Author: Ralf Bergs

Geek, computer guy, licensed and certified electrical and computer engineer, husband, best daddy.

Categories
Cell Phones

“Call Forwarding” setup on iPhone – what a stupid user interface design…

I’m using call forwarding a lot on my iPhone — every day after I left the office I forward calls to my voice mail, and next morning I cancel this forwarding. Also, in periods where I’m on-call I forward calls to my fixed line as soon as I arrive home, and I cancel this forwarding when I leave home so that I can be reached on my cell phone again…

Ok, here’s the thing I’m complaining about: When you want to enable call forwarding, you need to move the Call Forwarding switch from OFF to ON. This immediately enables call forwarding without giving you the chance to enter the number you want calls to be forwarded to. So if you’re frequently changing call forwarding destinations a lot as I do you will often end up setting a wrong destination for a short while until you have clicked the Forward to field and updated the destination phone number.

And, what’s really lame, you still cannot select a number from your phonebook as the destination, you have to manually key in the destination number — I already complained about that two years ago, and Apple still hasn’t fixed this in iOS 6.1.3. Unbelievable for the self-proclaimed leader in usability, Apple! My first cell phone 15 years ago could do that already…

Categories
Datenschutz

SCHUFA-Selbstauskunft ohne Personalausweis-Kopie

Ich kann nur jedem(!) empfehlen, regelmäßig einmal im Jahr kostenfrei bei der SCHUFA eine Selbstauskunft anzufordern — viele werden überrascht feststellen dass dort falsche oder veraltete Informationen gespeichert sind.

Als ich das erste mal vor zwei Jahren diese Auskunft angefordert hatte war dort noch ein Mobilfunkvertrag (und damit eine scheinbare Kreditverbindlichkeit für die monatlichen Vertragsentgelte!) enthalten, der bereits mehr als fünf(!) Jahre vorher beendet wurde (Danke, O2!).

Anfordern kann man diese so genannte “Datenübersicht nach § 34 Bundesdatenschutzgesetz” unter diesem Link.

Gierig wie die SCHUFA nun mal ist möchte man gerne auch eine Personalausweis-Kopie haben. Was die SCHUFA scheinbar nicht weiß: Es ist gesetzlich verboten eine Fotokopie/Scan des neuen, “elektronischen” Personalausweises anzufertigen (wegen der Misbrauchsgefahr mit dem dort abgedruckten Zugriffscodes für den elektronischen Teil des Ausweises).

Ich habe daher der SCHUFA einen Brief mit folgender Anmerkung geschickt, worauf hin ich problemlos die angeforderte Selbstauskunft erhalten habe:

Ihrem Wunsch nach Übersendung einer beidseitigem Kopie meines („neuen“, Scheckkarten-großen) Personalausweises widerspreche ich ausdrücklich.

Ich mache Sie darauf aufmerksam, dass Ihr Verlangen eine Ordnungswidrigkeit gem. § 14 PersAuswG darstellt, da dies vom Kopierverbot für nichtöffentliche Stellen erfasst wird. Dies wird in der Begründung zu § 14 PAuswG (Bundesratsdrucksache 550/08 vom 8. August 2008) noch einmal ausdrücklich ausgeführt.

Sollten Sie es unter diesen Umständen ablehnen diese Bestellung zu bearbeiten so weise ich bereits jetzt darauf hin, dass ich in diesem Fall den Bundesdatenschutzbeauftragten mit diesem Fall befassen werde.

Update 2021-02-20: Hier nochmal einige Infos zur aktuellen Rechtslage, ein bisschen was hat sich nämlich grundsätzlich geändert bzgl. Anfertigung von Kopien.

Categories
Computers Windows

How to add another language to Microsoft Office 2010…

I usually prefer to use English versions of all operating systems and applications I use — simply because the German translations are usually horrible, plus very often updates for English versions become available much earlier (if at all!) than for localized versions.

Now I just bought myself Office 2010 and found that it lacked proofing tools for German — call me naive but I expected that these “common” tools were available in all or at least major languages. Duh! 🙁

So what I did is to download the German office installation package from Microsoft and started SETUP.EXE. To my surprise adding German as a proofing language was simpler than I even thought. After a while Setup properly showed me

  • all the components I had already installed,
  • the language English I had installed, plus
  • German as an optional (UI!) language to install, and
  • in the packages section another German proofing tools package appeared that I could then install.

Maybe the above is obvious to all or most of you, but I thought it’s not exactly that so I’d create a post about it to help people who are in the same situation as I was.

Enjoy!

Categories
Travel

Flugverspätung? So setzen Sie Ihre Ansprüche durch…

Habe folgendes Schreiben an die Lufthansa geschickt, um für eine deftige Verspätung bei einem fast anderthalb Jahre zurück liegenden Flug eine Entschädigung zu fordern:

Beanstandung laut EU-Fluggastrechteverordnung 261/2004

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ich hatte über unser Reisebüro einen Rückflug nach <Ziel> gebucht (Buchungsnummer xxxxx).

Hiermit beanstande ich Folgendes: Der auf  <Datum/Uhrzeit> Ortszeit angesetzte Flug (Flugnummer xx1234) wurde wegen eines technischen Problems im Rahmen der Flugabwicklung –  und somit aus von Ihnen bzw. der von Ihnen beauftragten Partnerairline XXXXX zu verantwortenden Gründen –  annulliert. Die früheste mir angebotene Möglichkeit zum Rückflug war Flug xx4711 am <Datum> mit planmäßiger Ankunft um <Uhrzeit>. Ich kam tatsächlich erst am <Datum/Uhrzeit> mit einer Verspätung von mehr als 18 Stunden (gegenüber der planmäßigen Ankunft am <Datum/Uhrzeit>) in <Abflugort> an.

Mir steht daher ein Ausgleichsanspruch in Höhe von 250 € zu, siehe Artikel 7 (1) c) der o. a. EU-Verordnung.

Bitte weisen Sie diesen Betrag ohne Abzüge auf folgendes Konto an:

Konto Nr./Bank

Sollte der Betrag nicht binnen 14 Tagen nach Erhalt dieses Schreibens auf meinem Konto eingegangen sein oder sollten Sie nicht den vollen geforderten Betrag anweisen oder mich auf einen Reisegutschein verweisen wollen, so werde ich ohne weitere Nachricht meinen Rechtsanwalt mit der Beitreibung meines Anspruchs beauftragen. Ich weise darauf hin, dass Verjährung selbstverständlich nicht vorliegt und Kostendeckung durch eine Rechtsschutzversicherung besteht.

Nach über vier Wochen(!) erhielt ich einen Anruf, in dem mir die geforderten 250 EUR zugesagt worden, weitere eine Woche später ging das Geld dann tatsächlich auf meinem Konto ein…

Na bitte, geht doch! Ich fliege nach wie vor gerne mit Lufthansa… 🙂

Categories
Security

Data Privacy issue: Your Android phone might leak your IMEI…

Just played around with a new home router and noticed that my HTC Desire S Android phone sends the following hostname when requesting an IP address with DHCP in a wireless network:

Android_3567080XXXXXXXX

Why is this is a problem? Because the trailing part of that hostname is your IMEI, which is a unique number identifying your device. It’s normally only seen on radio-network level, so can normally be considered “private” (because your operator can’t disclose it to anyone).

The IMEI also contains a component called “TAC” (type allocation code) which identified the exact handset model you have.

So if you regularly visit Internet cafes or the like, these guys know how often and when you are there.

Please let me know whether you consider this a problem or not — I do think it is one.

Categories
Computers Debian Linux Security

Integrate “AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition” into Exim with ExiScan patch

If you would like to integrate “AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition” into Exim, using the ExiScan patch, this is actually quite easy.

Just insert the following fragment into your Exim config:

  # Reject virus infected messages.
  # Add message to implicit X-ACL-Warn: header
  warn  message         = This message contains malware ($malware_name)
        set acl_m0      = cmdline:\
                          /usr/bin/avgscan --arc %s; echo -e \N"\navg_retval $?"\N:\
                          avg_retval 5:\
                          \NVirus identified *(.*)$\N
        malware         = *
        log_message     = This message contains malware (avg:$malware_name)

Let me know if this works for you — I hacked this up quite quickly, but it seems to do its job…

Categories
Datenschutz Social Networks

How to “demilitarize” the Facebook “Like” button on web pages…

If you’re concerned about privacy you might be worried by the “Like” button found on lots of web sites. If you’re logged onto Facebook while you visit such pages Facebook knows that you were there…

So what can you do to disable that worrysome behavior? Simple. Use Firefox and the NoScript extension. Open the NoScript “Options” dialog, switch to the “Advanced” tab and then the “ABE” sub-tab, enable the ABE feature by activating the “Enable ABE” checkbox, and add the following snippet to the “USER” ruleset:

# This one allows Facebook scripts and objects to be included only
# from Facebook pages
Site .facebook.com .fbcdn.net
Accept from .facebook.com .fbcdn.net
Deny INCLUSION(SCRIPT, OBJ, SUBDOC)

Presto! You no longer need to worry about Facebook spying on you on “foreign” pages… 🙂

Categories
Windows

How Apple’s Bonjour service may break your net config…

Suddenly my brand-new, only a couple of days old Windows 7 installation had an odd problem: After a system boot or restart, networking would be broken in a way that hosts in the Internet could not be reached.

I investigated the problem and noticed that my Ethernet adapter had two default gateways assigned, while the first was 0.0.0.0:

C:\Users\rabe>ipconfig /all
[...]
Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:
[...]
   Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 0.0.0.0
                                       192.168.2.1

I googled for this problem and found some hint that pointed toward’s Apple’s Bonjour service. Supposedly it sometimes starts up before networking is fully up, and in consequence assigns the invalid default gateway. The advice given there to solve the problem was to completely disable this service.

While I currently don’t need this service, I didn’t want to use this “brutal” approach, so what I did was switch the service to start up as Automatic (Delayed Start) as opposed to Automatic (which causes the service to start as early as possible).

And this indeed did the trick — I don’t have these annoying networking problems anymore. 🙂

Update: To correct the name in the “Services” application which will often be Id_String2.6844F930_1628_4223_B5CC_5BB94B879762 you can use a command sequence as follows (your path to mDNSResponder.exe may vary):

"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -remove
"C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe" -install
Categories
Mac

How to “clone” Finder windows under Mac OS X Snow Leopard…

I’m now using Mac OS X since 1.5 years, and something that I always wanted to be able to do is to quickly open another Finder window that shows the same path as another one.

Today I discovered how to do this (not exactly obvious, if you ask me!), and here’s how…

Press Cmd-N to open a new window. With the new window being active, click Cmd-Shift-G to open the “Go to the folder” prompt. Press BkSpc to clear the prefilled content. Now activate the window that you would like to “clone.” Click-drag the Folder symbol in the title bar and drag it into the “Go to the folder” prompt. Click “Go” or press Return.

Presto! You cloned your original Finder window.

If you know more hints like this, please do post them here!

Categories
Vacation

MasterCard discriminates European cardholders

A couple of days ago, I booked a journey to Kuala Lumpur and Bali for my wife and me. When it came to paying the travel agent advised me that there would be a surcharge of 0.3% imposed by the tour operator when you pay with credit card — independent of which brand your credit card is.

I was pretty outraged because of the surcharge, because until then I was pretty sure that this kind of charges were expressly forbidden by card acquirers (an “acquirer” is the party which acquires the transacations of the merchant).

Therefore I visited MasterCard’s website in order to investigate their acceptance procedures. I found something very interesting in the MasterCard rules dated 2009-11-06.

In article 5.9.2. it says about “Charges to cardholders:”

A Merchant must not directly or indirectly require any Cardholder to pay a surcharge or any part of any Merchant discount or any contemporaneous finance charge in connection with a Transaction.

Duh!

When I continued to read I found a section “10 Europe Region Rules” where it said the following in “10A.3 Charges to Cardholders:”

Rule 5.9.2 does not apply in the European Economic Area.

So, why is this? Why does MasterCard reserve the right to discriminate their European cardholders compared to their US cardholders? “What have we done to deserve this?”

To Meier’s Weltreisen, the tour operator: Instead of adding surcharges to customers who pay using a credit card (and that will be the absolute majority of all customers), you should recalculate your prices and refrain from playing such dirty tricks.