Newsletter

Week 24/2024

Es ist ein kalkuliertes Risiko

Nikolaus Forgó

07 Jun 2024 — 4 min read

Computer security and user awareness are important.

NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song For the Week)

This week’s song is from Fortuna Ehrenfeld.

The YouTube version is, again, very different and very remarkable,

and has some quotes from a more recent and- again - beautiful (yet kitschy?) song:

Getting Older

Several very kind readers sent me messages with birthday wishes after last week’s weekly. I also got a very nice present this way - a link to this beautiful song that I hadn’t known before.

It’s on Spotify as well

and an equally beautiful yet different version on YouTube again:

I am currently in a Billie Eilish rabbithole which is a nice place to be. Although I am (somehow) interested in music, I missed this completly and this whole world is new to me. How could Spotify let that happen? Sometimes, humans are still better than algorithms in recommending tracks.

I learned from the YouTube-algorithm, however, what a great microphone the Shure SM7-B can be. What a voice!

But it’s the voice, not the mic, as this example of another prominent woman using the very same mic shows (bare with me that I don’t comment on this; the RollingStone calls it a ‘faithful rendition’):

Retrospect

European Elections

I had two very different and very remarkable conversations about platforms, politics and the upcoming elections. The first one was with Martin Selmayr.

Several aspects of his impressive career were really interesting to me: in particular the immense competition one needs to go through when willing to make an outstanding career in the European Commission (Selmayr was one among sixty being being allowed to enter the Commission’s services, in a group of 10.000 applicants), the workload and stress one needs to survive, the interplay between politics and law one needs to master and the dedication to the job speaking out of all these factors.

I was also impressed by his argumentation on the importance of traditional media in times of disinformation, propaganda and fake news. This was a very harsh contrast to this week’s second important talk with Lisa-Marie Gotsche and Stefan Apfl from Hashtag.

Apfl makes the - compelling and important and frightening - argument that the young are no longer to be reached via legacy media and that TikTok is an important - if not the most important - source of information. Period, end of story.

We talked about the brilliant YouTube-first documentary “Reclaim” that I would warmly recommend to watch - ideally ahead of the European Elections.

The interview was the very first #arsboni edition that I did in somebody else’s studio. I appreciated this learning exercise a lot and I welcome any (technical) feedback you have.

Prospect

Japanese Information Law

Professor Satoshi Narihara from Kyushu University in Fukuoka/Japan is with us as a guest professor for the next weeks. He is offering a course on Japanese Information Law that starts on Friday, June 7th. Registration is still possible (and highly recommended).

Conference on AI and Human Rights

The Working Group “Künstliche Intelligenz und Menschenrechte” holds a one day Conference on “KI-VO: Exekutive Rechtsetzung, Standardisierung, Zertifizierung und Grundrechte-Folgenabschätzung” in the law school’s top floor on Tuesday, June 11. Registration is open, the entry is free. The program is online, this is an excerpt from the morning session:

#arsboni

On Tuesday, June, 11.00 at 9.00 am, I will talk with Prof. Dr. Fabian Schmieder from University of Applied Sciences and Art Hannover. Schmieder is Vicepresident for IT, Information Management and Digitalisation at this University and went through the possibly worst nightmare anyone working in IT at a University can think of last year: a ransomeware attack.

He speaks openly about the event and lessons learned, inter alia on LinkedIn.

The story was so big that even some English reports on the incident were published. It’s a structural problem, though.

Later in this week, I will have Michaela Krömer in the laundry. Krömer is an Austrian attorney-at-law and founder of CLAW- an initiative for climate justice. The organisation supports climate cases on an organisational and financial level as well as with legal analysis and research. We will speak about strategic litigation and the law in climate crisis.