Many citizens interested in in a transparent state and worried about power abuse have heard about the discussion regarding general video surveillance. In Berlin, for example, cameras are omnipresent, especially in Mitte.

To give you an example, last year’s demonstration “Freiheit statt Angst” passed over 150 cameras. None of these – nor any of the many police cameras – filmed the unchecked police aggression towards an innocent man peacefully protesting; fortunately, demonstrators switched their cameras on as soon as they saw a crime being committed. This actually led to a reform of the Berlin police force: they have to wear an identification number on their uniform now.

Sometimes, the cameras in Berlin have a little sign next to them: “For your own safety, this place is under video surveillance.”

But that is simply not true: a camera does not increase your safety. It is just a piece of metal. If people rob you or assault you a camera will not help you. It will be there, filming, and show people robbing and assaulting. In nearly all cases, these people cannot be identified – that is very well known from cities like London where there is extensive research regarding the usefulness of video footage. We also know that cameras do not reduce crime rates, which was to be expected, because it is common knowledge in psychology that draconic measures of punishment like the death penalty do likewise not reduce crime rates.

Something has happened in London now that really upset me.
In January 2009, there were demonstrations against the Israeli offensive on Gaza. People were throwing bottles at police officers, which is not okay – and so the London police spent months watching CCTV footage in order to identify protestors and charge them. I understand that. But as the Guardian puts it: “It is only right that similar efforts are made to uncover police wrongdoing.” And there have been many documented assaults of policemen towards innocent and peaceful protesters, so that there is a lot of reason to investigate.

One case is a special, however:

“More worrying is the way in which CCTV is being used by the police. Demonstrator Jake Smith was charged with two counts of violent disorder. These charges were later dropped when Smith’s solicitor, Matt Foot, viewed the original CCTV footage and discovered that the police video had been edited to show events out of sequence, at one point implying another man was Smith while omitting footage showing Smith being assaulted by a police officer without provocation.”

Matt Foot, Jake’s solicitor, has published a short and very insighful written statement of the events.

To sum it up: the London police tampered with video footage in order to prosecute an innocent citizen, and they were caught by a very insistent lawyer.
I find that really hard to digest.

However, there was also one good consequence of the demonstrations. Russell and Ashley Inglis were assaulted by the police, but the police officers responsible could not be identified (youtube video).
They wrote a complaint which was turned down, appealed the decision with the same outcome, then decided to take their case to a solicitor for a civil claim. Russell and Ashley have been awarded £25,000 compensation, although the police officers responsible still remain unidentified! That is the first time this has happened, and although it might not be the best solution to let tax-payers cover for police crimes, at least there seems to be the possibility for compensation when the perpetrators cannot be identified.

Posts on this blog with related content:

• Police aggression in Berlin at “Freiheit statt Angst” demonstration, September 2009
• STOP IT: violence towards policemen at Berlin demonstrations

(Sources: Netzpolitik.org, The Guardian)

The project Google Street-View is very well known by now: Google-cars – equipped with cameras in a heigth of around 2.5 metres – drive through the world’s big cities, creating digital copies of the street fronts.

Many privacy issues have been raised since the project was launched – an example being that people could be identified on the pictures.

Recently, another “big thing” has happened. Something so severe that I want to publish it here.

The cars used WLAN to actually connect to open networks and copy private data. They logged MAC-adresses, parts of emails, names of the stations (SSID) and other information. For weeks, maybe months. All over the world.

Now, how did Google react when this became public? They apologized and stated they “accidentally” used the “wrong software”!

Of course!! Sorry for hacking into your bank and transferring a couple of million dollars to my private bank account. I used the wrong software. I merely wanted to play Tetris …

The good news: the department of public prosecution in Hamburg has taken this issue to court, and demands from Google to hand over the hard drives with the data, until the 26th of May.

Update, 4th of June 2010:
There seems to be some evidence that it was not an accident.

– Sources: tagesschau.de (1), tagesschau.de (2) FAQ, NDR

“We live in an amazing world that is wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don’t care …”

1:49 nearly killed me … hilarious!

How cool is that!

-- via ieee.org

XKCD did a color survey with over 200.000 user sessions, and came up with results both hilarious and interesting.

And since we all know that there isn’t really anything better than something that is both hilarious and interesting, I feel the obligation to share this with you.

A few results, just as an appetizer:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids. [If you don't understand, check this webcomic]
• Color names most disproportionately popular among women: 1. Dusty Teal, 2. Blush Pink, 3. Dusty Lavender, 4. Butter Yellow, 5. Dusky Rose
• Color names most disproportionately popular among men: 1. Penis, 2. Gay, 3. WTF, 4. Dunno, 5. Baige
• Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

Eight days ago, I happened to watch the most influential German TV news: Tagesthemen at 8pm. Sitting in the living room of my grandmother, I hoped that they would show footage of what happened at a press conference that day, and was very surprised as they actually did.

They ran a two minutes story about the video Wikileaks released that day:

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff. Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded. For further information please visit the special project website www.collateralmurder.com.

Finally, Wikileaks has reached the German mass media. I consider it one of the most important democratic tools the internet currently offers, and am very happy that it has been mentioned in the Tagesthemen.

What is Wikileaks?

• Scroll down on their website, and “Click here to make a secure submission.” That’s the main thing about Wikileaks.
• Wikileaks gives people the opportunity to publish documents they think are important for the public – anonymously. We have seen courts all over the world forcing newspapers and other media to disclose their sources in the last years, Wikileaks is trying to fill this gap.
• 10 questions on Wikileaks on CPJ blog (Committee to protect journalists)
• ForeignPolicy wrote an article called “Is This the Future of Journalism? Why Wikileaks matters.”
• A post I wrote a couple of months ago about Wikileaks leaking a document written by the British Ministry of Defence giving advice on how to stop documents leaking onto the internet

WikiLeaks is an organization protecting internal dissidents, whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who face legal or other threats related to publishing. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes [...], we are of assistance to people of all nations who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources. We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies.

If you are going to spend a bit of money on charity projects this year, consider giving $10 to Wikileaks. They accept no other funding than private donations, since they want to stay absolutely incorruptable and transparent.

Achtung, das ist kein Aprilscherz — Facebook hat einen Vorschlag für neue Datenschutzbestimmungen gepostet. Unter Punkt 4 (“Dritten zugänglich gemachte Informationen”) findet sich folgender Satz:

Um dir die Möglichkeit zu geben, auch außerhalb von Facebook nützliche Erfahrungen im sozialen Bereich machen zu können, sind wir gelegentlich gezwungen, anderen überprüften Webseiten und Anwendungen, die sich auf die Facebook-Plattform stützen, allgemeine Daten über dich zur Verfügung zu stellen, wenn du diese besuchst (wenn du noch bei Facebook angemeldet bist)

Was für eine absurde Formulierung … Neusprech³.

(via Heise)

For all the oldschool people who actually still use chat clients (like ICQ, MSN or AIM): check out Miranda. I have been using it for a couple of years now.

Advantages:

• Very small.
• Needs very little RAM.
• Addon system similar to Firefox: the program offers what is needed, you can get the rest (all the fancy stuff noone really wants, like games) via addons/plugins.
• You can run many chat clients on Miranda at the same time. Look at the screenshot – use see my online contacts for Facebook, ICQ, Gmail and Skype. It works for many more protocols, that means you have all your contacts from all different kinds of programs in ONE chat program. MSN, AIM, JABBER etc. pp. are supported.
• For browser-based protocols like Facebook and Gmail you do not need to have your browser opened.
• It is not green (like ICQ), it is not flashy (like ICQ), and it refrains from regularly doing stuff you very much do not want it to do (yes, you guessed already … like ICQ).
• Unfortunately, Miranda still refuses to do my dishes. But apart from that, it’s a pretty neat tool.

EDIT: No, I did not get money for posting this. Too bad really …

A couple of days ago I talked about a study showing that people who illegaly download music on the internet actually also buy more music legally – which means that if the music industry increases the prosecution of downloading music, they actually harm themselves.

People who illegally download music from the internet without paying for it are the music industry’s main clientele, because they are at the same time the very people who buy the most music legally.

Now, a new study has been published on timesonline, with the title “Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing”? The answer is a clear “nopes”.

Let me quote the most interesting parts of the article:

“The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music.”
[...]
“Our data [...] make two things clear: one, that the growth in live revenue shows no igns of slowing and two, that live is by far and away the most lucrative section of industry revenue for artists themselves, because they retain such a big percentage of the money from ticket sales.”
[...]
“Revenues accrued by artists themselves have in fact risen over the past 5 years, despite the fall in record sales.”

The article also contains two very interesting graphs, I’ll show one here, titled with “This is the graph the record industry doesn’t want you to see”.

To sum the graph up:

• The labels makes less money with records, the artists still make the same money as before.
• Compared to 2004, musicians in 2008 earned around 50% more money from live acts.

Overall, they make more money since the whole “pirating” business started, not less.

(via: netzpolitik.org)