Is this a good time to move on?

Will anybody miss our daily missives?

As they said in some already forgotten episode of the U.S. TV series Scandal, "some guy in his underpants blogging from his mom's basement".

No, not in underpants, as amusing as the thought may be. Not from mom's basement either.
Oh, and it was not a quote from Scandal.

The blog will remain up, as will the other pieces we put on the web for a very dear friend. The ads remain up, too. A handful of cents a month won't pay the outrageous German tv license fees  -- which we have to cough up despite not using their services at all.

Who knows, maybe we'll be back to rant about something, or to chronicle a few more stories of the "hillbillies" around here. We have grown fond of the many Germans who get by month to month, their money running out around the 20th of each month, their fridge empty by the 25th, in short those not working hard to bring you more Beemers or VWs, those not in warm and safe government jobs.  

What about the Random Research Team, you ask?

They will be fine, the blog has been a minor side show for them, their day jobs, whatever they may be, we never asked, will support them.

Does your decision have anything to do with the surveillance thing?

Swell, imagine the non-headline "Unknown English-language blog out of Germany shuts down in protest of widespread government surveillance!"

It ain't so. Sure, we prefer Widespread Panic to Widespread Surveillance, which sane human being wouldn't? Unchecked surveillance is dangerous, as we found out first hand: Those news caused TheEditor to shake its (gender neutral) head hard enough to suffer a minor concussion. From which it has fully recovered.

As a wise man once said, as you hit 30, your experience widens but your options narrow. To which a wise woman responded....

Will there be updates on your New Year's Resolutions?

Not after this post. They are all done already!

1) Nobody on the planet needs Hewlett Packard. 2) We have opened a few new email accounts and subscribed to wonderful news out of the corporate world -- thus becoming hidden, unsung job creators, thank you. 3) And we got a TOR hidden service prototype up and running, just to prove to ourselves that we could set up such a thing. No, it won't be there for you or anybody else to play with. Setting up such a service is not trivial. Learning how to prevent ssh root logins, how to prevent a proxy or a web server from advertising its name and version number, forcing the mime type of documents, disabling directory traversal, restricting php, making sure that firewall is set up correctly, it is work. It is like that wise man said when asked "why in the world would you learn Russian?"

Because I want to figure things out by myself, not rely on some "expert".

This leaves us with the timeless question "Cui Bono?"

If you don't know the answer to this, how about Chaz Bono.

Have a happy and safe 2014.