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…
Category: Politics
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…
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…
Knowledge is key
In the last couple of days I attended a clinical cancer conference. I learned a lot about the clinical practice for this terrible disease and also about careless data protection habits. As we learned from our tweeting hero, the connection data are the low hanging fruits. And this is not different in conference business. When…
Achievements of Civilisation
Living in peace in my country is a privilege, I can not appreciate enough. Civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and several other places in the world, are horrible. Cruelty of the soldiers involved and the terrible consequences of their activities are beyond my imagination. These countries are drowing in chaos and rational thinking and…
Simple minds
Recently I got a request from the business contacts platform linkedin, asking if I might share all my email addresses and passwords with them. They want automatically go through my mail account’s address books to find new contacts for me. They promise, that my passwords are save with them and they will use them entirely…
The world is changing
It has been a while since my last post in January this year. In the meantime lots of things changed in the online world. The naive part of the population (including me) realized, that the secret services around the world do more sophisticated spying, than opening hand-written letters with steam. A brave young man, Edward…