Stop data retention - Stop Vorratsdatenspeicherung

EN: Hacking-paragraph, biometric passports ... German politicians decided in the last time against the recommendations of IT/security specialists (german). Next law in the pipe: telecommunication data retention. The benefits of this law are very low, the effort of the implementation is quite high and the potential of abuse of the stored data (german) is tremendous. There is still the possibility to stop the law - visit www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de for more information.

DE: Hacking-Paragraph, biometrischer Reisepass ... in letzter Zeit haben deutsche Poliker entgegen den Empfehlungen von IT-/Sicherheitsspezialisten entschieden. Als nächstes steht die Verabschiedung der Gesetzes für Vorratsdatenspeicherung auf dem Plan. Der Nutzen dieses Gesetzes ist gering, der Aufwand der Umsetzung sehr hoch und das Potential des Missbrauches dieser Daten enorm. Noch kann das Gesetz verhindert werden. Mehr Informationen auf www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de.

Empfehlung: Chaosradio und Chaosradio Express haben in letzte Zeit viele verwandte Themen behandelt und bieten eine gute Einführung.

Max Planck Society puts pressure on Springer

The Max Planck Society has not extended it's contract with Springer. Michael summarized the story nicely.

Semantic web logos

The W3C has created a set of logos to promote semantic web technologies. Nice!





(What this means for microformats can be found here. :))

A talk about openness, freedom and transparency

Finally I took the time to record and finalize the screencast (Xvid4, mpeg, Google Video (*)) of a talk I gave some weeks ago at the EMBL PhD retreat in Barcelona. It is called "A quick trip through openness, freedom and transparency" (pdf) and covers open source, open formats, Creative Commons, open access, open science/knowledge in a very introductionary way.

Thanks to Nikolay Sturm who helped me to create a port (not perfect but fine for this purpose) of recordmydesktop for OpenBSD.

(*) bad resolutions on Google Video ... any suggestions how to improve that?