Today I ended my Pocket Premium subscription.
I have been using Read It Later (now Pocket) since 2011, quite a long time ago. In 2015 I started paying for it because I used the service a lot, I found it very useful, and I did not want it to disappear like so many others have before. The best and notable features were:
On too big to fail tech …
Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all.
The Internet has gotten too big.
Will anyone ever write another positive story about a tech startup? I said probably not.
Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction.
Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups.
The [EU] Commission has been trying to boost the security industry for ten years now, and nearly €2 billion has already been funneled into security research.
some politics after non-Brexit day …
In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.
The notion that public figures and professionals are basically trustworthy has been integral to the health of representative democracies. After all, the very core of liberal democracy is the idea that a small group of people – politicians – can represent millions of others.
Die Bürgergesellschaft wird als nicht zeitgemäß empfunden – allein Berufspolitiker verstünden die Welt des Jahres 2019 noch. […] Zusammengefasst: Die Berufspolitiker möchten beim Wegregieren nicht belästigt werden.
Meine These zur neuen Urheberrechtsgesetzgebung und deren Artikel 11 und 13 ist ja, dass die gesamte Novelle vor allem ein Versuch ist, das Internet so umzugestalten, dass es zu einem, – sagen wir mal – konservativerem Verständnis davon, wie Medien funktionieren, passt.
Aber mit der Bahn über eine längere Strecke in ein anderes, europäisches Land zu reisen, in eine Stadt abseits der paar Metropolen, die mit dem Railteam erreichbar sind? Das kann ich niemandem empfehlen, der nicht vollkommen schmerzgeil und mit einem dicken Notfallgeldbeutel gesegnet ist. An diesem Punkt schäme ich mich für “meine” Bahn, für “meine” EU.
Noch nie seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg war Europa so wichtig. Und doch war Europa noch nie in so großer Gefahr.
Über Arbeit und ihre Umstände …
Wer sich für mehr Homeoffice einsetzen möchte, um Arbeitnehmerinnen und Arbeitnehmern eine bessere Vereinbarkeit von Beruf und Familie zu ermöglichen, könnte mehr als zwei Minuten in eine passende Bildwahl investieren.
Ich erhebe die Forderung nach einer Architektur und Inneineinrichtung aus nicht mehr als 10 Materialien und nicht mehr als 5 Formen.
WLAN, ein Tisch, frischer Latte Macchiato und schlaue Köpfe hinter Computern: Mit diesen Zutaten wollte die idealistische Coworking-Bewegung die Arbeitswelt revolutionieren. Herausgekommen ist die Plattformisierung vor allem in Gestalt von Wework – modular, effizient und pragmatisch.
It’s easy to wallpaper over the shortcomings of the business with a bull market’s halcyon: cheap capital. WeWork has brought new meaning to the word wallpaper.
There’s a chart I came across in 2017, and not only does it tell an extremely important story about automation, but it also tells a story about the state of the automation discussion itself.
I couldn’t figure out why small, straightforward tasks on my to-do list felt so impossible. The answer is both more complex and far simpler than I expected.
On Licenses, Open Source, Communities, etc
Op-ed: How one German professor had a bad experience with overly broad upload filters.
Did you download your binary of Visual Studio Code directly from the official website? If so, you’re not using a Free Software and only Microsoft knows what was added to this binary. And you should think of the worst possible.
Author’s note: This is a more intimate look into what it’s like to be a maintainer of popular open source software. This is written by me, personally, and not as a representative of the company. I’m going out on a limb here, so try to be nice, okay?
TL;DR: Don’t be a passive consumer of FOSS. It’s going to kill the FOSS community or change it in bad ways. Contribute in any way described in this article, even really basic ones, but contribute daily or on a very regular basis.
In the past couple of weeks, there’s been a lot of commotion in the open source / free software world about codes of conduct and specific people (Linus) and specific projects (Linux) and so on.
Let’s take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2019 main talk schedule, shall we?
GDPR, DSGVO, etc.
Es hätte klappen können: Privacy by Design, Klarheit über unsere erfassten Daten, Datenschutz als Normalzustand. Die Datenschutzgrundverordnung (DSGVO) hat stattdessen den Ruf des Datenschutzes geschwächt und das Internet weiter zentralisiert. Schöner Mist. Und jetzt?
Denn eine Flut an Pop-Ups zum Abnicken helfen am Ende weder den Nutzern noch den kleinen und mittleren Anbietern im Netz, sie helfen vor allem den Großen.
Letzte Woche ist was nicht so Schönes passiert. Es hat mit *drum roll* Datenschutz und DSGVO zu tun. Und mit meinem Kind. Oder vielmehr: allen Kindern. Und Jugendlichen. In diesem Internet.
This text will just look at the GDPR as it is, as regulation.
GDPR requires you to be more thoughtful about the sites and services you build, more transparent about the ways you collect and use data, more considerate of your users, and more thorough in your development and documentation processes.
On Java …
Developers can use this guide to discover, understand and use the right Java logging library for their applications, like Log4j2, Logback, or java.util.logging.
Java is one of the most popular languages in use by AWS customers, and we are committed to supporting Java and keeping it free.
If you stay up to date on news from the Java community, you may have heard that Oracle have changed their support model for Java. Some news is even suggesting that we now have to pay to use Java – this is not true!
Java 11 is released today! Formally it marks the end of a monumental shift in the Java ecosystem.
It occurred to me that, really, I had more or less picked up all of it by word of mouth and experience, and there just aren’t any good reference sources on the topic. So… here’s my word of mouth.
Later JDK versions have made it far easier to run a JVM application in a Linux container.
On cloud computing and vendors …
It comes up in a lot of conversations with clients. We want to be cloud-agnostic. We need to avoid vendor lock-in. We want to be able to shift workloads seamlessly between cloud providers. Let me say it again: multi-cloud is a trap.
Perhaps there is no deeper disappointment in life than when a cherished concept fails to produce the desired results. Such is the case with the industry’s notion of private clouds. I’m throwing in the towel, walking away – and cursing under my breath. It’s a failed concept.
For companies that don’t want to spend a lot of time learning and dealing with the complexities of AWS, I recommend looking at Google Cloud.
With the enormous attack surface of cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP, why aren’t there more security problems? […] Dr. Byron Cook gave an enthusiastic talk on Formal Reasoning about the Security of Amazon Web Service.
When you take a hard look at CloudWatch’s complete failure across all 14 Leadership Principles, you wonder how this product ever made it out the door in its current state.
On the youtube channel, it can be hard to search by description or session level. Try these pages to help you navigate.