The Private Citizen

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are a pretty stupid idea. Not only do they legally not guarantee ownership of anything, the very idea they represent is inherently flawed.

Blockchain technology is one of the biggest buzzwords in tech in recent times. But what are blockchains and what do you need them for, really? Spoiler: Not much, actually.

I don't like Elon Musk. But I think him buying Twitter isn't a bad thing. The people who do, however, are either unintentionally wrong or they are actively fighting on the side of censorship and propaganda, like the US intelligence community.

What does the Russian war in Ukraine have in common with the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939? What is different? And what can we learn from this about how the current war is going?

In response to some input from listeners, I feel it is necessary to explain some things about how I cover the war in Ukraine and how I feel about wars in general. Let's talk about wars, international law and justice.

In Germany, telling someone on the internet that you will hurt and injure them if they visit you at home is apparently a valid defence for actually hitting them now.

What are Putin's war goals in Ukraine? What is the Russian military trying to achieve? And how is it going?

Facebook just made a mockery of the fight against hate speech by admitting that it's okay if you call for the murder of people the political mainstream doesn't like. It's only hate speech if you want to murder the wrong people. What the actual fuck.

German YouTuber Drachenlord has sold his infamous Drachenschanze and is travelling in a pickup truck around Germany. Meanwhile, well-meaning people, who have no idea what's actually going on, think he's being bullied.

The war in Ukraine has been raging for eight years, largely ignored by the West. It is not new. Neither are the policy blunders by NATO and the EU that have led to the current full-scale invasion. Putin is to blame for the war, but the West has created the situation that enabled Putin to wage it.

Log4Shell, a vulnerability in the Java application logging framework Log4J has been called the worst security vulnerability ever. Is that just the usual hype, though? Or why haven't we seen the forecast large scale exploitation of this bug? Is there something more sinister at play here?

Neil Young has had his record label pull his music from Spotify because he doesn't like that Joe Rogan interviews people who have a different opinion than Neil Young. The story of a counterculture rebel turned censorship advocate.

Taking stock of the civil liberty and privacy nightmare we have built for ourselves in the pandemic and explaining why I don't think reporting on it accomplishes much at this point.

The law is not the same as justice. There can be unjust laws and illegal actions can beget justice. So why is it that many people can't tell the difference between these two concepts? And how can we reconcile them in our society?

When who to save in case of a medical emergency becomes a moral, or even worse, a legal decision instead of a medical one, we all lose. This will soon be the reality in Germany, though, as the Constitutional Court has just passed a very unfortunate ruling in this regard.

A look back at the second year of the show, through the lens of the topics covered and the things discussed.

The people who ran the so-called bulletproof Cyberbunker in Germany have been sentenced to hefty jail times. But what does the verdict mean for other hosting companies and telecommunications providers in the country? Will they be liable for criminal activity of their clients from now on?

On this special episode, Mike and myself are having what will probably be the beginning of many conversations on climate change, climate activism and their impacts on our civil rights and other aspects of our lives.

For the one-hundredths episode of this show, I'm telling the story of who I am, where I was born and how I was brought up, in the hope that it will help you understand my place in the world and my biases as a basis for further episodes.

Looking at the plans for the new German government, made up out of the Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals, there are some interesting free speech and privacy implications for the future. Not only of Germany, but probably also for much of Europe.

The German Constitutional Court has decided that the strictest pandemic measures were within the remit of the law. The government is already talking about force-vaccinating everyone. I feel stoicism is the only recourse left for freedom-loving citizens of this country now.

What we've been suspecting all along has now been proven correct: Apple's app anti-tracking feature in iOS does precisely nothing to effectively protect your privacy. In fact, it makes things worse. And Apple probably knew this was the case, too.

In Germany, the pandemic emergency has now been declared over by a new law. But instead, the government can now just use all the measures, and more, whenever they want. Not even the parliament needs to approve.

Looking at the EU's ban of two tattoo pigments as a good example for the silly and anti-scientific legislation the lawmakers in Brussels sometimes fall prey to. The EU desperately needs to fix idiotic behaviour like this if it doesn't want anti-EU voices to sway the public against the European Project as a whole.

At what point does a person who is bullied relentlessly become responsible for the situation if they keep encouraging it? That's the question we are trying to fathom when looking at the case of German YouTuber Rainer Winkler aka. Drachenlord.

Examining the contemporary forces arrayed against those speaking what they perceive of as the truth, be it Julian Assange or that random dude on Facebook.

When Whitfield Diffie, Ronald Rivest, Steven M. Bellovin, Peter Neumann, Matt Blaze and Bruce Schneier come together to publish a paper on the security and privacy implications of client-side scanning, we should listen up.

Modern Solution created a software platform that is so ass-backwards and treats customer data so casually, it's almost criminally negligent. Instead of fessing up to how bad they are as a company, they now want to get a security researcher in jail.

What's more in your interest? Stopping Facebook from leeching off the private data of your life to further its monopoly or forcing it to censor your speech? And now take a guess which of the two politicians want to do and journalists are ecstatic about?

How can the hope of a new drug that might help fight COVID-19 get turned into bad news? Bad journalism, that's how. Let's look at how Matt Taibbi breaks it down in his exemplary writing on the topic.

Will the recent German federal election be followed by time of horrible uncertainty, that is will it be the country's Brexit moment, or is it actually a good thing? This episode discusses the election result and gives a historic explainer of the German parliamentary system.

You expect me to believe that the best funded, best trained, best organised and most experienced military in history left military arms behind in a hasty retreat that are worth more than the annual military budget of all but two countries on the globe? Seriously?

A discussion with my friend Mike about the current state of Brexit and what it means for the future of the European Union and the geopolitical situation on the continent and beyond.

Again and again, so-called journalists in big media outlets exaggerate or even outright invent stories to scare or outrage the public. The audience just buys it wholesale and never notices when, a day or two later, it all turns out to be complete bullshit. Today's example: Ivermectin.

Authentication on the internet is fundamentally broken. Weak passwords, password reuse, data leaks and untrustworthy third parties tracking us while they log us in are the unfortunate reality right now. One man decided to single-handedly fix this mess.

Pegasus isn't new. Anyone in the field has known about NSO Group's spyware and its use against politicians, activists and journalists for half a decade. What's worth discussing, though, is how the topic has been ignored for so long. Both by the press and by iPhone maker Apple.

The people responsible claim nobody could have predicted what happened in Afghanistan this week. But their experts did in fact did predict it, which wasn't exactly hard, and then the people in charge lied about it. The public now desperately needs to understand how governments operate, or it will all happen again. And soon.

What are the new features Apple is implementing in iOS 15 that have privacy and security people all up in arms? And why none of this should come a surprise to anyone who's actually paid some attention and is thinking for themselves instead of just buying the company propaganda.

The US President says it's likely that hacker attacks will lead to a real war and that is something that scares me a lot.

The certificate infrastructure of the German digital immunity passport, based on an EU-wide system, has been completely undermined by a hack that's so easy to pull off that probably any twelve year old with a computer can accomplish it.

What happens when our media consumption is so fear-inducing that we let companies regulate our social connections? A culture of digital snitching develops that gives companies knowledge that previously only authoritarian governments possessed.

The German police can now hack into computers and phones, without the target having to have committed a crime. Even though a Berlin court has just ruled evidence from similar hacks originating outside of Germany to be inadmissible in criminal proceedings in the country.

The German constitution states that censorship does not take place and yet, Germany is one of the most censorship-happy countries when it comes to Western democracies and therefore at the forefront of the brewing culture wars. How can that be?

YouTube blocked one of my episodes, insulting my professional reputation and claiming that I was spreading misinformation about SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. They later admitted they were wrong, but refuse to tell me how such an egregious mistake can happen. Let's examine what behaviour like this means for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Germany has just introduced digital immunity passports as mandated by the EU. How does this system work and what does it mean for civil rights of EU citizens in the future?

The EU copyright reform is now in effect in all member countries and with it comes the horrible idea of upload filters. Let's discuss why this is bad for journalism, already very much on its last legs, and free speech in general.

Let's talk about ransomware. Ransomware is not the problem. People being lazy is the problem.

Cloudflare's Zero Trust Browser is a dumb idea if I ever saw one. Here's why. And as a little bonus, we look at the Mighty browser, which is even more insane.

The German government wants to put trojans on its citizens' phones and other devices to crack end-to-end encrypted communications. And it wants to do it with as little due process as possible. Welcome to another battle in the Crypto Wars!

The Gemini protocol, a text-only alternative to normal websites, might be the perfect off-the-grid publishing platform. At the very least, it's damn cool. In an old-school, indieweb kind of way.