Newsletter

Week 37/2024

Nothing but blue sky

Nikolaus Forgó

06 Sep 2024 — 4 min read

Pumpkin field (and me) during a late afternoon run in Weinviertel. It’s very hot and dry.

NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song For the Week)

This week’s song is from Holly Cole. It’s a beautiful version of an old Jonny Nash classic.

It’s also on YouTube

and in a very nice live-version

And here’s the original:

Retrospect

Ronen Steinke

Ronen Steinke was in #arsboni some months ago and we had a very nice conversation. Interestingly, he started to extract excerpts from our conversation and posts them as (joint) Instagram Reels - with several hundreds of (additional) views. This is him (and me) on legal language barriers

or on social injustice of fines

or on politics in law studies

It’s very impressive to me how succesful he is in distributing serious, difficult, text-heavy content via Instagram and I feel lucky to be a tiny part of this endeavour.

The full video with him is here:

Messenger Surveillance

There’s an intersting post on a Google-blog on why buying serveillance software by state authorities, as recently suggested in Austria, is a bad idea.

Der Standard has a German and simplified version of the story.

I did an #arsboni interview on the matter with Florian Schweitzer. This is, in my view, a really important contribution to the debate, fundamentally weakening the argument that online surveillance via malicious siftware can be and should be introduced under Austrian law.

From a (purely) technical standpoint I believe that the video quality is acceptable, in particular when I compare this with the team available for a TV-format like the “Sommergespräche” (35 people!).

I am still doing this completly alone and without any (formal) training (YouTube University, Galore!), which means that I really appreciate all kinds of comments you might want to share with me! Questions, I have, for example: Should I switch to a 2-cameras setup? (pro: less boring images. cons: another point of failure, additional costs, additional complexity). Should I do anything with the seating and the lighting? Should I invest into different mics? Or into someone helping me with/teaching me with the editing in Premiere Pro? Etc. I would love to get your feedback.

Full Professorship

À propos feedback:

We have a very interesting vacancy at the department. (Please spread the news!).

I received quite funny and unexpected (family-internal and external) feedback on the video.

Prospect

#arsboni

Three sessions are ahead of us.

On Monday, September 9th, at 17.00 CET I will talk with Marc André Bovermann about his text in Verfassungsblog “Putting X’s Community Notes to the Test”.

The topic is politically and legally highly rrelevant as this recent tweet from Jakob-Moritz Eberl might show:

Thursday, September 12th, at 16.30 CET, will be dedicated to a legal analysis of Pavel Durrov’s arrestment in France. Durov is the founder and CIO of Telegram. I wrote about this in last week’s weekly. I will speak with Clara Saillant from the department, she is a French lawyer.

And on Wednesday, September 11th, I will, hopefully, finally do the interview with Shirin Ghazanfari.

We decided to postpone this once again because we hope that we will have found and read the mysterious new draft of the law on the matter that is, presumably, under review in the federal chancellery at the moment:

Look and Feel

I am introducing a new category this week.

“Look and Feel” is about the best books, podcasts, videos, TV shows, concerts etc. that I watched or listened to during my runs or other leisure (non-)activities. It won’t necessarrily be strictly legal, but, hopefully, interesting (yes, there is life apart from law!) . I have two recommendations this week: