Today’s quote is from Mike Kuketz’s Fediverse1: Those in control of data are also in control of society. Digitisation must take this into account and understand data protection as social value. Data protection and digitalisation are not incompatible though many people believe this. In my daily practice, I encounter people who try to play data protection and digitisation off against each other. This eristic dialectic2 is something you can only avoid and quickly put an end to. It is a false dilemma3 mostly used in the absence of expert knowledge and arguments. Read more

Today I’ve found this quote in Nitter (Twitter-Proxy): The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles. To the unkown author: You nailed it!

I would like to wish all my customers, business partners, friends and acquaintances a happy Holiday Season. Please stay healthy! Wherever you are, cosily couch in yourselves and keep the necessary peace of mind during the Corona-Lockdown. May it be like an admin-friend told me recently: Think positive, stay negative! I am winding down my blog activities till January and devoting myself to the persons and activities needing me. For the long, dark and hopefully snowy winter evenings there are some books awaiting me aswell together with a tea, milk and honey. Read more

For my presentations and webinars I am always looking for good quotations. A treasure of them, I found yesterday evening in the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma”1, of course in the original English version. I do not know the German translation. Some of those quotes I would like to share with you but not without first saying something about their context. Besides the inventors of the “Like-Button”2 and the “Infinite Scroll”, the documentary features numerous software developers, managers up to the highest levels of management, venture investors from Google, Twitter and Facebook, as well as a lot of scientists and civil rights activists. Shoshana Zuboff3, US economist and professor emeritus of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, is also among them. With her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”4, she has written what is considered as the most important reference on tech industry. Read more

I need to admit: I really love writing audits. It has a certain degree of scientific working to falsify statements. So I was recently confronted with the following quote from a responsible IT manager: We are not concerned with security, but with liability. If Microsoft promises security, this is enough for us. Well, unfortunately I did not attend a judicial exam but when I read the Microsoft EULA1 regarding risks and liability, I consider the circumstances slightly more differentiated: Read more

Today Mike Kuketz published a great article in his blog on Digitization in schools and on educational policy, unfortunately in German only, but worth to read: Bildungswesen: Entlarvung der häufigsten Microsoft-Mythen Have fun reading and a good start to the week! Here are some Power-Quotes: Therefore, only product training courses take place. The expiration date for such trained knowledge will be exceeded by the next update of the user interface and subsequently has to be re-learned. So students do not receive digital competence about how something works from a technical point of view, but rather which “buttons” they have to press. Read more

Felix von Leitner (Fefe) in his latest article1 at Heise wrote a very good statement straight out from the bottom of my heart: Programming is in reality more an optimisation problem (what is the least effort I have to invest to get the customer to buy this) than engineering design. Even worse: If you find a developer who does everything correctly, then he is not competitive on the market against all the short-term approaches of the botchers of the competition. Read more