There is a shadow on the world, a shadow of secrecy surrounding the ACTA treaty. We are concerned that this treaty will have severe consequences for the future of the Internet. But there is no need to fear, only to rebuild and patch the errors that appear in politics.
Towards the end of this month, Swedish Minister of Communications Åsa Torstensson will travel to Washington DC to convey one (out of several other) important message from the European Union and Sweden. …
Åsa Torstensson will also meet with the president’s advisor Peter Cowhey (Senior Counselor to the US Trade Representative) in order to discuss the new trade agreement known as the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), which is currently being negotiated. Åsa Torstensson will present the opinion that the negotiations process should be opened up, so that interested parties and groups are given the opportunity to submit more detailed opinions about the contents of the negotiations and draft documents.
Let me add that 1st of December Art 15 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU is set into force. In my German language “confirmatory application” for an ACTA document access to the European Council I argued recently that this takes effects for the ACTA document access regime as well.
I continue to advocate the following doctrine:
If the EU-Commission (DG Trade) is unable to comply with Art 15 (former Art 255) citizen rights then the Commission lacks authority to negotiate such legislative and regulative matters with these third nations. It is upon the US and other nations to agree on a transparency regime compliant with Art 15 citizen rights.
It seems unacceptable to me that documents are provided to few American professional lobbyists but not to European legislators (despite repeated requests) and European citizens which enjoy a right scrutinize such documents of legislative nature.
Dabei handelt es sich um einen Dienst, der Verschlusssachen der allgemeinen Netzöffentlichkeit verfügbar macht und damit die Intransparenz von Regierungshandeln und Vertraulichkeit von wirtschaftlichem Handeln untergräbt. So sehr es Blogger und Journalisten freut, an brisante Dokumente zu gelangen, hat der Abbau von Informationsasymmetrien einen schalen Beigeschmack. Der Dienst Wikileaks untergräbt beispielsweise den Respekt vor Verschlusssachen, und er macht Geheimnisverrat zu einer Art Volkssport. Dass sodann niemand mehr die Privatsphäre respektiert, wozu die warnende Formel “Privacy is dead” konsequent exekutiert wird, erschiene folgerichtig.
Reformwürdig ist für mich zweifelsohne die ganz normale legale Transparenz staatlichen Handelns und der Schutz vor Wirtschaftsspionage und Verletzung der Privatsphäre. Das hat nicht zuletzt auch der unglücklich erzwungene, schneidige Rücktritt von Minister Jung demonstriert.
Besserre Offenheit ist möglich und tut staatlichem Handeln gut, das sollte mehr Aufmerksamkeit bekommen. Die Schweden machen es vor, auch die EU hat sehr weit entwickelte Offenheit. Die Transparenzmaßnahmen sind leider mitunter nur sehr “dumm” realisiert wie z.B. das EU-Lobbyregister. Den sehr linken Gruppierungen, die sich daran verheben für das Register öffentlichen Druck aufzubauen, fehlt die Weitsicht, warum ihre Vorschläge nutzlos bis schädlich sind. Am 1. Dezember tritt außerdem der neue Lissabon-Vertrag in Kraft, mitsamt Artikel 15 des Vertrages über die Funktionsweise, der den Bürger Europas erweiterte Zugangsrechte zu öffentlichen Dokumenten gibt.
Einen Dienst wie Wikileaks beäuge ich äußerst skeptisch bis ablehnend. Neben Recht und Gesetz gibt sehr gute Gründe Informationen verschlossen zu halten, ACTA ist vielleicht ein schlechtes Beispiel, aber es gibt Dokumente, die wir als Bürger gar nicht zu Gesicht bekommen wollen. Man kann also fast von einer Art Informationsterror der Offenlegung sprechen. Ich wundere mich übrigens, dass noch keine Gruppierung auf die Idee gekommen ist, auf internationalen Konferenzen oder in Lobbybüros zu sniffen. Der Geheimschutz wird bei Lobbyisten und Repräsentanten immer noch viel zu nachlässig behandelt. Da sind wir sehr nah einer anderen Ebene, unserer Privatsphäre, Vertrauen und dem professionellen Schutz unseres Arbeitens. Wer weiss schon, demnächst findet die Blogosphere womöglich den imap-Folder von Markus oder den Deutschlandradio-Journalisten bei Wikileaks.
Here is the readers digest quote from an interoperability specialist’s rant about the French paper:
- the document is of poor quality. By this I mean that you do not expect this kind of document stemming from a french central administration: a few spellchecking errors, low level of technical discourse matched with european jargon.
…
- an attention to details that is simply ridiculous: it describes the SMTP and TCP/IP protocols in details and then set as a Rule that they should be used. (Thanks to the document we can now feel safe and righteous when we use TCP/IP to surf the Internet).
…
- Lots of factual errors and inaccuracies: times new roman is not a font that can be used free of any right.
- comparing apples and bananas: The only difference between REST architectures and SOAs is not that the SOAs are not REST (although we understand they’re trying to describe two kinds of “web services” it is wildly inaccurate and creates a senseless chatter).
… and so forth. The simple question to ask is, like it or not, what does the Sarkozy government want to achieve with its French interoperability framework RGI? What is the practical purpose of their RGI? I have no answer for this question prepared. It only makes much sense to me to enact it while Malmö quarrels over the European Interoperability Framework 2.0 and the degrees of openness needed for interoperability. If administration hasn’t made up its mind about its national interests in the matter it is no surprise that the contents of the document becomes coton.
Ghostwhite is a very useful colour for web spplications. When you consult the colour dictionary you will find out the hex code. For CSS files it is better to use the hex codes, otherwise the W3C validator would complain.
Eine Antriebstechnik, die vor etwa 35 Jahren bei der amerikanischen Firma Mecanum entwickelt wurde, erlaubt sehr beeindruckende Anwendungsmöglichkeiten in der Robotik. Weiterentwickelt wurde diese Antriebsform vor allem für die Militärlogistik.
The General Secretariat has weighed my “interest in being informed of progress in this area against the general interest that progress be made in an area that is still the subject of negotiations”… “As there is no evidence suggesting an overriding public interest to warrant disclosure of the document in question, the General Secretariat has concluded that protection of the decision-making process outweighs the public interest in disclosure.”
I wonder if I should write a confirmatory application. In particular it seems that the person who wrote the letter was not very experienced with EC/1049/2001 applications.
The Commission today moved to the second phase of an infringement proceeding over the UK to provide its citizens with the full protection of EU rules on privacy and personal data protection when using electronic communications. European laws state that EU countries must ensure the confidentiality of people’s electronic communications like email or internet browsing by prohibiting their unlawful interception and surveillance without the user’s consent. As these rules have not been fully put in place in the national law of the UK, the Commission today said that it will send the UK a reasoned opinion.
Found this rant about the social network service Facebook at harmsen.net.
Facebook is worse than useless to you because facebook.com is Facebook’s website, not yours. It is not ‘your’ profile, it is Facebook’s profile about you. Those aren’t your friends, they are a Facebook sanitized version of your friends. It took centuries of political evolution to reduce this kind of manipulative abuse and insult from the state – why go backwards to a medieval social structure and expose ourselves to this kind of abuse on Facebook and the like?
A business colleague of mine started a project called TioLibre with our German association FFII e.V. which researches the risk management of cloudsourcing. I don’t know if he thought of the term Tiro libre. Social networks at least require a better management of personal social identity data but who does?
When I entered university there were still Volkszählung’s boycott stickers in the toilet. The data attempted to be gathered by the government was riddiculous, but the Volkszählung followed from the symbolic 1984.
For the SkyDrive Explorer, a kind of Dropbox clone, a new definition of cross-platform has been developed:
Cross-platform
32/64 bit OS support
SkyDrive Explorer works both in 32- and 64-bit Microsoft® Windows OS. Minimal required OS is Windows XP, and SkyDrive Explorer will successfully work in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and 2008, and Windows 7.
But anyway, tools like Skydrive are killer applications. File servers are nothing new in the business environment but setting these external virtual hard discs up has never been so simple.
Now that is fun! When you look at the KDE4 trunk statistics the Germanic minority language Low Saxon is more complete than the German translation/localisation of KDE. Back in 2004 I attended the Linux Information Days in my home town Wilhelmshaven as a speaker, where Heiko Evermann presented his project to translate KDE into low saxon. I thought it was a great idea but they would never catch up. Low Saxon reads as follows:
“Updating boot sector for NTFS file system on partition %1.”
msgstr “”
“Bootsektor för NTFS-Dateisysteem op Partitschoon %1 “”warrt opfrischt.”
The teams have to translate at present 163711 strings. Lox Saxon (5) is at 92%, German (11) at 87%. There is a reason why Lower Saxony won’t make KDE4 in Low Saxon its National Desktop Environment for the public sector. Hardly anyone speaks it in the capital Hanover where according to certain legends the reference dialect of German (Standard German) is spoken, a city which ironically had been under English rule for quite some time.
