In ur internetz, gettn kikt awf

So I’m officially a student here at the Munich University of Applied Sciences, meaning I’ve been granted VPN access and can now surf the campus wireless. Since I live so close to main campus, I can chillax on my balcony with my laptop and snipe the network, which is what I’m doing right now on this gorgeous Bavarian evening. It even rained a little bit earlier, but fortunately the dude above me has a balcony too, so I was safe from the diurnal deluge–this time. Word to living on the second to highest floor of my building.

But apparently this dream I’m living is not bereft Cthulhu-esque rude awakenings, for I’ve already been kicked off of the VPN once for excessive bandwidth usage.

I haven’t determined whether I got flagged because I was batch downloading huge files using a chunking extension for Firefox (DownThemAll), or if because I had been hosting a Tor server. While the downloading was certainly using a ton of bandwidth, the Tor traffic likely looked more suspicious and botlike (thus the advice that I install antivirus software, even though I’m not using Windows), as it was likely contacting nodes all over the world.

Now the Department of Homeland Security will really be looking for me. I remember that one of the first days I was here, my Dad cautioned my in an e-mail that they were onto me:

Because you are abroad, and communicating from Germany (and often from internet cafes), and Congress just passed that broad addendum to the FISA act, you should assume that all your communications are being either keyword searched or open text searched when you communicate with anyone inside the US. Irony and satire are often lost in translation when read by an attorney in a court of “law”. Context is a literary tool, not necessarily a legal one. Prenez garde, as they say across the Rhine…

Your cautious father loves you.

Anybody who knows me also knows that “warning” me like that is just asking for it. My original thought was to paste the contents of this article verbatim into an e-mail as reply. I mean, if irony and satire are lost in translation, then we’d be back in the “Patriot” category in the Carnivore, Echelon, Blackbriar, or whatever the hell kind of database they have going these days. But then I thought that it would be far too cruel to have this administration like my father that much.

Anyway, they be Nazis here. Yeah, I said it.