Mappa Mundi
Konstantin
is using Posterous to post everything online. Shouldn't you?
The name is Konstantin Klein. I'm a senior editor with Deutsche Welle TV in Berlin, Germany. I've been blogging since October 30, 2000, under various blog and domain names. This is the 2010 edition of my weblog.
All content is served to the RSS reader of your choice; new posts are also announced via Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed.
You can send me an email from here.
© 2010 Konstantin Klein,
Planet Earth
Legal stuff can be found here. All content, unless noted otherwise, is licensed to everybody (including you!) under a Creative Commons License.
Undifferenziert müßte ein Access-Provider genauso wie ein Blogger ausnahmslos jederzeit sämtliche Inhalte kontrollieren, da er dafür verantwortlich sein soll, »die Einbeziehung und den Verbleib von Inhalten im Gesamtangebot«, die entwicklungsbeeinträchtigend sind, zu verhindern. Hier stellt sich die Frage, welcher User kann dies mit den ihm möglichen Mitteln sicherstellen? Der Freizeit-Blogger wird hierzu regelmäßig nicht in der Lage sein. Ihm steht das technische Equipment und gegebenenfalls Know-how kaum zur Verfügung. Ob er sich parallel die eingreifende Filterung durch einen Access-Provider wünscht, ist gleichfalls fraglich.
Seriously, German readers: After the federal government's more or less failed attempt to restrict unfettered access to the Internet to fight child pornography (or so they said until everybody and their Supreme Court said that this might be censorship), it is now a new version of Germany's Jugendmedienschutzstaatsvertrag which is supposed to provide legal foundation for content control. 1&1, as everybody of you may or may not know, is one of Germany's leading ISPs, and together with AK Zensur Internet activists, they are not too happy with the draft legislation.
While this may turn into another legal battle, it is definitely reason enough to once again look into ways of circumventing a possible future access control infrastructure.
Which brings us to the topic of Private VPN. I've been a supporting member of SDF for years, and I've been using their VPN service - not to protect myself from official sniffers, but to keep any eavesdropper off my communication while I'm on public WLANs, such as in airports. Now I might start using VPN access (which tunnels all your Internet communication securely to the provider's server, which, in SDF's case, is far beyond the reach of German legislators) from home as well, and for good. Not because I'm perusing illegal or merely indecent content - just because it's nobody's business.
Other, possibly easier-to-use VPN providers include Witopia, YourPrivateVPN and PureVPN. Note that I haven't tested any of these, and that all of them charge for their services.
Noted while reading Der neue Welt-Geist, a compilation of four articles to explain the Google phenomenon (in German):
Jetzt belehrt uns das Google-Handy darüber, wer, wo und was wir sind. Ist der Internetkonzern die göttliche Instanz unseres Zeitalters?
Nowadays, Google's cell phone tells us who, where and what we are. Is the Internet corporation the divine instance of our days?
Sheesh. At the end of the day, Google is just another corporation. Visionary, maybe, shrewd, certainly, powerful, without any doubt - but neither the end of the world nor the beginning of a new one.
Full disclosure: The previous paragraph unveils the real reason why I switched this blog to English. "Am Ende des Tages" is what could be called Denglish, a bad German translation of "at the end of the day". Now I can use the phrase without being a jerk.
