Stanford Center for Internet and Society

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I am very excited to have been awarded a place at the Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Summer School which is going to take place in Beijing this year.

The programme starts on thursday but I flew in a few days early and arrived in Beijing yesterday. Its my first time outside the western hemisphere and learning to find my way around already turned out to be a challenge.It started right after arriving at the airport where I was immediatly approached by a helpful young man offering me a taxi-ride into the city. One of them hijacked my suitcase and quickly moved toward a parking garage just opposite the arrivials hall. My suitcase ended up in his trunk before I was able to stop him. I started to negotiate the fare and he wanted 400 rmb (around 50$) for the trip. The organisers of the oii summer school had recommened us to take a taxi into the city and thankfully prepared us with the information that the fare should be around 100 rmb. After some serious chit-chat my driver finally tossed my suitcase before my feet and went off.

Since June 1. 70.000 so called 'e-cards' are delivered daily to Austrias citizens. By the end of the year all 8 million austrian people will be issued the ecard, which is the citizen-side component of a comprehensive E-Health infrastructure. Austrias e-card is factually a test for the E-Health project in Germany described by me in an earlier post and is produced by the same contractor Giesecke & Devrient.

As of yesterday there is finally a end-user friendly Mac OS X version of Tor. Tor is a small tool endorsed by the EFF that allows users to anonymize their webtraffic, including instant messaging, IRC, SSH and more. In its newest version it is really easy to set up and use and provides a great deal of security. You can get and learn more about it here.

Germanys Cabinet has announced its new 'eCard' (PDF German) strategy that essentially will render the 'GesundheitsCard' (HealthCard) into a universal ID solution. Health insurance is mandatory in Germany and basically every citizen already holds a Chipcard containg data about is insurance status. The GesundheitsCard is planned to become the succesor of the current Chipcard but with a much broader scope. The most important new features are the inclusion of a government approved Digital Signature and of an personal insurance number similar to the Social Security Number in the USA.

Sight and Sight is an exiting new service being live since March 1. It offers daily abstracts of the feuilletons of Germanys (and Switzerlands) biggest newspapers. A selected range of essays is also being made available in english translations.

Make sure you read the Sight and Sight Manifesto by Thierry Chervel.

Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer and a couple more high ranking politicians last week issued a proposal for their 'Count Every Vote Act of 2005' that the Slashdot folks immediatly dubbed Open Voting Bill

Paragraph 9 of the act prohibites the use of undisclosed software in electronic voting maschines and that source code, object code, and executable would be made available for inspection upon request to any citizen.

At least in the public sector!

Microsoft has announced that it expands its Government Security Program, better known under the name ‘Shared Source”, to its Office application suite. Shared Source allows governments to inspect code of Microsoft products. Since its introduction in 2003 over 30 governments worldwide took the opportunity to inspect the code of the Microsoft Windows OS.

So what happened to Microsoft, once claiming that Open Source is Communism, that they suddenly start to open their code?!I recently published an article in a german book on the normative dimension of software usage in the public sector. In this article I present four arguments that might explain the increasing use of Free Software in the public sector:

I just arrived in the US for a four month visit to Stanford where I will mainly dwell hidden from the sun in serveral libraries in order to pursue my thesis. I am available and eager to share and discuss my work on E-Government and media-theory, my impressions as a european hitting US soil and almost everything else while being here. So if interested, just send me an e-mail.

Disinfopedia is something I found useful recently, since being exposed to a Presidential election campaign that is muddy beyond imagination. Disinfo

I am always impressed by the ability of US politicians to coin catchphrases. While European governments try to sell their e-health initiatives with lengthy arguments about cost containment and service convenience, Newt Gingrich simply states: "Paper Kills" - Paper prescriptions kill. Paper records kill." He even manages to bring the notion of terror into play: "And if there's a public health emergency, paper will kill a lot of people."
Gingrich referred to the US e-health ‘Framework for Strategic Action’ that was released today by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Besides the open question, if a digitized health care system will actually benefit the patients or someone else instead, e-health programs seem to become a major contributor for establishing government approved PK-Infrastructures for the Internet. Within the health care complex privacy issues and security needs are obvious and highly agreeable to all parties involved. Electronic Prescriptions, electronic health records, clinical interconnectiveness etc., all meet in the need for authentification and encryption of data being transfered over the Internet. This development presumably will have a profound impact onto the Internet and on the ongoing struggle for authentification infrastructures.