NSFW

This week's NSFW is another finding from my Spotify weekly mix of suggestions - a song by Danielle Ponder of whom I had never heard before.

The song s also on YouTube.

What a voice! What a bass line! How much energy! I fully understand why this song was elected for an Apple iPhone ad.

Wikipedia tells me that the artist is a fully qualified lawyer who worked as a public defender. FM4 has a text about her and the song's background, CNN a story about her career shift from law to music.

Retrospect

#arsboni

Dr. Heidi Scheichenbauer and Dr. Mirjam Tercero joined me in the laundry to discuss in how far Europe attempts (or should) attempt to deregulate AI training in data protection law.

On the technical side, I experimented - once again - with the lighting here; it's much darker in the laundry in this video than in most of the others; it's impressive how light sensitive the sensor is. Reason is that I consider some of the other videos to be somehow overexposed in the face areas and I also wanted to try a warmer tone. I showed this to several people who said that it's OK but not an improvement. Contentwise, we started with a text in Der Standard but went beyond the arguments there. I like the sections most in which one can see all three of us pausing and reflecting - we left known territory, somehow.

Mag. Nikolaus Loudon gave an interview on white collar crime to the Vienna Legal Literacy Project.

Freedom of Information Act

I gave a presentation on the Austrian Freedom of Information Act in Landhaus Eisenstadt. Two lessons learned: First, as heard at other occasions, the expected flood of citizen requests paralyzing administrations that many had been afraid when the law was debated, didn't happen (yet). Second, the law is used as apolitical instrument to annoy the political adversary in a way, probably, not expected.

I went there by train and was impressed that something looking like on the picture below can be the main railway station of a (regional) capital.

I also found the possibly saddest Christmas tree ever in the station restaurant.

Prospect

Ars Iuris

The law school's doctoral school is holding a one day "Socratics seminar" in which the authors discuss chapters of their work with each others (and Prof. Dr. Franz-Stefan Meissel and me).

Doc-Scholarship

Klaudia from the Department received a Doctoral-Scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her PHD-project on "A Legal Perspective on the (Mis)use of Data on Menstruation Apps: Looking Beyond the General Data Protection Regulation." There will be an award ceremony on Tuesday that I will - gladly and proudly - attend. The programme offers funding for highly qualified doctoral candidates in all areas of research and is intended to allow young researchers to dedicate themselves to focus fully on their project.

#arsboni

I met Otmar Lendl from CERT.at in the #arsboni laundry and we had a very nice conversation on the implementation of the NIS2 directive in Austria via the NIS2 transposition law 2026 that is currently in the making. The video is rendered literally while I am writing this and I will hopefully publish the outcome very soon.

Look and Feel

Im Gespräch

Armin Wolf held a long interview with Marco Wanda that I found interesting although I am not really a fan neither of the band's music nor of their image.

Wolf is well prepared in the talk, He also writes about the interview in his own blog - which is stupidly the easiest way to find the long version (not the shortened radio version) on ORF. I would really like to understand why a radio station sees the need to shorten such a talk which has in its very core a claim for "authenticity" (whatever this is). YouTube has - of course - the long version - but with remarkably few clicks.

ORF Podcast - which is the channel where one can find the long original - has less subscribers than arsboni. Wolf provides on his blog (and not via ORF) a full written version of the talk as well - also an interesting move.

Kennedy

Due to the, excuse my French, legal and medical garbage the US-secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is currently publishing on German health politics, I listened to this long podcast interview with him from July 2023 (again).

I wouldn't recommend to do this, though. It's so depressing that someone with such conspirative positions and with no medical qualification whatsoever can become the, possibly, most influential health politician worldwide. And it's also an issue that the host is very weak in opposing the extremities heard. ZDF-heute has an overview on how to contextualize the recent attacks, TAZ analyses how this resonates with German right-wing politics.

Prof. Dr. Volker Depkat helped me significantly to get a fuller picture about what's currently happening in the USA in a recent Falter Radio podcast episode.

Depkat argues that Trump and his allies are just an extreme version of US-conservative politics with hundreds of years of tradition and that the period between 1945 and 1991 with strong connections between Europe and the US was an exception whereas, historically, the "clash of cultures" that we see at the moment is the normal state of play.

The most recent episode of Inside Austria, about Sebastian Kurz' reinvention as entrepreneur and his ties to ('conservative') US-positions fits into the frame as well.

Although this edition does have some interesting points, it's disappointing that - again - nothing new is said about where the phenomenal net value of his startup "Dream" is coming from.

Funnily, I didn't even manage to sign up for Dream's company newsletter.

Is this a bug or a feature?

Daisy

likes the snow (sometimes).

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)