Week 08/2026

The things that I have done

Nikolaus Forgó

13 Feb 2026 — 4 min read

Heiligenblut, Panoramabahn, on Sunday morning, after Random Haiku Generator on continuous loop

NSFW

This week's song is called "Random Haiku Generator",

written by Sin Fang, Sóley and Örvar Smárason from Team Dreams.

It's the almost perfect song for an early morning ride in a cable car bringing you to the mountain summit, in the sun, at the beginning of a day of skiing. Here's a little more about the band (from Iceland).

Retrospect

Media

I did, as announced last week, an OE1 full hour radio interview in "Punkt 1" on Wednesday.

The good news was that it happened as scheduled.

The bad news was, how it happened: I arrived in the hotel in which I had prebooked an office with rather clear specs (seperate room; little noise; highspeed internet) 30 minutes before the episode started. But: There was superfine Wi-Fi in the hotel lobby, yet not in my booked office - and the staff didn't bother at all about this. The only remaining solution, 3 minutes before start of broadcast, was my own mobile-hotspot (that unfortunately wasn't stable either). My headset (rather expensive Bose Noise canceling headphones) produced so much echo in the untreated room that they (rightly) failed the sound engineer's quality check. I didn't have any other microphone with me (silly me) so that I finally ended up sitting hunched over on a couch, yelling directly into my laptop. All this wasn't really excellent for my focus on the content to be delivered and the sound quality is deplorable.

I learned two main lessons, one one content, one on gear: First, I would really love to understand how it could happen that the standard fake law assumption of freedom of speech being something coming without any limits has become so dominant in European (political) culture that it even makes it into the first contributions of such "eliticist" programs.

Second, after a Reddit-search (Reddit is really terrific on such things), I bought a Hollyland Mark M2S microphon combo for future occasions like this. Let's see whether this helps. They should be (very) portable and with nice sound quality.

It's a funny coincidence that the starting point of this spleen - the department's YouTube account - has become 7 years old this Thursday.

What certainly remains on the positive side is the music chosen by ORF for this radio broadcast (Georg Kreisler! and - in particular - Radiohead - Hunting Bears!).

It's (somehow) depressing and haunting - but brilliant and it was a nice and surprising déjà- vu (or déjà écouté) to hear this again.

I also did an interview for profil on AI and policing, one for Kurier on AI in the judiciary and one for ORF on a recent US Court Case on (potentially) addictive social media platforms .

All three will (probably) be published next week.

Datenschutzrat

I interrupted my holiday for a 3 hours long Datenschutzrat-meeting in the Ministry of Justice. One of the changes I saw there is a new security check in front of the parking lot that now also blocks pedestrians and bicycles so that it is no longer possible to directly get to the building on a bike.

Prospect

#arsboni

I will do (and hopefully publish) three laundry sessions next week: Member of the Austrian Parliament and speaker on digitalisation for the Greens Süleyman Zorba will speak about the constitutional complaint against the law on messenger surveillance.

Fabian Fischer and Anna Pauls (Institute for Technology Assessment, ITA, at ÖAW) will present their recent study on age verification

Here's also a short summary.

Dr. Franz Leisch will join me again (see #arsboni 599) and will discuss Austrian peculiarities in electronic disease coding.

Pro Bono

On Monday, February 16th, at 18.00 CET I will stream (technically) a new episode of Pro Bono, hosted by Hannah and Julia from the department.

Datum Stiftung

The Datum Trust advisory board (I am a proud member of) will have a meeting next week. I would expect that the ongoing debates on the reorganisation of media support in Austria will - somehow - be topical.

Look and Feel

It has been a very hectic week. I didn't read/see too much that was not job-related. I managed, however, to deepen my love-and-hate relationship with Karl Kraus (see also Weekly 06/2026), thanks to this very insightful biography (recommended by and bought in Buchhandlung Riedl again).