• The German Christian Democract Ansgar Heveling wrote the most hilarious guest article, in which he attacks the new generation using the internet, pretending you can either use the internet, or live a real life as a real person. (German link, and commentary on the article on spiegel.de)
• “Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN. T-Mobile and KPN argue that blocking websites is a threat to the open Internet, and suggest that the entertainment industry focuses on new business models instead.” (via torrentfreak)
• “Top 10 Mistakes in Behavior Change … and some ways you can fix them” (Persuasive Tech Lab, Stanford University)
• “Under new consular fees published Thursday, cost of renouncing U.S. citizenship skyrocketed from $0 to $450″. They really want you to stay American citizen, I guess? (NYdailynews)
• “Aerospace engineers from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor have developed a prototype device that could power a pacemaker using vibrations in the chest cavity that are due mainly to heartbeats.” (Source)
• FDP at 0%. Hard to fathom that a party which would be voted by 0% of the people is governing this country (German source)
• “As FBI and Scotland Yard investigators recently plotted out a strategy for tracking suspects linked to Anonymous, little did they know that members of the group were eavesdropping on their conference call and recording their plans.” (Wired)

Wikipedia will be down for 24 hours, starting at 05:00 UTC tomorrow. The blackout is a protest against proposed legislation in the United States – the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, these bills would “seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia”.

(EDIT1, January 18th 1am: that’s how Wikipedia looks like at the moment!)

(EDIT2, January 18th 2am: I just saw this ad on a news website.)

(EDIT3, January 18th 3am: google.com)

(EDIT4, January 19th: open letter by Neil Gaiman and “musicians, actors, directors, authors, and producers” against SOPA and PIPA).

“It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web.
Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.
On careful review of this discussion, the closing administrators note the broad-based support for action from Wikipedians around the world, not just from within the United States. The primary objection to a global blackout came from those who preferred that the blackout be limited to readers from the United States, with the rest of the world seeing a simple banner notice instead. We also noted that roughly 55% of those supporting a blackout preferred that it be a global one, with many pointing to concerns about similar legislation in other nations. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of you know how important sound is to me, and I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard what this little device does to the sound of my laptop.

A friend of mine owns one, and after trying it for a couple of hours I had to get one. They are cheaper in the States, but also very affordable in Germany. Increasing the sound quality by 500% for 42€ sounds like a good deal to me.

You can find the Logitech Z305 for example on Amazon. And no, I did not get money for this review. I wish I had!

… home of the brave.

(1) After serious and longlasting privacy discussion regarding data of passengers flying from Europe to the United States, there is a new agreement now. The US is provided with data like name, address and credit card number by default. However, “sensitive data” like religion or sexual orientation underlie “very severe restrictions”, the restrictions being: they can only be saved up to 15 years, and can be given to other countries. The German minister of interior says the new agreement is a success. And I agree: if handing over very personal data to the US which then stores the data for up to 15 years and is allowed to hand it over to other countries isn’t “severely restricted”, I don’t know what is (German source).

(2) The US police is using unmanned drones. Probably that isn’t new, but it fits together with the today’s news. What this means for you is: no matter who you are and what you do, you are automatically accused of being a criminal. There is very little privacy left, at home or outside. You are a suspect, from the day you are born. Many people listed convincing evidence that general surveillance does not decrease crime rates, so did I. Look for it, the Swedish and English police publish reports regularly in which they have to admit that all the surveillance really doesn’t help, is a massive waste of tax-payers money, and infringes upon basic human rights.
Stand up for your privacy. Not because you want to hide something. Because you have the right for privacy.

“For decades, U.S. courts have allowed law enforcement to conduct aerial surveillance without a warrant. They have ruled that what a person does in the open, even behind a backyard fence, can be seen from a passing airplane and is not protected by privacy laws.”

(Sidenote: Russian bloggers are using unmanned drones in Moscow at the moment to stream the protests live on the internet, because Russian media do not report about the demonstrations of up to 80.000 people in Russia’s capital)

(3) The FBI seems to be using information from the App CarrierIQ that is installed on “millions of phones” (second source).

Analysis done by an engineer intern working at facebook in 2010.

(Click for high resolution)

This article sums up very nicely that google is providing different people with different “truths” about subjects like climate change, depending on your personal google history:

So if last time you looked up climate change and chose to open something by, say, Marc Morano, then Senator Inhofe, and then the Drudge Report, which would all poo-poo climate change, google thinks, “oh, this moron likes denier news about climate change,” and next time, more of its top suggestions for your search will be skewed even further to the right.
As you keep heading further into la-la land, Google is there, holding your hand, assuring you that indeed, this is the objective, google-able truth. Two people with different search histories get two entirely different sets of google “facts” for the identical search terms.
– Susan Kraemer, “How Google is Making the Climate War Worse”

Last week, something very special happened, and it is worth remembering: the organization “Chaos Computer Club” managed to get the sourcecode of the software “German Trojan Horse” (Bundestrojaner), which is used by the German state to invade the privacy of its citizens and find things out about people (e.g. if they are involved in illegal activities).

The idea of this trojan horse is that you hack the computer of a citizen, install this trojan horse on it, and then you have full surveillence of that person’s life. You can even use the camera of a laptop to take pictures of the room, or record audio if the computer has a microphone.

The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has declared many of the functions of this software illegal (because they break the constitution) in 2008, and the government reacted to that and changed the software.

Or did they? A few days ago the software leaked to the CCC, they analyzed the program, and published a 23page statement. I will not translate this here, but to sum it up:

• The program still has most of the functions that were declared to be anti-constitutional; you could also say, the government ignored the order of the highest German court on purpose (yes, “the government”. I’m aware that only few people knew of this, but they are in the government, and the government has to take responsibility for the actions of his members, especially when are the main guys).
• The software is badly written, leading to the fact that it can be hyjacked by other people with bad intentions and abused – it has plenty of security issues.
• The way the program works is that it abolishes certain defenses, leaving the computer open to other attacks.
• The program enables the state to STORE ALIEN DATA on the computer. I cannot stress this enough, and I am sure you are aware of what this means (it takes 2 minutes to store data on a computer which will ruin this person’s life forever).
• The data is transferred over servers hosted in the US, giving other countries potentiall access to sensitive data of German citizens.

The main point: people who are experts in the field warned about this, precisely about all these points, when we were debating whether we needed something like a state trojan horse or not. Everything they said has come true now.

Next time they say something, stop acting like they are hallucinating weirdos who lost their mind, and listen to them. They might look funny, and some of them don’t shower as often as you would like it, but they are among the most important people of a modern society.
A big shoutout to the CCC.

Spread the word, let other people know what is happening. This is important.
If you want to know more, Fefe has a very comprehensive overview of links. For my English-speaking friends, here are two American sources (1, 2).

PS.: Thank you, government, for making sure that the Pirate Party will be elected into parliament September 2013. You are doing a great job. <3

Update: Thomas Stadler on his Internet-Law blog with a devastating statement.

Once the stuff of science fiction and high-tech crime fighting, facial recognition technology has become one of the newest tools in marketing, even though privacy concerns abound.
[...]
The Venetian resort, hotel and casino in Las Vegas has started using it on digital displays to tailor suggestions for restaurants, clubs and entertainment to passersby.
– Source: LA Times

It seems to be widely used in Japan already, Kraft Foods Inc. and Adidas announced their plan to start using the system this year to “push their products”.

Welcome to the future. Isn’t it amazing?
………. not.

Elections in Berlin in ten days – poll results:

(Apologies, dear international readers – German politics. Just skip this one if you don’t know what is going on.)