Open source software has many advantages: Its function, functionality and correctness can be reviewed. It is instructive and adaptable and can be assembled into a full featured operating system with many software application (giving the impression to be) under the user’s (my) control. On the other hand, as John Mark pointed out, it increases income…
Give peace a chance
At the latest NATO Summit, the president of the USA, Donald Trump pushed the other NATO allies to increase their military spending. The 29 North Atlantic Treaty Organization members have agreed in 2014 to reach or maintain defense budget by 2% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Most countries are currently clearly below. (e.g. Germany…
Life without Google
The rise of the Internet in the last 20 years was tightly connected with the success story of Google LCC . It is one of the most valuable and powerful companies with an enormous knowledge about all of us. Even though their motto was Don’t be evil for a long time, they are undermining data…
Machines took over control
A few month ago, I flew to London Stansted and queued up for the custom control. There was a large group of people ahead of me and took about 20 min to reach to the customs officer, who was, to my surprise, a machine. A few humans helped to properly fill the waiting lines. Only…
Communication is fundamentally changing
The coolest company worldwide is clearly Cambridge Analytica. Within a few month they became the most powerful voter analysis organization, which could substantially influence big polls like last year’s Brexit and US presidential elections. Everybody who believed that free speech over the internet comes without costs, learned an important lecture: In the late 1990th when…
Disney, back off from my paper towel!
If you have small kids you are probably aware of my challenge: The million-Euro-marketing-budget cartoon characters are discovering the kid’s minds. Suddenly their bed is full of (plush toys of) handicapped fish or ice-cold princesses like Nemo and Elsa, respectively. Recently, I observed a quantum leap in cleanness after meal time because of Dory on…
Turnkey Tyranny
When Edward Snowden used the term “turnkey tyranny” (at the end of the linked video) in 2013, I did not see the governmental surveillance systems as the key feature to replace democracy with despotism. Without underestimating Edward’s big achievements and the importance of pointing out the spying on communication systems, I classified the broad surveillance…
Populism rules
The Austrian presidential election is going to a lap of (dis-)honor. The highest court decided to repeat the run-off ballot, which was narrowly won by the green party’s candidate Alexander Van der Bellen, a former economy professor. The loser in this election was the vice chairman of the right-wing populist party Norbert Hofer. Hofer and…
Conspiracy competitors
Recently I saw the first episode of the latest season of X-Files. They blamed their government to be ill-disposed against their own people. As examples they mentioned the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks (Here is a link to the transcript). I did not know about the syphilis experiments but I read a book about the…
Popular outrage
Why we should not tolerate US remote executions by drones. The drone papers were already published three month ago. They describe how American drones kill more than a thousand people in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The victims and their friends and relatives had no voice to make this terrible injustice public, until the brave journalists…