The relation between expert communities and society at large does not take place in a vacuum, but in a field marred by vested interest. For if policies change, this creates winners and losers—and potential losers have an interest in the status quo remaining in place. One strategy they can choose is to accept the facts and openly fight for their interests. But often, these potential losers choose another strategy: undermine the public dissemination of the facts that would suggest that change is needed.

How can we reset the expectations we have of connected devices, so that they are again worthy of our trust and money? Before we can bring the promise back, we must deweaponize the technology.
Guidelines for the hardware producer

These are things we want consumers to expect and demand of manufacturers.

• Control
  *Think local
• Decouple
• Open interfaces
• Be a good citizen

LibreOffice-Anwender:innen wähnen sich hier oft auf der sicheren Seite und ändern, wie vermutlich auch viele MS Office Anwender:innen, nichts an ihrer Konfiguration. Das BSI hat aber auch für LibreOffice Richtlinien entwickelt bzw. entwickeln lassen:

• Sichere Konfiguration von LibreOffice: Empfehlungen für Unternehmen mit einer verwalteten Umgebung
• Sichere Konfiguration von LibreOffice – Empfehlungen für kleinere Unternehmen, Privatanwender und Privatanwenderinnen

Auf der Seite LibreOffice – Aber sicher! sind die Empfehlungen in Form einer LibreOffice XCD-Datei als Service zum Download verfügbar. Die enthaltenen Direktiven wirken vergleichbar zu Gruppenrichtlinien bei Microsoft Office und sichern LibreOffice entsprechend dem Leitfaden. Die Datei herunterladen und im Installationsverzeichnis von LibreOffice in den Pfad share/registry/res ablegen. Wenn man danach LibreOffice startet wird diese Vorkonfiguration automatisch angewandt. Damit lassen sich komplette LibreOffice-Deployments für viele viele Workstations sichern ohne die Anwender:innen das alles selbst machen zu lassen.

Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.

Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut

Sovereignty is the absence of strong dependencies on third parties. The Sovereign Cloud from AWS is a misnomer here.

POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere.

The idea is that you, the poster, should post on a website that you own. Not an app that can go away and take all your posts with it, not a platform with ever-shifting rules and algorithms. Your website. But people who want to read or watch or listen to or look at your posts can do that almost anywhere because your content is syndicated to all those platforms.

Work software isn’t really about work anymore -
It’s all about organizing how you’re planning to complete tasks, instead.

There are six lies that corporations have told since time immemorial:
I. Pure denial (Workers are happy, no negative env. impact, ...)
II. Markets can solve problems, governments can't
III. Consumers and workers are to blame
IV. Government cures are always worse than the disease
V. Helping people only hurts them
VI. Everyone who disagrees with me is a socialist

The CSD 3324 SPF secures Group 3 fax communications for mission-critical government, corporate and private applications. The CSD 3324 SPF connects to Group 3 fax machines providing secure fax communications using the AES 256-bit encryption algorithm and Diffie-Hellman public key exchange key management for proven cryptographic strength, and ease of deployment and operation. The CSD 3324 SPF's secure fax encryption features are identical to the CSD 3324 SP secure voice telephone and fax encryption system; therefore, secure fax exchanges are 100% interoperable with the CSD 3324 SP secure fax encryption capability. The CSD 3324 SP also has AES-based secure voice.

Since 17 October, to our knowledge any email with the NewClimate URL (newclimate dot org) in the email body, link, signature, reply header or contained anywhere in an attachment is unjustifiably quarantined by Microsoft email servers without any notice, regardless of who sends or receives the email.

"das Zusammenwirken welcher Zufälle den Auftragswert gemäß § 46 Abs 2 BVergG haarscharf unter 100.000 EUR ergeben hat, sodass die Vergabe mittels Direktvergabe formfrei und nicht per Durchführung eines förmlichen Vergabeverfahrens erfolgte"

Wir können nicht ausschließen, dass Daten abgeflossen sind“, schreibt das Unternehmen in einer Stellungnahme. „Auf Basis bisheriger Erkenntnisse könnte es sich dabei um Geschäfts-, Mitarbeiter- und Kundendaten handeln.“

Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc.
a
The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16.

From the "no shit, Sherlock" department:

The legacy of layoffs—and how they were carried out—could “come back to haunt companies when the pendulum of the labor market inevitably swings back,”

Whilst Visual Studio Code is "open-source" (as per the OSD) the value-add which transforms the editor into anything of value ("what people actually refer to when they talk about using VSCode") is far from open and full of intentionally designed minefields that often makes using Visual Studio Code in any other way than what Microsoft desires legally risky...

Wann aber die notwendige Überleitung von der Cyber-Krise in den Cyber-Defence-Fall vorgenommen wird und welche Schritte zu setzen sind, darüber herrscht Unklarheit. Das stellt der Rechnungshof in seinem heute veröffentlichten Bericht „Koordination der Cyber-Defence“ fest.

In den drei Covid-Jahren haben sich in allen Firmen sehr stabile und produktive Remote-First Strukturen ausgebildet. Sehr viele Mitarbeiter haben sehr schnell gelernt, dass zweimal eine Stunde Commute pro Tag mehr Belastung waren, als sie bewusst bemerkt haben. Sie waren sehr froh, diese Lebenszeit zurückzubekommen.
...
Wenn Unternehmen nun – aus welchem Grund auch immer – versuchen, das zurückzudrehen, dann erzeugen sie damit eine große Unzufriedenheit bei ihren Mitarbeitern und drehen die Fluktuation hoch bis zum Anschlag. Sie machen dabei keinen Gewinn, denn sie verlieren genau die Mitarbeiter, die sie behalten müssen und wollen. Unternehmen bluten vom Kopfe her.

Queen Mary University had an important role in the history of the Vim editor. It was here that, in 1973, the first UNIX system of the UK was installed, and it was also here that professor George Coulouris developed an editor called em. The creation of em ended up snowballing into the development of vi and many other vi clones after that.

After “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” ended, Graham Chapman worked with an up-and-coming young writer named Douglas Adams on a new sketch comedy show for the BBC. It was called "Out of the Trees," and it bombed. Only one episode was made, and that aired only once, on January 10, 1976.

Once the Beeb gave up on "Out of the Trees," they did to it what they did to so many other programs of that era: they erased it. They wiped the master tapes so they could be re-used. "Out of the Trees" went into the history books as lost media.

That changed nearly 30 years later, when Chapman's partner, David Sherlock, approached Dick Fiddy, an archivist at London's National Film Theatre. Sherlock revealed that Chapman had in fact recorded a copy of "Out of the Trees" onto videotape from his home TV the one and only time it aired.

But there was a problem. That air date was in 1976, before VHS or Betamax became global videocassette standards. Chapman had recorded the show on one of the very earliest home videotape formats -- Philips' "Video Cassette Recording" (VCR), which had reached the market in 1972. The rise of Beta and VHS had, however, led Philips to abandon its VCR format. The last compatible players had been made in 1979. By the mid-2000s, they were impossible to find. Sherlock had been left with an historic tape, and no machine to play it on.

Fiddy says it took two years to build a compatible player, but eventually it was done.

Once we were acquired, Yahoo helped us on the tech side, but not as much as it said it would. I think this is common for acquisitions. Before you’re acquired, you’re an important visionary. Afterward, you’re a crazy person who just wants to burn money.

Any decision was an endless discussion. I remember once, we had to present to a senior vice-president. We had a 105-slide deck prepared, and we didn’t get past the second slide because they ratholed about one fucking slide. It was a miserable environment.