A couple of days ago I’ve given a short look back at the year 2009 from a personal point of view. Right after, I realized there were a couple more things with a wider tech perspective that I’d like to include – again, more for personal documentation than anything else. So here goes.

Everything went to the cloud
We had been talking about cloud computing for a few years, but for me, 2009 clearly was the year The Cloud took off. I moved practically everything to the cloud, and cloud often equals Google these days. My email has been living inside gMail for years, but in 2009 I’ve ditched my email client altogether. Now I’m IMAP-ing browser-based between my computers and my phone.

Everything but my most sensitive documents live in the cloud, especially most collaborative docs. (Again, Google Docs or Etherpad, but Etherpad has also been acquired by Google recently.) My calendars are 100% up in Google Calendar.

Am I happy about this focus on Google? Far from it. But at this point, I see no equally well-executed alternative. For an overview of just how googley 2009 was, head over to Gina Trapani. Also, I recommend This Week In Google, a great weekly podcast with Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis and, again, Gina Trapani.

Still all this is clearly just the beginning. It should be interesting to watch where cloud computing goes in 2010.

Android killed the iPhone (for me)
Ok, ok, Android may not have killed the iPhone officially. But ever since I switched to an Android-based phone (HTC Hero), I haven’t felt the urge to get an iPhone. Not a single time. Before I had been playing with the idea, and had always restrained. (I really don’t like the product policy behond the iPhone.) Android is a gorgeous, stable, powerful platform, and it’s all open source. It’s clear to me that while I might change phones a few times over the next couple of years, it’s not likely I’ll be leaving Android anytime soon.

Speaking of open source, 2009 is also the year I ditched Windows for good. I now live a Windows-free live (with a mix of Mac OSX, Ubuntu and Android), and boy, it’s feeling good.

The fight for our data
2009 has also been a year of intense battles in the digital realm, although certainly it’s not the last (or worst) to come. These fights have been along many different fronts, and not all have been going well at all.

In politics, Europe has been covered in conflicts regarding data retention. (German government introduced excessive data retention laws which are now under court review as far as I know.) Also in Germany, the basis for government-run censorship was laid under the pretense of fighting child abuse, search for #zensursula for details. The best German-language resource for these topics is certainly netzpolitik.org, so check them out for more details and updates. Good news, if not a solution to the problem: President Köhler has so far refused to sign the law.

In the corporate world, the conflict lines have been a lot more fragmented and twisted. However, one thing has become clear: Internet consumers will have to make a clear point regarding their expectations in terms of privacy and data control in digital contexts. Be it Facebook and its privacy settings, be it data ownership in other social networks. Important keywords in this field are: Data Portability identification systems like OAuth, microformats or the decentralized social web. (Like so often, Chris Messina is right in the middle of it. Check out the DiSo Project.) The same goes for End User License Agreements (EULA for short). Everybody is so used to just clicking those pages upon pages of legalese away that we’re bound to have a discussion about their use and legitimacy sometime soon. This isn’t new, but hasn’t been solved either, so maybe 2010 will bring some news there.

But worry not, it’s not all lost – these topics seemed to be very niche, and maybe still are. However, everybody in their right mind will come to the conclusion that there’s a line to what consumers have to bear before just moving on to another brand or product. (Even my mom was asking about the insanity of DRM the other day!) It looks like these topics, obscure as they may seem, are getting more publicity and more people to help out. Hopefully we can all collaboratively take some of the load off of the few individuals that have been doing such a tremendous job of raising awareness so far. (You know who you are.)

Obviously I’m happy to be able to end this post on a happy note.

So, again in short: the tech year of 2009 the way I perceived it = year of privacy discussions, cloud computing, Android.

Did I forget anything important? Let me know…

(image source)

In short: The Zensursula plans won’t help a single abused child, but rather warn the abusers; and the whole project is based on perfectly wrong premises. Example: One of the most-often repeated arguments of the censorship side is that the internet may not be a lawless space – of course it isn’t in the least, all the national laws apply there as well, and are in most cases fairly easy to enforce. While not helping anyone in the least bit, this opens the doors for more classic censorship (think intellectual property rights etc.).

To cut a long story short, this video is spot on. (It’s German, though. If you happen to know a translated or subtitled version, please let me know.)

RetteDeineFreiheit.de from alexanderlehmann on Vimeo.

More on the website: http://rettedeinefreiheit.de.

I’m not sure I should be quoting from this email, but these lines feel so intense I think they better speak for themselves.

“Up to now, since election, most of us are talking and thinking about election results, street demonstrations, arresting people … we had a terrible shock and we got thrown among lies. We are still so sad and angry. We have to overcome our problems,” she said among many other things, “and we shall, but we need time.”

Around them, chaos is raging, and this young woman takes the time to reply to my email, to share her thoughts and to explain herself. The odd thing is – she’s an extremely brave young woman, but she’s like one of us, she could be a geek from around the corner. I don’t know what to say.

(Boingboing has a list of things to do for Iranians.)

It’s a sad day for Germany, and an infuriating one. The law hasn’t passed yet, but the major parties have agreed (Netzpolitik.org, in German) to introduce net censorship in Germany. It’s all under the pretense of protecting children against abuse, but the draft of the law clearly shows that it will neither protect children nor put a limit on the distribution on videos of child abuse. It also shows how badly an unhealthy mix of under-informed politicians and overly symbolic politics can go wrong.

The German government will censor the internet. What country am I living in?

I am seriously stunned as I’m writing this. How could this come about? Von der Leyen, the conservative Secretary of Family Affairs, pushed this piece of legislation hard and actually managed to get not just her party (CDU) but also a large chunk of the German Bundestag to agree to legislation that clearly they haven’t read don’t understand the scope of, mostly by using harsh rhetoric and fake statistics, pretending she knows how to fight child abuse. Never mind that even conservative newspaper Handelsblatt stated: It’s official, von der Leyen has lied. (Some conservative politicians as well as lobbyists have already stated that other content – copyright infringements, gambling, violent games – should also be considered for blocking.)

Personally, this troubles me on several levels. These laws clearly intrude my private life as someone whose private and business life revolves around the net to a large degree. Also, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had the chance to stop this madness by withdrawing support and didn’t – despite a wing within the party strongly opposing the whole censorship project.

I’m an adviser to the online youth election campaign of SPD. Panorama3000 and I organize the online campaign for Jusos, the SPD’s youth organization. (The Jusos oppose censorship plans; former head of Jusos Björn Böhning lead the intra-party stance to stop the censorship plans.) Both on a personal level and as a campaigner I must say agreeing to this legislation hurts democracy in Germany, and the ongoing election campaign.

To clarify, and as full disclosure: I will continue to support Jusos in the election campaign; I still think SPD is one of the very few sound choices in the upcoming elections (the Greens being the other), but that’s a personal choice. The thing is: We all need to make it clear that we oppose censorship. This is not something that just affects the geeks and nerds. This affects all of us.

How could we get to this point? This is ridiculous.

Update: Thomas Knüwer of German newspaper Handelsblatt has some comments on this issue: Dammbruch im Internet (de)

So you can imagine how happy I was when a petition to the parliament to prevent this law was put up on the German Bundestag’s e-petition site and got more than 10.000 supporters – within hardly 12 hours. Now there’s about a month until we need to get 50.000 supporters, then the parliament would be forced to listen to the petitioners. Given the surge of support in the little time, I’m confident this will work out.

CP is a heinous crime, and should be fought effectively wherever possible. But what she plans is ridiculous, ineffective, and dangerous: A blacklist of domain names, secret and without any oversight whatsoever, to be filtered by ISPs on a “voluntary basis”. Whereas “voluntary” means choosing between agreeing or being outed as a supporter of crimes against children.

Needless to say, IP filtering is too easy to circumvent to prevent any crime, or even the access to this kind of content. It’s completely ineffective & inefficient. What’s worse, this seems to happen instead of cracking down on the criminals who run the CP rings. (Some recent studies have shown that most CP rings are based in Western countries like the U.S., Sweden and Germany with strong laws to fight CP, and that the police isn’t really maxing out these laws yet. In other words: A test by Childcare showed that it’s actually fairly easy to shut down CP providers without any kind of filtering. This needs to be the first step.)

The opposition to these plans have been acting under the common tag Zensursula, a pun on the word censorship (“Zensur”) and the ministers first name (“Ursula”). Experts of all fields agree that these plans are complete crap. Even the Minister of Justice criticizes von der Leyen’s plans as probably anti-constitutional.

Putting these domain filters into place – with no oversight by judges, parliament or any independent jury – is the most dangerous thing I’ve seen in the German political sphere in a long time. Ursula von der Leyen is now trying to put her project on a legal basis. (What’s even worse, she gives contradictory, if not misleading information about the extent of her plans.)

It’s important that the politicians learn about this issue. I sincerely believe that the support for this whole internet filtering idea act on the best intentions. But a lot of them simply & clearly don’t have the technical background to understand what’s going on. How we could end up in this weird situation I simply cannot grasp. (Hello, staff, how about a decent briefing for your boss?) But now it’s important to stop this craziness.

Also, it’s clear that once these censorship tools are put in place, it won’t stay about CP for long. Others, most notably the Intellectual Property interest groups, will try to get in on the game, too. Dieter Gorny, the spokesperson of the German music industry has already expressed their support of the plans as a good first step towards better protection of intellectual property, read: he looks forward to also filtering supposedly pirated music. This is blunt, insensitive, and of course he’s not in any position to demand internet censorship to protect his industry’s interest on the expense of basic democratic rights like free, unlimited and uncensored internet access.

If you speak German, Netzpolitik is the best source for info on the topic. If you’re eligible to vote in Germany, you can sign the petition against censorship.

So this turned out much longer than intended. But yes, it’s that important. And that insane.

Nutshell version (from the press release):

Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard was a member of the BOBs jury last year, and sees a real benefit to promoting freedom of opinion in the blogosphere.

‘Reporters Without Borders is proud to promote online free speech,’ Julliard said. ‘Blogs are often a means for people to express their views in countries where they generally cannot do this. The Internet is a revolution for voices that governments try to silence or harass. It was a great experience to be part of the jury as the BOBs are an excellent way of exploiting the Internet’s possibilities with regards to freedom of information.’

Among those nominated for this year’s Reporters Without Borders Award is the Cuban journalist Yoani Sanchez, who Time magazine voted one of the 100 most influential people of the year in 2008. Another nominee is Zeng Jinyan, the wife of the human-rights activist Hu Jia. She is currently under house arrest in China. The blog from the 4Equality project was also nominated. The project is aimed at collecting a million signatures in favor of more rights for women in Iran.

The liveblog will go online around 8pm Berlin time (GMT +1) and there’s a number of ways to follow the event:

First, and of course best, is being there, live in the meatspace. If you’re in Berlin, don’t miss out, it should be great. The ceremony will take place in the Museum for Communication (Google Maps). It’s free and open, and after the ceremony you’ll have the chance to meet the jury.

Second, and hopefully not bad either, there’ll be live coverage: I’ll be liveblogging both here and on the BOBs website. (Full disclosure: This is a paid gig.) Personally, I’d recommend you watch it on the BOBs site, as there’ll also be a live video stream. You’ll get the videostream on your left and my liveblog on the right. Of course, you can also grab the embed code and spread the work (and thereby promote freedom of speech) on your own blog. Feel free to do so!

You can register here if you’d like to get an email reminder:

Update: Get the whole picture!
I figured it might be even more interesting to follow both the liveblog and see what others are saying about the BOBs. So here’s what the folks on Twitter are saying:

The box above is done via Twemes.com, a pretty useful little service that aggregates in one place every tweet tagged with #thebobs. If you discuss the BOBs on Twitter, just include #thebobs in your post and it will show up here.

Update: Chinese jury member couldn’t leave China
The Chinese blogger, citizen journalist and member of the jury Shuguang Zhou was restricted from leaving China. This sadly shows how important these awards are.

Image: CCC

Who’s it for? “Especially for people with little experience it is important to have simple solutions to break through walls. For this reason we present the FreedomStick.” And by walls, they refer to the Great Firewall.

Using TOR and mobile FireFox, your connection will be quite a bit slower. But that seems like a pretty fair price to pay for not leaving any traces online.

The software and a tutorial is available here. (If you’d like to support a non-profit while preserving your privacy, German privacy fighters FoeBud sell a memory stick loaded with the software for fundraising, it’s available for €20.)

Amnesty International (ai) just published their report “Chinese Authorities’ Broken Promises Threaten Olympic Legacy” in which they state:

In the run-up to the Olympics, the Chinese authorities have locked up, put under house arrest and forcibly removed individuals they believe may threaten the image of “stability” and “harmony” they want to present to the world.

Internet censorships continues, even in the confined Olympic media center:

Reports have just confirmed that foreign journalists working from the Olympics press centre in Beijing are unable to access amnesty.org, the Amnesty International website. In addition, The China Debate, a site recently launched by Amnesty International as a forum to discuss human rights has been blocked in China.

A number of other websites are also reported to have been blocked, including Taiwan newspaper Liberty Times and the Chinese versions of both Germany’s Deutsche Welle and the BBC.

This flies in the face of official promises to ensure “complete media freedom” for the Games. Internet control and censorship is increasing as the Olympics approach. Many other sites, including several reporting on HIV/AIDS issues in Beijing, have been targeted.

What’s more, reporters and activists (including, I suspect, bloggers) face legal and other threats:

Amnesty International believes that local activists and journalists working on human rights issues in China are at particular risk of abuse during the Games.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) confirms this situation:

Chinese authorities deleted an Internet link to an article that appeared on 17 July 2008 in the prominent Chinese newspaper Xinjingbao (Beijing News) of an interview with a US photographer of Hong Kong origin, Liu Xiangcheng, who worked in China during the 1980s. They acted over a small photo showing men with bullet wounds following the 1989 military crackdown against the Tiananmen Square uprising. (…) The Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported that the authorities also immediately demanded the removal of the newspaper from newsstands and censorship of the article online. The same source said that several staff on the paper, the editor and the journalist, were facing legal proceedings.

RSF calls for a boycott of the games (PDF). Amnesty International takes a slightly different approach. In cooperation with, as far as I can tell, New Zealand students, they organize the Freedom Challenge 08 in which so-called freedom teams rally support for human rights in China.

Do you know of any valid, up-to-date information sources on the situation for bloggers in China these days?

(Please note: Quite a few of the linked sources are in German only as most material on Deutsche Telekom is only available that way.)

While Germany’s Minister of the Interior & big-time surveillance fan Wolfgang Schäuble says he’s shocked and invites leading Telekom representatives for a nice cuppa coffee, the Telekom managements (both former end current) keep bouncing back and forth responsibility for ordering the super-illegal surveillance. Schäuble, sadly, doesn’t seem to be drawing the correct conclusions: That privacy is worth protecting, and not as he proposes in his interpretation of the war on terror a matter to be dismissed lightly. But back to Deutsche Telekom.

The Telekom had, or so it seems, suspected someone leaked confidential information. How to hunt a mole? Spy on our board of directors, our shareholders, and those pesky journalists. And how to do that best? First you hire a Berlin-based consultancy run by former Stasi spies. And since they’re the predominant German telco, they could just tap into journalists’ phone calls, trace their movements and map their social networks. This stinks.

Fun twist: As of Jan 1, 2008 all telcos (including Deutsche Telekom) are forced by law to save all connection data for six months as part of the war on terror. Well, after all we’ve learned about the Telekom’s data handling, we can surely agree on their trustworthiness, right? Oh boy. Just to be clear: This kind of spying is absolutely illegal in Germany.

I’m curious how this is going to play out. While I’m watching the drama unfold, I’m quite happy that I don’t use any Deutsche Telekom services anymore, and I’ll make sure to encrypt my surfing and my email more thoroughly to avoid being eavesdropped on by not-so-trustworthy organizations.

Little Brother is, technically, aimed at young adults, but don’t let that put you off. (It certainly didn’t stop me!)

I just devoured the whole novel in a single swoop on my train ride back to Berlin, and it’s an absolute page-turner. Also, it’s so angry it’ll make you see your day-to-day world just that little differently, like it just inserted a dash of ARG (Alternate Reality Game) into your daily life.

Neat side feature: Instructibles explains how to built all the neat hacks and tools brought up in the novel.

Go hack away!

Here’s a few links to get started, largely taken from the Little Brother’s Afterword:

• Reading
  • Reporters Without Borders: Freedom of the press & of expression is the basis for a stable, working, living democracy. Reporters Without Borders watch the freedom of press worldwide.
  • Center for Citizen Media. Call it citizen media, participatory journalism, or simply blogging: Don’t leave it to commercial media to report on abuse by authorities.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). THE fighters for our digital rights. If you have a few bucks to donate, this would be a good place.
  • cryptome.org: An anonymous place to post confidential information. Think dissidents and whistleblowers.
  • For German speakers: Newspaper TAZ.de just started a new blog about privacy issues called CTRL. Full disclosure: I’m friends with one of the authors of CTRL.
• Hacking
  • tor.eff.org: TOR, The Onion Router, allows for anonymous surfing. You really want that.
  • gpg encrypts your email. Like, pretty much unbreakable.
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