Vague Law Scares Off Toolmakers in Germany Very much to my surprise I didn’t notice this earlier: German government created a law that makes it illegal to possess, use, produce, or distrubute “hacker tools”. So if you help someone to break into a computer system by providing (producing, selling etc.) either passwords or software tools, which serve this purpose, you … Read More
Freedom of Choice
I’ve just been watching two interesting TED talks by Bryan Schwartz and Dan Gilbert – yes I’m slowly going through all of them – both of which carry strong ideas about “choice”.If you are in my parents age (born around the 1950s) and even more so if you’re part of my generation (born in the 1980’s) you probably noticed that … Read More
Video Games = Art Question Mark
:: rogerebert.com :: Commentary :: Games vs. Art: Ebert vs. Barker (xhtml) I don’t know if you heard about it but when crawling through my rss feeds I found an entry on the discussion of movie critic Roger Ebert who doesn’t consider video games to be art. Full stop. I actually found it in the blog of game designer and … Read More
Food: The potato-salad-fish-fingers-Sub
I decided to start a new series of blog entries about something I do quite regularly. I like to cook. I also like to eat (what seems like a neat coincidence) but I love to experiment with new recipes and I have several books and the web to retrieve them from. I’m quite into italian and greek food but I … Read More
Official Zooomr Blog : Live at the iPhone Launch on ZooomrTV
Official Zooomr Blog : Live at the iPhone Launch on ZooomrTV Well, half of America is anxiously exspecting the iPhone launch later today (in short: the iPhone is a mobile phone and an iPod plus incredible usability due to the touch display). People are camping at the various Apple Stores to be among the first to pay their 600 $. … Read More
Starting a Second Life
I’ve been to second life a few times because it is a big subject in media research at the moment. However, I always try to have a subjective perspective in addition to what is said objectively. A few weeks ago I decided that I should personify my avatar so I started to work on that. It took some time to … Read More
iTunes Plus DRM-free, not free of annoying glitches – Engadget / Zooomr fighting for Mark III
iTunes Plus DRM-free, not free of annoying glitches – Engadget True words, I myself experienced -and still do- problems on downloading certain songs for upgrading my library. If they load they are creepingly slow and after a minute they time out. However, of an overall count of 65 songs that I upgraded 9 seem to be a problem. It may … Read More
New Music on iTunes – now DRM-free!!
It’s been announced a while ago but as of today I started using iTunes Plus. iTunes Plus offers music and videos in better sound quality and without DRM at a slightly increased price (1,29 € per song in Germany, 1,99 € per video, albums prices remain). This is possible because music publisher EMI agreed to offer his music catalog for … Read More
Official Zooomr Blog : Lauching Zooomr Mark III
Official Zooomr Blog : Lauching Zooomr Mark III Ok, we had this situation already a few weeks ago but now this is -hopefully- for real (;-)):Kris Tate ist in the process of bringing the next generation of the Photo-Sharing Service “Zooomr” which is called “Mark III” on-line. If you wanna know more about it see the blog entry. It might … Read More
Information Wars or Give me your data and I tell them who you are
O’Reilly Radar > Google and Privacy Well, the age of information has pretty much begun and informations are of more value (even commercially) than they have ever been before. We used to say: “Knowledge is power” but that implies not only the possession of knowledge but also the access control to knowledge and the distribution of knowledge (usually performed by … Read More
Deadliest School Shooting in US History: Tragedy at Virginia Tech – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News
Deadliest School Shooting in US History: Tragedy at Virginia Tech – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News Needless to say that I’m deeply disturbed by the events that took place at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg. Our thoughts are with the victims and their families. I just watch CNN at this very moment, they’re saying that students honor the victims on Facebook, … Read More