About me

Nickname: Alster
IRC nickname: Alster
Email addresses: alster@indymediaSTOPSPAM.org, alster@zeromailSTOPSPAM.org, alster@riseupSTOPSPAM.net
Local IMC: Germany
GPG key: Download it here. Fingerprint: 1B8B 128F 8435 541C B3A5 1B7E CF5A 9D55 0505 9C17
Unfortunately an older copy of this key is stored on keys.indymedia.org and cannot be updated (the HKP server software silently fails to accept updates for existing keys).
Who I am:
I'm a politically and technically interested person living in a city in northern Germany. I was born in late 1970's. Alster is a river which flows through Hamburg, a city in northern Germany. The Alster river has been misused as a reidentification symbol to right wing parties in past regional elections. Hopefully I can add a little in correcting the image of this - otherwise most lovable - city by using this name.

Stuff I'm engaged in

IMC Germany - http://de.indymedia.org - Reading and writing on mailing lists, sometimes contributing news, too
IMC Communication - random ranting and spamming a huge world-wide group of activists
IMC Tech - I try to follow the mailing list and sometimes comment or even contribute if I can't hold back
Listwork - I'm one of the server administrators of sarai, Indymedias' main mailing list and mail server.
IMC Docs - I'm one of the few server administrators, and a TWikiAdminGroup member.
IRCd - I'm one of the server administrators and an IRC operator.
SoS - Bertagaz setup a wonderful request/response ticketing system we call 'Save our Systems' and I tend to pretend to have helped him with that
Dispatch Working Group - This was meant to be a group to work out ways to improve the dispatch process used by IMCs. Due to lack of people who got invlved and time they could spend on it it is no longer maintained.
input - The INdymedia News Production UTility is an implementation of a dispatch system which arose out of the work of the Dispatch Working Group. It's still our idea to get this improved and make it a mature dispatch system which is still and will remain to be needed by IMCs on most planets along the milky way (and possibly beyond it).

(...but didn't find the time for yet or am lacking information or coding abilities)

Improving / rewriting the Contact DB AKA IMC Database in means of
- user-friendlyness, i.e. improving the user interface,
- currentness of codebase (PHP 4/5 instead of PHP 3)
- current HTML code (possibly XHTML 1.x and CSS 2)
- extended functionality:additional user and group levels, IMC regions, increased search options, search speedup, bulk mailing selectable IMCs, many more, see imc-commwork mailing list archives, codecoop.org tracker for this project and ImcDatabase)
- security (get rid of register_globals, check for html/DB injection and cross site scripting vulnerabilities, restrict access to https only etc.)
Collecting information on and possibly implementing a Short Messaging Service (SMS) reporting system. There are several approaches and implementations for this and similar approaches to reporting from mobile devices already. See Stuff I find interesting below.

Privacy
- Determine your current IP address (and host name)
- MinMinxMUA: Simple Mail User Agent (MUA) for Mixminion (Anonymous Remailer Class III)
Un*x Utilities
- findallcontaining.sh: Searching files for specific content
- neardrat: NEARDRAT (NEtwork Abuse Report DRafting Tool), helps drafting network abuse reports

AKA my personal bookmarks

Intel's first Trusted Computing chipset has just arrived.