Category: Editorial

  • Electronic Vaccination Certificate: Eureka! Eureka?

    Electronic Vaccination Certificate: Eureka! Eureka?

    When I was reading the original “Spiegel” article on the German Electronic Vaccination Certificate, I was fascinated.

  • A SIP library is born

    A SIP library is born

    Inspired by Andrijan Möcker’s “Überallklingel” (Everywhere Bell), I decided to create my own. However, I wanted to use it with a motion sensor and therefore to be able to turn it off and on again, when necessary. I also felt that using Asterisk was overkill and it could be done quickly and much easier with…

  • The Phone Advantage

    The Phone Advantage

    Smartphones and apps have been hyped for over a decade now. But sometimes, the smartphone is not the smartest thing to get an interaction done. A dedicated device or even a plain old phone may be better. Let us look at some advantages of telephones.

  • Telephony of Everything: From IoT to ToE

    Telephony of Everything: From IoT to ToE

    We all know about the Internet of Things. Cool or useless gadgets, which are each controlled by their individual app on our smartphone. This is often very convenient, but not always.

  • The dangers of free cloud-based storage

    The dangers of free cloud-based storage

    A few days ago, Google Docs locked out many users from their documents, claiming they violated their Terms of Service, despite being innocuous. Here is why this will continue to happen what you can do to not run into this problem yourself.

  • Federated XMPP chat (and more) with Movim: A success story

    Federated XMPP chat (and more) with Movim: A success story

    There are many reasons to be unhappy with current social media sites and chat applications. For a long time, there was no viable alternative, especially not, if you wanted usability and integration. Now there is hope, with Movim.

  • DDoS: What we can do to prevent it

    DDoS: What we can do to prevent it

    Distributed Denial of Service, DDoS for short, is the shooting star in today’s Internet nightmare gallery. Here is a quick overview over what each and everyone of us can do to prevent his. And some hints at manufacturers and researchers.

  • XMPP: Chat with a Future

    XMPP: Chat with a Future

    XMPP is the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol standardized by the IETF. This standard provides the framework for doing anything you want to do with chat, and more. Why is XMPP (formerly known as Jabber) not the mainstream chat protocol? Actually it is. It is the most secure messaging standard: battle-tested, independent, and privacy-focused. And…

  • DANE: The CA game changer

    DANE: The CA game changer

    Securing the Internet is important. However, many design decisions are broken: For example, encrypted web pages are considered less secure than unencrypted pages, even outright dangerous, unless you regularly pay a lot of money to certificate authorities, which have shown to make the Internet less secure. The new kid on the block, DANE (DNS-based Authentication…