Articles about Technology

La revolución digital

I always wondered why each generation had some historical point of change when they had to fight for the new age, not having been able to recognize that we also have such a situation in our current world. Either being to young or only seeing daily politics, I was not able to see the deeper events in our current world and connect them to a whole string of conflicts.

It is not only about a world between free speech and censorship, between big trust companies and individuals, between national identity and globalization, but rather the fight between isolation and participation. I do not speak of US’s interventionism (you could call it “participation”) and isolation policy which changes each few decades, I am talking about the participation of individual persons in different processes.

These processes do influence both economcy and politics, which includes two different processes in current world who also affect each other.

From Hierarchy to Diversity

In the former world, there have been clear hierarchies: On the top there was a company owner, a politician or somebody else who made his way up. He gave the instructions and the people followed his orders, liking or not liking them. There were discussions, but due to the one-way structure of communication back then it was not possible for normal people to influence the processes.

With the introduction of Internet into daily world, it became possible to post one’s own opinion online and to discuss with other people. The citizens become more self-assured and want to influence political discussions. This can clearly be seen at the young generation, often refered to as digital natives, because they grew up with the Internet.

What we see now in both economical and political conversations is the collision of these two different worlds. On the one side there are the older people who are used to one-way structures from top down, which enabled them to make people follow their wills when they had some new ideas. These people are not used to discussions with their voters or customers and they cannot adapt to the new order very well.

OpenGovernment / eGovernment

While some of these digital natives are claiming for eGovernment the German government is preparing its own definition. This definition does not include public information as demanded by OpenGovernment, but only APIs for application forms. The government does not care about privacy either, as ELENA shows.

ELENA is a project to force companies to use an electronical system to submit information about employees to the state. This system stores much more information than needed and it is a pressure for many company owners. Instead of removing the whole law again, our government now wants to discuss if it is possible to continue the old system for small and medium-sized businesses which would make the whole process even more complicated.

If you ask politicians about eGovernment they think it is just about enabling people to fill out a form via Internet. Most of them never thought about providing data in machine readable format via the Internet. You have to be happy in Germany if information is even available in human-readable format and you can find it. US’s data.gov and UK’s data.gov.uk are first attempts to create such databases with governmental data, but they are not as much readable by machines as possible.

Why Freedom is Not Certain

Censorship vs. Freedom of Information

We also face the conflict between censorship and freedom of information once again—or rather as always. Government has to decide whether it wants to stop the liberal and anarchical structure of the internet and establish a control organisation. Of course, each sovereign state’s laws are already valid on the Internet, but since the Internet is global it sometimes is really difficult to enforce these laws.

The in Germany and Europe over and over repeated argument that child pornography should be blocked is a very poor example, because almost every state where servers contain child pornography has laws against it. It’s thus obviously only an argument used to disable any criticism. Better examples could include the hosting of nazi websites in the US, even though I do not know any numbers there, but I guess you know what I mean. While Germany forbids nazi propaganda, it is part of free speech in the US. There are different laws in different states and this could be a reason to destroy the Internet’s international architecure.

However, it is probable that—just like in the past on the way from absolitism to democracy—we will face other structures in the future. The world is becoming more and more complex and we have to begin understanding that not everything can be described unidirectional. Considering that we also rule more on a supra-national level it would be logical that also some laws concerning international communcation and interaction will reach such a level (e.g. photography laws and distribution).

We also see discussion about freedom of information within each single state. Wikileaks has published a video of the US army which showed the death of two journalists in Iraq. Reuters, who they worked for, was not able to get access to the video even though there is a Freedom of Information Act in the US. Officials often argue that specific pieces of information were classified and important for national security. We also see such reasoning when asking German institutions about data: they often claim that this information was not for the public.

Copyright infringements

You might also recognize that copyright owners are suing as many people as they can and they always complain about their decrease of income. They are demanding stricter rules which are currently discussed by many states—totally intransparently—in ACTA. Even the European Parliament having the right to get informed about all discussions of the European Commission has not seen the draft, yet.

On this field we have the choice between strengthening the major companies or making knowledge public and allowing everybody to use it. Some people say that copyright should be the exception and public domain normal arguing that copyright is a unnateral state stopping people from working together. The flood of patents and patent claims (often by companies who do nothing else but owning patents and suing other companies ten years later), by the way, belongs to the same category.

Will We All Become Transparent?

Moreover, we are facing the discussion between privacy and transparency. While the Internet creates the chance of gathering much information and restructuring and analysing it, there are warnings arising that we will become too transparent.

Still, we have to see that there are also a lot of advantages we get from these services. Ibrahim Evsan of sevenload separates the web services according to their size and their desire for highness of information and calls some of them digital superpowers. Seeing the problem that Germany was too shy in the new field of Internet and politics was too slow, he also explains why all of these digital superpowers come from the US. He also mentions that our current copyright laws do not fit the internet which is part of the conflict between censorship and freedom.

Of course, you can help yourself by altering between search engines instead of only using Google (which is also valid for other services) and watching out which services belong to the same company (e.g. flickr to Yahoo). We cannot achieve full privacy—just as in real life where we communicate with other people—but we can solve the problem on our own without the influence of the state, I guess.

This also shows again that the web will just contain diversified contents and we will have to learn how to deal with it ourselves. We cannot rely on the state and hope that it will show us which one is the right way, otherwise we have to return to absolutism.

One e-mail for 20 Eurocents

A long time ago, the German government presented a new idea: A reliable e-mail system, so that e-mails could be used for business communication. The name of this system is DE-mail and it is planned to include only a few certified e-mail providers.

One DE-Mail will Cost 20 Cents

However, Deutsche Post—one of the providers—now introduced they will charge your account with 20 Eurocents. Compared to a normal e-mail this is exactly 20 Eurocents more, because many e-mail providers offer accounts for free.

Compared to a standard letter with Deutsche Post for 55 Eurocents, this is much cheaper, but for only the transfer of some bits it is a lot. Of course this also depends on how many people will use the service and how many mails will be sent. Other providers meanwhile said they while make it cheaper. German ISP 1&1 mentioned 15 Eurocent, but they also added that “values of Eurocents were possible”.

Deutsche Post Failed with Lifetime e-mail

Some years ago, Deutsche Post wanted to start a service offering an e-mail account for your whole life, which also failed. The service was started in 2000 and stopped in 2005, because the “synergy effects they had hoped for did not become real”. Deutsche Post back then wanted to extend this system—for premium users—in a similar way as DE-mail by introducing “electronical certified mail”.

When the whole system did not work, Deutsche Post wanted to earn more money by offering advertisment free inboxes for paying customers. I am not sure, if POP3 was not common in 2003 or they added advertisment directly into the e-mail (like other e-mail providers do nowadays), but the idea didn’t seem to work.

Courts already Accepting normal e-mail

While the introduction of DE-mail is taking more and more time, courts are already starting to accept the normal e-mail system. This can of course be seen both positive or negative, but it is one big strike against DE-mail. If you have the choice between a free e-mail or a 20-Eurocent e-mail, both of them being legally accepted suficiently reliable, then the decision should be clear.

The Higher Regional Court Düsseldorf has accepted informational e-mails of an esteem agent as chargeable (the defendant has bought the house and therefore the treaty with the agent became legal).

A more discussable and maybe also ridiculous case is the judgement of the Regional Court Hamburg, which says that people have to anticipate written warnings via e-mail. This is of course a bit a problem, because many mails get just filtered by junk filters and the recipient does not know there should be such an e-mail.

For such cases (written warnings), a DE-mail could be useful, but who would open up an account just to wait for e-mails harming him?

Possible Surveillance

Due to several surveillance laws in the past months and years, there might be the possibility that the state wants to use this new method to gather easier access to sent and received e-mails. According to my knowledge end-to-end encryption should be supported, but only few people really use it. Therefore, the state would be able to reach business e-mails through only a few big providers.

The e-mails will be encrypted on the server, but this is only a encryption in the backend with the provider’s key. Therefore, the provider could also decrypt it easily and when the state forces the provider to do so, there is no way around it. If people use free providers then it is more complicated for the state, because he does not know all providers.

How IT Companies try to Circumvent Democracy

Recently there has been a decision about another special duty for being allowed to create private copies of media. This time it’s about computers, but not all computers. Currently, there are already duties on CD / DVD writers, the discs and hard drives which are then given to copyright associations, e.g. for music or text. It is a strategy of the German entertainment industry to denigrate each type of copy (they do not mention private copy, but they neither exclude it) and then demand compensation for the damage these “evil” private copies do to them.

However, this case is not about entertainment industry, at least not mainly. It rather is about companies who follow these claims just to achieve a better balance sheet at the end of the term. Even worse is that these huge companies also want to force other companies to do the same.

The range between 13 and 30 €

It has already begun some years ago with law suits between entertainment industry and PC manufacters. The entertainment industry claims they have a right on duties on each sold computer, which leads to a problem for the computer manufacters: They have to retain money just in case they lose and have to pay.

I read the number of 30 euros in a news paper, which they wanted to get rid of. It is a really huge difference if a company has to save 30 € per sold computer or ca. 13 €. Therefore, some major companies wanted to stop the law suits and sign a treaty with the ZPÜ, an association for copyright holders.

Working committee in their way

Yet, the working committee of the German association for IT, tele-communication and new media (BITKOM) was in their way. A report mentioned that 1 € was enough, but of course this offer was refused by ZPÜ. Therefore, the needed 2/3 majority could not be reached in a democratic voting. Since there would have been a normal majority, the executive committee tried to sign the treaty itself, luckily being stopped by two other IT companies.

The solution was the foundation of a new association called Federal Computer Manufacters Association (BCH). It seemed a bit strange when media reported that there had been a agreement between BCH and ZPÜ, because nobody had ever heard of BCH before—and now it’s clear: The BCH has been formed by seven companies who wanted to sign this treaty.

ZPÜ using its position

Instead of being confident the ZPÜ is now trying to use their advantage and demand even more duties on “similar devices”. This could mean a lot, but according to Frank Brunen, CEO of Belinea and opponent of the high duty, probably devices like “USB sticks, mp3 players etc. etc.” are meant.

Moreover, the BCH is trying to confuse people by mentioning that “PC manufacters and importers” now had to pay about 13 € for each sold computer to the ZPÜ. This was understood by some media as if each manufacter now had to pay 13 €. However, according to Brunen’s lawyer, BITKOM is in charge of the negotiations and a great number of participants would be needed to make it obligatory for everybody and these seven major companies—even though it’s Acer, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Medion, Samsung und Sony—are not even an average number.

Moreover, BITKOM wants to change its rules to require only normal majorities for such changes. This is done due to the huge pressure that these major companies have on the association paying much money to BITKOM. If BITKOM signed this treaty, this would be a huge defeat for the small PC retailers etc., because they are said to have good chances at Federal Court.

Federal Cross of Merit for IT-developer

Something that might be interesting for information scientists: The German IT-developer Matthias Ettrich received the Federal Cross of Merit on November 6, 2009 for his work on KDE - a desktop environment for the open source operating system Linux. Matthias Ettrich founded KDE in 1996 as Kool Desktop Environment. Called K Desktop Environment nowadays, it is - together with Gnome - one of the most important desktop environments for Linux.

He received a lower level medal, but this still is a huge honor I think. Usually, you only get to know that soldiers receive the Cross of Merit. However, there are also other IT-developers or similar who receive such crosses - I just do not know about them. Using a search engine I was able to find a mechatronic engineer called Bernd Gombert.