Author: Johannes Ernst

  • Germany: Law Requiring Data Retention “In Advance” Unconstitutional

    They thought: why not simply requiring everybody to store logs, just in case a crime happens and the authorities would have a much easier time if they could access the logs when they needed them. The German constitutional court disagreed and requires that all such logs be deleted as soon as possible. Link to story…

  • It’s watching us already

    Cory Doctorow writes at BoingBoing yesterday: According to the [court] filings …, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools’ administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when …[a] child…

  • What is Silicon Valley Like?

    If you want to know, read through this slide presentation put together by Joint Venture Silicon Valley and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. It aggregates a wealth of data. One thing that struck me particularly: it says that 45% of all people speak a language other than English at home. That is more than the…

  • A New Bumper Sticker?

    Mind you, the NoSQL community still has a lot of work to do, years and years of work, InfoGrid and many other NoSQL technologies non-withstanding. But I remember that when I first heard about what SQL is and what it does (particularly, what it can’t do), I thought: “this can’t be true. How many billions…

  • Is Social Media Decentralization the Problem or the Solution?

    Mike Arrington is complaining about fragmentation of his personal media: Everything is decentralized, and no one is working to centralize stuff. I’ve got photos on Flickr, Posterous and Facebook (and even a few on MySpace), reviews on Yelp (but movie reviews on Flixster), location on Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, status updates on Facebook and Twitter,…