Back in December 2023, FDA announced intention in the Federal Register and in a press release to form a new FDA Advisory Committee to be called the Genetic Metabolic Diseases Advisory Committee (GeMDAC). As noted in a recent posting here, … Continue reading →

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Critics of Italy's Piracy Shield are not difficult to find but, with its powerful and influential proponents rarely far away, getting heard is a considerable challenge. Not to mention getting anything done. After calling for the platform's suspension and meeting resistance in the wake of the recent Google Drive blocking blunder, AGCOM board member Elisa Giomi has gone public with a laundry list of concerns. It pulls zero punches.

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From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Nintendo has filed a devastating lawsuit against a gamer who not only live-streamed games before their commercial release, but used emulators and pirated ROMs to do so. Jesse Keighin, aka EveryGameGuru, faces claims of unauthorized public performance and reproduction, contributory infringement and inducement for sharing links to emulators and pirated ROMs, plus violations of the anti-circumvention and circumvention device trafficking components of the DMCA.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

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Privacy: The liberties of our parents are not being inherited by our children – they are being lost wholesale in the transition to digital. Today, we’ll look at the importance of posting anonymous public messages.

When I was in my teens, before the Internet (yes, really), there was something called BBSes – Bulletin Board Systems. They were digital equivalents of an analog Bulletin Board, which in turn was a glorified sheet of wood intended for posting messages to the public. In a sense, they were an anonymous equivalent of today’s webforum software, but you connected from your home computer directly to the BBS over a phone line, without connecting to the Internet first.

The analog Bulletin Boards are still in existence, of course, but mostly used for concert promotions and the occasional fringe political or religious announcement.

In the early 1990s, weird laws were coming into effect worldwide as a result of lobbying from the copyright industry: the owners of bulletin board systems could be held liable for what other people posted on them. The only way to avoid liability was to take down the post within seven days. Such liability had no analog equivalent at all; it was an outright ridiculous idea that the owner of a piece of land should be held responsible for a poster put up on a tree on that land, or even that the owner of a public piece of cardboard could be sued for the posters other people had glued up on that board.

Let’s take that again: it is extremely weird from a legal standpoint that an electronic hosting provider is in any way, shape, or form liable for the contents hosted on their platform. It has no analog equivalent whatsoever.

Sure, people could put up illegal analog posters on an analog bulletin board. That would be an illegal act. When that happened, it was the problem of law enforcement, and never of the bulletin board owner. The thought is ridiculous and has no place in the digital landscape either.

The proper digital equivalent isn’t to require logging to hand over upload IPs to law enforcement, either. An analog bulletin board owner is under no obligation whatsoever to somehow identify the people using the bulletin board, or even monitor whether it’s being used at all.

The Analog Equivalent Privacy Right for an electronic post hosting provider is for an uploader to be responsible for everything they upload for the public to see, with no liability at all for the hosting provider under any circumstance, including no requirement to log upload data to help law enforcement find an uploader. Such monitoring is not a requirement in the analog world of our parents, nor is there an analog liability for anything posted, and there is no reason to have it otherwise in the digital world of our children just because somebody doesn’t know how to run a business otherwise.

As a side note, the United States would not exist had today’s hosting liability laws in place when it formed. A lot of writing was being circulated at the time arguing for breaking with the British Crown and forming an Independent Republic; from a criminal standpoint, this was inciting and abetting high treason. This writing was commonly nailed to trees and public posts, for the public to read and make up their own minds. Imagine for a moment if the landowners where such trees happened to stand had been charged with high treason for “hosting content” — the thought is as ridiculous in the analog would, as it really is in the digital too. We just need to pull the illusion aside, that the current laws on digital hosting make any kind of sense. These laws really are as ridiculous in the digital world of our children, as they would have been in the analog world of our parents.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: Our analog parents had the ability to read news anonymously, however they wanted, wherever they wanted, and whenever they wanted. For our digital children, a government agent might as well be looking over their shoulder: the government knows what news sources they read, what articles, for how long, and in what order.

For our analog parents, reading the news was an affair the government had no part of, or indeed had any business being part of. Our analog parents bought a morning newspaper with a few coins on the street corner, brought it somewhere quiet where they had a few minutes to spare, and started reading without anybody interfering.

When our digital children read the news, the government doesn’t just know what news source they choose to read, but also what specific articles they read from that news source, in what order, and for how long. So do several commercial actors. There are at least three grave issues with this.

The first is that since the government has this data, it will attempt to use this data. More specifically, it will attempt to use the data against the individual concerned, possibly in some sort of pre-crime scheme. We know this that since all data collected by a government will eventually be used against the people concerned, with mathematical certainty.

In an attention economy, data about what we pay attention to, how much, and for how long, are absolutely crucial predictive behaviors. And in the hands of a government which makes the crucial mistake of using it to predict pre-crime, the results can be disastrous for the individual and plain wrong for the government.

Of course, the instant the government uses this data in any way imaginable, positive or negative, it will become Heisenberg Metrics — the act of using the data will shape the data itself. For example, if somebody in government decides that reading about frugality probably is an indicator of poverty, and so makes people more eligible for government handouts, then such a policy will immediately shape people’s behavior to read more about frugality. Heisenberg Metrics is when a metric can’t be measured without making it invalid in the process.

(The phenomenon is named after the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is traditionally confused with the Observer Effect, which states you can’t measure some things without changing them in the process. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is actually something else entirely; it states that you can’t measure precise momentum and position of a subatomic particle at the same time, and does not apply at all to Heisenberg Metrics.)

The second issue is that not only government, but also other commercial actors, will seek to act on these metrics, Heisenberg Metrics as they may be. Maybe somebody thinks that reading fanzines about motorcycle acrobatics should have an effect on your health and traffic insurance premiums?

The third issue is subtle and devious, but far more grave: the government doesn’t just know what articles you read and in what order, but as a corollary to that, knows what the last article you read was, and what you did right after reading it. In other words, it knows very precisely what piece of information leads you to stop reading and instead take a specific action. This is far more dangerous information than being aware of your general information feed patterns and preferences.

Being able to predict somebody’s actions with a high degree of certainty is a far more dangerous ability than being vaguely aware of somebody’s entertainment preferences.

Our analog parents had the privacy right of choosing their information source anonymously with nobody permitted (or able) to say what articles they read, in what order, or for what reason. It’s not unreasonable that our digital children should have the same privacy right, the analog equivalent privacy right.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: Our parents, at least in the Western world, had a right to hold private conversations face-to-face, whether out in public or in the sanctity of their home. This is all but gone for our digital children.

Not long ago, it was the thing of horror books and movies that there would actually be widespread surveillance of what you said inside your own home. Our analog parents literally had this as scary stories worthy of Halloween, mixing the horror with the utter disbelief.

“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being surveilled at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual device was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they listened to everybody all the time. But at any rate they could listen to you whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.” — from Nineteen Eighty-Four

In the West, we prided ourselves on not being the East — the Communist East, specifically — who regarded their own citizens as suspects: suspects who needed to be cleansed of bad thoughts and bad conversations, to the degree that ordinary homes were wiretapped for ordinary conversations.

There were microphones under every café table and in every residence. And even if there weren’t in the literal sense, just there and then, they could still be anywhere, so you had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.

“Please speak loudly and clearly into the flower pot.” — a common not-joke about the Communist societies during the Cold War

Disregard phonecalls and other remote conversations for now, since we already know them to be wiretapped across most common platforms. Let’s look at conversations in a private home.

We now have Google Echo and Amazon Alexa. And while they might have intended to keep your conversations to themselves, out of the reach of authorities, Amazon has already handed over living room recordings to authorities. In this case, permission became a moot point because the suspect gave permission. In the next case, permission might not be there, and it might happen anyway.

Mobile phones are already listening, all the time. We know because when we say “Ok Google” to an Android phone, it wakes up and listens more intensely. This, at a very minimum, means it’s always listening for the words “Ok Google”. IPhones have a similar mechanism listening for “Hey Siri”. While nominally possible to turn off, it’s one of those things you can never be sure of. And we carry these governmental surveillance microphones with us everywhere we go.

If the Snowden documents showed us anything in the general sense, it was that if a certain form of surveillance is technically possible, it is already happening.

And even if Google and Apple aren’t already listening, the German police got the green light to break into phones and plant Bundestrojaner, the flower-pot equivalent of hidden microphones, anyway. You would think that Germany of all countries has in recent memory what a bad idea this is. It could — maybe even should — be assumed that the police forces of other countries have and are already using similar tools.

For our analog parents, the concept of a private conversations was as self-evident as oxygen in the air. Our digital children may never know what one feels like.

And so we live today — from what started as a habit that has already become instinct — in the assumption that every sound we make is overheard by authorities.

Privacy: In a series of posts on this blog, we have shown how practically everything our parents took for granted with regards to privacy has been completely eliminated for our children, just because they use digital tools instead of analog, and the people interpreting the laws are saying that privacy only applies to the old, analog environment of our parents.

Once you agree with the observation that privacy seems to simply not apply for our children, merely for living in a digitally-powered environment instead of our parents’ analog-powered one, surprise turns to shock turns to anger, and it’s easy to want to assign blame to someone for essentially erasing five generations’ fight for civil liberties while people were looking the other way.

So whose fault is it, then?

It’s more than one actor at work here, but part of the blame must be assigned to the illusion that that nothing has changed, just because our digital children can use old-fashioned and obsolete technology to obtain the rights they should always have by law and constitution, regardless of which method they use to talk to friends and exercise their privacy rights.

We’ve all heard these excuses.

“You still have privacy of correspondence, just use the old analog letter”. As if the Internet generation would. You might as well tell our analog parents that they would need to send a wired telegram to enjoy some basic rights.

“You can still use a library freely.” Well, only an analog one, not a digital one like The Pirate Bay, which differs from an analog library only in efficiency, and not in anything else.

“You can still discuss anything you like.” Yes, but only in the analog streets and squares, not in the digital streets and squares.

“You can still date someone without the government knowing your dating preferences.” Only if I prefer to date like our parents did, in the unsafe analog world, as opposed to the safe digital environment where predators vanish at the click of a “block” button, an option our analog parents didn’t have in shady bars.

The laws aren’t different for the analog and the digital. The law doesn’t make a difference between analog and digital. But no law is above the people who interpret it in the courts, and the way people interpret those laws means the privacy rights always apply to the analog world, but never to the digital world.

It’s not rocket science to demand the same laws to apply offline and online. This includes copyright law, as well as the fact that privacy of correspondence takes precedence over copyright law (in other words, you’re not allowed to open and examine private correspondence for infringements in the analog world, not without prior and individual warrants — our law books are full of these checks and balances; they should apply in the digital too, but don’t today).

Going back to blame, that’s one actor right there: the copyright industry. They have successfully argued that their monopoly laws should apply online just as it does offline, and in doing so, has completely ignored all the checks and balances that apply to the copyright monopoly laws in the analog world. And since copying movies and music has now moved into the same communications channels as we use for private correspondence, the copyright monopoly as such has become fundamentally incompatible with private correspondence at the conceptual level.

The copyright industry has been aware of this conflict and has been continuously pushing for eroded and eliminated privacy to prop up their crumbling and obsolete monopolies, such as pushing for the hated (and now court-axed) Data Retention Directive in Europe. They would use this federal law (or European equivalent thereof) to literally get more powers than the Police themselves in pursuing individual people who were simply sharing music and movies, sharing in the way everybody does.

There are two other major factors at work. The second factor is marketing. The reason we’re tracked at the sub-footstep level in airports and other busy commercial centers is simply to sell us more crap we don’t need. This comes at the expense of privacy that our analog parents took for granted. Don’t even get started on Facebook and Google.

Last but not least are the surveillance hawks — the politicians who want to look “Tough on Crime”, or “Tough on Terrorism”, or whatever the word of choice is this week. These were the ones who pushed the Data Retention Directive into law. The copyright industry were the ones who basically wrote it for them.

These three factors have working together, and they’ve been very busy.

It’s going to be a long uphill battle to win back the liberties that were slowly won by our ancestors over about six generations, and which have been all but abolished in a decade.

It’s not rocket science that our children should have at least the same set of civil liberties in their digital environment, as our parents had in their analog environment. And yet, this is not happening.

Our children are right to demand Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights — the civil liberties our parents not just enjoyed, but took for granted.

I fear the failure to pass on the civil liberties from our parents to our children is going to be seen as the greatest failure of this particular current generation, regardless of all the good we also accomplish. Surveillance societies can be erected in just ten years, but can take centuries to roll back.

Privacy remains your own responsibility today. We all need to take it back merely by exercising our privacy rights, with whatever tools are at our disposal.

Image from the movie “Nineteen-Eighty Four”; used under fair use for political commentary.

Pirate Parties: This past weekend, elections were held in Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. The Pirate Party of Luxembourg tripled their support and entered the Luxembourg Parliament with two MPs, and in the Czech Republic, the Pirate Party increased their support further – now receiving a full 17% in Prague.

With 6.45% of the votes of the final tally, the Luxembourg Pirate Party is entering its national Parliament, being the fifth Pirate Party to enter a national or supranational legislature (after Sweden, Germany, Iceland, and the Czech Republic). This may not seem like much, but it is a very big deal, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later. A big congratulations to Sven Clement and Marc Goergen, new Members of Parliament for Luxembourg!

Further, the Czech Republic has had municipal elections, and the Czech Pirate Party showed a full 17.1% support in Prague, the Czech capital, making the Pirates the second biggest party with a very narrow gap to the first place (at 17.9%). This may or may not translate to votes for the Czech national legislature, but is nevertheless the highest score recorded so far for a Pirate Party election day. I understand the Czech Pirates have as many as 275 (two hundred and seventy-five!) newly-elected members of city councils, up from 21 (twenty-one). Well done, well done indeed!

For people in a winner-takes-all system, like the UK or United States, this may sound like a mediocre result. In those countries, there are usually only two parties, and the loser with 49% of the vote gets nothing. However, most of Europe have so-called proportional systems, where 5% of the nationwide votes gives you 5% of the national legislation seats. In these systems, the parties elected to Parliament negotiate between themselves to find a ruling majority coalition of 51%+ of the seats, trying to negotiate common positions between parties that are reasonably close to each other in policy. This usually requires a few weeks of intense negotiations between the elections and the presentation of a successfully negotiated majority coalition.

Further, it could reasonable be asked what kind of difference the Czech Republic or Luxembourg could possibly make on their own in the global information repression. The answer is, a whole lot. The key here is realizing that one country is sufficient to break the global repression of information; the repression is completely dependent on every single country keeping watertight doors. If one single country decides to allow the free movement of culture and knowledge, then all such distribution will immediately be based there. The copyright industry lobby in other countries will protest, quite loudly, but there’s not really anything they can do about it.

And since the problem from a policymaking standpoint has been that the industry-age era politicians consider the Internet-related policy areas completely peripheral in the first place, conceding those policy areas will be seen as very cheap price to bind those votes to a majority coalition.

“One country is sufficient to break the global repression of information.”

A relevant comparison is how Canada has now legalized cannabis at the country level, following many state-level initiatives here and there in the world, and at once, the floodgates are open. Not just for the illegal distribution networks, but more importantly, for legalization everywhere else. As a German politician dryly said today, “what’s possible in Canada is also possible in Germany”, proposing that cannabis should be legalized outright in Germany. I would imagine the tone is similar in most places — or, importantly, many enough places.

The Luxembourg and Prague coalition talks have just started, with an outcome typically expected in a few weeks.

Personal: I ran headfirst into a bit of a classic burnout two years ago. I’m still recovering from it. I’ve been trying to maintain a presence and not make this condition show too much, but I need to scale down the rest of my presence too for a while in order to reset and recharge.

I’ve been starting and re-starting writing this post way too many times now. I’ve decided to just post it as a stream of consciousness, readable or not as it may be, rather than my usual bar of having some sort of clear red thread with step-by-step logical coherence.

Two years ago, while moving from Stockholm to Berlin, I hit the infamous brick wall. I became incapable of most work that required any form of vehicular travel — I was literally limited to walking distance. Yes, it felt as ridiculous as it sounds, but it was just a matter of accepting the lay of the land and working with it. At the time, I was able to maintain some illusion of normality while starting to wind down and recover behind the scenes, thanks to being able to work remotely. I’ve since stopped working altogether — or so I thought, at least — and focusing on recharging.

When you drive a solar-powered rover too aggressively in Kerbal Space Program and the sun goes down, the batteries deplete quickly. You can’t start driving the rover again when the sun goes up from its state of depleted batteries, not even at its rated speed; you have to wait until the batteries have recharged, even if the circumstances (i.e. shining sun) should otherwise make you able to operate nominally. This is a little bit the state I’m in: I should nominally be fine, with most of the everyday load reduced significantly, but my batteries are still not recharging at the rate I had expected them to. (Yes, I’m impatient, which is admittedly part of the problem in the first place.)

So to all people who have written to me over this past time that I haven’t responded to: Please accept my apologies. It’s not out of malice or disinterest I haven’t responded, I’m simply getting done in a month what I used to get done in a day, and even that is a marked improvement. The “need to respond” queue is silly long by now, and includes conference invites and whatnot, that I would normally have responded to within minutes. It includes pings from near friends, that I had hoped to spend a lot more time with here in Berlin, as well as distant friends.

A close friend of mine pointed at a recent study about stress, a study looking at burnout symptoms in places with very good work-to-life balance, and the study concluded that the body doesn’t make a difference between obligations for work or obligations that are felt outside of work for any other reason than money. And she’s right: I’ve been feeling a pressure to shoot video, to code open-source projects, to participate in the community. I need to, bluntly speaking, drop all of these expectations for the foreseeable future. “Go off-grid” is a little too harsh, but I’ll need to turn off the expectation heartbeat on literally everything. I’ll do random things from time to time when I have the energy and desire for it, which unfortunately won’t be most of the time.

These recoveries basically take whatever damn time they please. I could have recharged batteries in six months, in a year, in ten years. I have honestly no idea and therefore I’m not setting any expectations, in either direction.

I’d like to say “I’ll be back”, but I don’t think the person on the other side of this recovery is going to be the same person I am today. I am sure I will still want to change the world for the better, somehow. I just can’t tell today how I’ll be wanting to change the world tomorrow. So even though I’ll very likely be back doing something, it’ll very likely not be the exact same things I’ve done up until this point.

 

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5.4. Please note that in the case of cross-border deliveries, additional taxes (e.g. in the case of an intra-community acquisition) and / or duties, e.g. in the form of customs duties which must paid by yourself.

6. Shipping costs (Zone 4 - World)

6.1. For shipping in Zone 4 - World we charge a flat rate per order 40.95 EUR shipping costs .

6.2. Countries : All countries and areas that are not assigned to zones 1, 2 or 3.

6.3. From a gross order value of 899.00 EUR we ship carriage paid .

6.4. Please note that in the case of cross-border deliveries, additional taxes (e.g. in the case of an intra-community acquisition) and / or duties, e.g. in the form of customs duties which must paid by yourself.

7. Delivery time

The packed orders are picked up daily at 2.30 p.m. (Monday - Friday) by DHL / Deutsche Post. Thus, depending on the amount of shipping volume, all orders that we received by 2 p.m. and where the availability of all products in the shopping cart are "in stock (ready for dispatch)" on the same day handed over to our shipping service provider DHL / Deutsche Post. If products have the status "available (ready for dispatch in approx. 2-5 working days), we will order them from our suppliers and send them to you after we have received them. If you choose to pay in advance, we will wait until the payment has been received has been received in our bank account.

In general: ➜ delivery time = ready for dispatch + parcel delivery time

Ready for dispatch in ...

This is the time it takes to hand over the packaged goods to our shipping service provider.
This period of time can vary depending on the product or product option. This is always displayed in the detailed overview of each product:



Delivery time is always depending on three factors:

• product availability
• chosen payment option
• destination country

As a general rule:

➜delivery time = ready for dispatch + package run time


On this a tiny sample calculation:

With "on stock (ready for dispatch)" and with an average package run time of 1-2 working days (DHL inside Germany), a total package run time of 1-3 working days is resulting. (For delivery inside EU the total package run time increases by 1-3 weekdays, for delivery outside EU and Continental Europe by 3-8 working days).

Ready for dispatch in...

It´s about the time needed to deliver the prepared package to our shipping provider.

Depending on the product the term can be different. This is always shown in the detailed view of the product:




Following terms are possible:

• in stock (ready for dispatch)
• available (ready for dispatch ca. 2-5 work days)
• availability notification after order received
• curr. not available (delivery time upon request)

Please consider, that with an time designation of 2-5 working days the product has to be ordered at the distributer/producer. Delivery takes place after arrival in our stock.

You´ll find an overview of all payment options here: payment methods

BMX Autumn Session - Shawn & Robin - Mellowpark Berlin

Robin Kachfi & Shawn Hammer spend some time at Mellowpark in Berlin and made this edit for us! Nice autumn mood and chilled vibes out there!

Kamera: Robin Kachfi, Meo Kunze & Markus Lange
Music: Danny Brown - 25 bucks instrumental

John Krämer isn't just a team rider he's also a very motivated employee at kunstform BMX Shop. Johnny rides since 2002 BMX Flatland and his favorite spot is the "Schlossplatz" in Stuttgart.

BMX Since: 2002
BMX discipline: BMX Flatland
Hometown: Eberswalde
Residence: Stuttgart
Sponsors: kunstform BMX Shop
Homespots: House of History Baden Würtemberg
Favorite Spots: Königsbaupassage (Schlossplatz)
Favorite thing beside BMX: ping-pong
Instagram: john.kraemer.bmx
Youtube: John Krämer

Miguel Smajlji - Welcome to SIBMX, Sunday & Odyssey

Miguel Smajlji is riding through SIBMX for Sunday Bikes and Odyssey and filmed with Robin Kachfi a solide "Welcome to SIBMX" Video.

Video: Robin Kachfi

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