Category: current affairs

Posted on

Nothing to Hide

If you’re reading this blog regularly, you might have asked yourselves why all the thoughts about security, privacy, freedom, and so on lately? And you might be one of those who say “I have nothing to hide”. Well…

This one is a must see. It helps if you understand English, French, and German at least a bit, but even if you don’t, watch it to the end:

This comes from the PeerTube, and it promotes those free and decentralised services, and for good reason as you will hear. So please do yourself and us all a favour and stop using Facebook, Whatsapp, and all of that – and replace it with something like Signal or even better, XMPP. We will all profit from it.

Oh, and in case you have an old Android phone which isn’t supported with regular updates anymore, try DivestOS. And if you have a new one from Google, try GrapheneOS (or else, DivestOS again). Sure you can’t live without that intrusive Play Store? Have a look at F-Droid instead. Or are you using Apple instead? Maybe think again… and please start encrypting. You can at least do that even if you stay with a standard Google or Samsung or Apple device.

As always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.

Posted on

A ‘Thank You!’ to BigBrotherAwards

Have you ever visited their site? Maybe you should…

I just read the BigBrotherAward 2019 in der Kategorie Verbraucherschutz (in German) which went to Zeit Online for their paywall which basically lets you choose to either pay with money or with your data – something that 75% of all online news magazines seem to do now as the article and speech said.

And yes, I’ve seen the same paywall at spiegel.de or heise.de – and no, that *is* not acceptable. If you click “yes, go on”, the heise guys for instance will send your data to >200 “partner” sites all over the globe – so I just asked a member of the EU commission if we can’t stop these practices, for instance with forcing them to add the option “yes to ads, but no to tracking”.

Maybe we should all say “no” instead, and boycott these data tracking sites? If they’d all lose their readers like the British “Times” which lost over 90% of their audience when using similar techniques, then maybe that would stop them… according to Wikipedia (search for something like “Paywall”), some US news magazines are already taking these trackers off…

Thanks to digitalcourage, DVD, ILMR, and CCC for supporting these BigBrotherAwards!

And to you, like always, thanks for reading.

Posted on

Auf Deutsch: Corona und Freiheitsrechte

Direktor des Bonifatiushauses Fulda Gunter Geiger im Gespräch mit Dr. Patrick Liesching, Leitender Oberstaatsanwalt der Staatsanwaltschaft Fulda:

Online-Akademie Bonifatiushaus: Corona und Freiheitsrechte

Das Video ist am 8 May 2020 hochgeladen worden, also bitte nicht wundern wenn manche Aussage nicht ganz aktuell klingt.

Wie immer: vielen Dank für’s Lesen und für’s Zuschauen.