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ACTA is one more offensive against the sharing of culture on the Internet. ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an agreement secretly negotiated by a small “club” of like-minded countries (39 countries, including the 27 of the European Union, the United States, Japan, etc). Negotiated instead of being democratically debated, ACTA bypasses parliaments and international organizations to dictate a repressive logic dictated by the entertainment industries.

ACTA would impose new criminal sanctions forcing Internet actors to monitor and censor online communications. It is thus a major threat to freedom of expression online and creates legal uncertainty for Internet companies. In the name of trademarks and patents, it would also hamper access to generic medicines in poor countries.

More on ACTA:

• La Quadrature du Net about ACTA
• EFF’s International Page on ACTA

I updated my Firefox extension for searching the Leo.org database some minutes ago. I added no new features, just made it compatible to the newest versions of Firefox.

You will find the Download here. In some days it will be available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leo-search/.

Have fun… ;)

I got some samples from MAXIM some few days ago. Since I was busy studying other stuff I had no time to give them a try. Today I tried the DS1626 Temperature Sensor.

It was very easy to setup in the Arduino environment using the SoftwareSerial library. One problem I had was, that I was not able to write the temperture to my LCD display. I could not figure out why this happens. The LCD code didn’t worked anymore when including the SoftwareSerial header without using any functions of it…

Another problem for me was, that the DS1626 is being delivered in a SOP8 package and I for the first time needed to solder SMD. I used an adapter for SOP28 to DIP28 conversion because I wanted to place the IC on my breadboard. I soldered it successful and it worked right out of the box… ;)

I am lucky to say, that my PHP extension for using Smart Cards based on the winscard API was successful released on pecl.php.net. It is designed for the use with the wonderful project PCSC-Lite for *nix. Since PCSC-Lite is implementing the API compatible to the PC/SC standard it should be possible to compile this code on other operating systems too.

I have created this extension in 2010 but needed to clean it up and do some long term tests. It runs nicely on some machines and now you are able to do Smart Card terminal prototyping using PHP. I am using this extension to run Smart Card devices on the server side for enabling communication with Secure Application Modules (SAM) / Hardware Security Modules (HSM).

The name of the extension is “pcsc”. There is only a small subset of the API implemented but for most things this is enough. I will implement the full API at any time.

More information:

• PECL Project Page
• PHP SVN Code Browser

To checkout the code you need to execute the following command:

svn checkout http://svn.php.net/repository/pecl/pcsc/trunk pcsc

Thanks to the PHP developers who helped me doing this step and for commenting my code.