the morning (so it actually was already Monday).
The streets were empty, no cars, everything dark and calm. You can just walk in the middle of the road.

Online movie rental in Germany: How hard can it be?

We all know that: You are sitting at home Sunday night. There is nothing interesting on TV and also your DVD collection is not appealing that day. But hey, this is the Internet age, so why not just rent a movie online and watch it. That's convenient and just perfect. So I checked out the services available in Germany and the situation sucks:

I am running a Mac (so I am not even ranting about that no one will support my Linux laptop), so I first tried iTunes. They do not rent/sell movies in iTunes in Germany. How lame is this? There are at least two other big stores online, but they require Windows Media Player, thus only sell to Windows users.

So my only way out is to go the illegal way and use a filesharing system? This just cannot be true. I am willing to pay some Euros to see a nice movie on demand, I am even willing to bear with stupid DRM. But they will not let me, so what can you do...?

Garfield turns 30

Happy Birthday Garfield. 30 years ago, the first comic strip was published by Jim Davis. I love this comic and its humor a lot:


(Click to enlarge)

BitTorrent blocking project hits the media

The results of the tool I blogged about earlier has hit the public media: AP
has written an article about our most recent findings.

Update: Almost all online news site covered this story. I especially like the Ars Technica review.

Test if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent traffic

My new research project deals with ISP traffic manipulation. We just released a test that can detect ISP BitTorrent blocking or throttling. You can find it at http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php.

The webpage also features the full source code of the tool and a results page that gives an overview of our findings so far (and will be updated periodically with new results).

Stockholm

I am just back from a (almost) week-long vacation in Stockholm. Although a little chilly at this time of the year, we had a really great time. We had sunny weather and saw a lot of this beautiful city. And as you probably can guess, we had no trouble finding some decent places for food. :D

After this very nice and relaxing vacation, I am now back at work, moving forward.