Inspired by a blog entry about "non-locations", that means locations you don't feel like to visit, I want you present a series of localities that you might want to go to see.

Psychiatry, brain research in general, has always been a daunting task: not knowing how this strange grey matter - our brain - really works must have been frustrating in former days. Scientists threw in input data (treated their probands with various stimulus patterns) and reviewed the results. Everything between input and output was a black box, a no-man's-land, barely covered by psychology, biology, and medicine.

The last decade brought imaging techniques and psychiatrists and brain researchers are avid users. Finally they are able to watch what happens in the head while a proband is solving problems, and without doubt this kind of research resulted in great insights. This is big science and there is much more to come.

The venerable Stanford University School of Medicine released a study somewhere between brain research and gender studies. Researchers developed a simple game that involved occupying territories, and they found out that it appealed more to their male than female probands. Now they claim to know why men can't deny games like Halo. Obviously, according to their hypothesis, men are more attracted to space-infringement games than women, because men feel more rewarded in winning territories, thus more predestined to "territory- and aggression-type games".

You don't say. In certain situations men are more aggressive than men and we can prove that by developing a simple game and watching the brain curves. Where's the beef? Statements about men as "tyrants" and "conquerors" are following the only too well-known "men are from Mars, women from Venus" pattern and this is neither original nor is it scientific. Results are presented that everybody implicitly has known before and that just affirm that knowledge. That's no science, not even insight, that's somewhere between entertainment and prejudice.

But what really annoys me (it didn't happen yet, but this is just a matter of a few hours) is the inevitable editing by mass media. I predict that articles about that study will deal with terms like "men hooked on games more than women", "game addiction scientifically approved", "aggressive games rewarding men's basic desires" and next week we'll see politicians in talkshows debating on a ban of "killer games". Is it science? No, it's a stupid study becoming propaganda. (Source)

If you attend a conference in the near future, you'll have to watch your badge: so-called "smart badges" will track every step you make, notice who you meet and send this information to a central computer where it gets visualized. Sociometrics is the new kid on the block and everybody wants to know everything about you, even at conferences. A new spin-off that produces these thingies is already underway and remember: it's all science! Really! (Source)

Stephen Murdoch, PhD doctorate at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory on the principal weakness of 'covert channels', that means anonymizing systems like TOR. Watching the patterns of behaviour of different users reveals their intentions, if not their identity. A nice reminder that usage of anonymity tools alone is no guarantee for surfing incognito at all. (Source)

What now? Dispersion of behaviour, adding a random element in your online practice, usage of multiple anonymity tools. A high price to escape the eye of Mordor.

"What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act."

Excellent photographs of voyages to Yemen and Niger, executed by Evelyne Dubos. Absolutely great.

This was not the usual raid on an ordinary tax dodger: yesterday, prosecutors and police raided home and office of Klaus Zumwinkel, CEO of Deutsche Post, the still quasi-monopolist for German mail affairs. After posting bail he was allowed to return to his home.

Today, he backed out of his management positions, and it will be just a matter of a few days to watch decreasing the number of his influential friends. (Some politicians are already claiming about the loss of trust in Germany's elite, but this isn't up to much. Sorry politicians, no bonus points for you available here!) Zumwinkel is no leightweight: he's one of Germany's longest-serving top-managers and head of various supervisory boards. He planned to finish his career at the end of this year, but obviously not this way.

I've watched the photos of his detention. After bailing out and returning home to Cologne, he was alone with his family and his advocate, and I wonder what might have been happening that night. Did his family, especially his wife, address reproaches to him? Or didn't they know what was happening at all? Was he trying to save his lifework (or at least parts of his fortune) and permanently making phone calls? Is there a closed drawer at his desk with a tool to be used as last resort? Would this be enough for a Tennessee Williams like family drama? Who knows?

In the end, it's probably just another chapter in Germany's white-collar crime history. But if I was a filmmaker, I'd had an idea for my next movie. It would be an intimate play about an industry giant who had been nabbed with both hands in the cookie-jar, just a few hours after releasing him from jail and just hours before his total breakdown.

Most likely, I got infected by a colleague at work. At least that's the assumption of my doctor, who told me about children diseases and their sometimes unusual characteristics on the adult body. Perhaps a Streptococcus infection. Great. I can't remember being beaten with an infection like that for ages!

When colleagues and friends are talking about their kids, this sometimes turns out into a medical seminar: there are always nasty infection waves, making kindergartens and schools a sort of pest holes, where various germs are constantly exchanged. The last wave hit me.

Our beloved government wants and urges everybody to have a job and to have as much children as possible. If both parents are at work and no granny's available, they just have to put their sick kid into kindergarten / school, together with other sick children nobody has time to care for. Because in today's Germany everybody is in fear of losing his job, many people are going to work, though, and spread their children's diseases. This doesn't work out. If a kid is permanently ill and gets a daily refreshment with viruses and bacteria without any chance to recover, I wonder what's going wrong here. And I don't blame the parents for this!

"We're just a means to and end - and not an end in itself." - our head at yesterday's meeting. I was just browsing through some articles, all dealing with the question why young people / women / whoever isn't interested in a carrer in IT any longer. My boss told us the answer: we're just there for customer's sake, we're costing too much money, our only raison d'être is to satisfy the customer.

I was too tired to tell her that even the opposite of this would be still wrong. Why should one try to convince people to have a career in a work environment without any self-confidence? Why this bullshit about that abstract customer? Most customers I talked with were actually nice people, they were, in fact, people. No need to frighten IT workers because of this evil customers. Who takes his work seriously doesn't need a monster to be afraid of, he's proud to deliver good work.

The complete loss of self-confidence up to total self denial is the main reason for people backing away from a career in IT. If we could get back our self-confidence, coffee-cup reading like this or that would get obsolete. Give IT the glamour back and people will come.

Remember Java? 13 years ago, Java creators touted that Java was made to revolutionize the computer world (this discussion had a subthread that dealt with ultra-thin net computers, but that's a completely different story). The revolution felt through, sort of. It's way too early to pronounce the Java software market dead, there's a tremendous code-base and global players like IBM and SUN do big business with server and programming environments for the Java platform. However, a decrease in importance is noticeable due to developers who prefer systems like PHP, Ruby or the .Net Framework for rapid development. To me this reveals a growing trend towards rapid prototyping systems that promise to do all the work in less time. However, this might work out for little Web2.0 rat shops, but not for serious programming. If Ruby on Rails is the only programming environment you're used to, I'd recommend a cold shower and some lessons in C. (Source)

StudiVZ and SchülerVZ usually are described as Germany's answer to community sites like Facebook. In a recent interview (German language) StudiVZ CEO Marcus Riecke tells about his view on personalised advertisement and the recent changes in StudiVZ's terms and conditions.

Riecke sees his company sitting on the fence when conflicts arise between members' privacy and curiosity of prosecutors. Thus he widely changed the VZ's terms and conditions and asked its members to accept these changes or to leave the community in order to keep the directory and the users sober. By accepting the new terms and conditions users actively agree that their data are given to prosecutors if these deliver a warrant. According to Riecke's statement, acceptance is overwhelming and just 10 per cent of all users didn't agree to the new terms.

Based on the ten enquiries by administrative bodies that come in every week (Riecke mentions this number in the interview) where name and address of a user are given to the authorities, this results in a number of more than 500 incidents with possible juridical consequences per year. Issuers of cease and desist notes can find an extensive area of operation, certainly there will be almost always copyright infringements, cases of verbal abuse and the like.

On the other side, scholars and students have to bear personalised advertisement. Because every community member is encouraged to enter as much data as possible in her user profile, advertisers have a walk-over to find the appropriate customers for their products. I wouldn't consider this innovative like Riecke does, but maybe these people still don't know that even the most personalised ads are just annoying.
And I still don't get the idea of these VZ community sites. You're running barely naked, your data is sold to advertisers or given to prosecutors, that means: defenceless, and still there are enough people to accept all this for a little bit of digital love and security. To me, the price for this would be too high. My data's precious.

Germany's Constitutional Court has spoken: by nullifying North Rhine-Westphalia's 'law on protection of the constitution' and creating a new basic right to 'integrity and confidentiality of IT systems' as a part of personal rights, many of the dubious developments of the last few months in Germany are restrained. In its explanations, the court shows more technological appreciation than many journalists of the mass media. So various techniques like keyloggers or capturing of electromagnetic radiation are mentioned and the judges declare that not everything is allowed to the state that might be technically possible. Online eavesdropping with trojans or unheralded surveillance of user owned data are massively made difficult for prosecutors, and that's very good news.

The next weeks will show how our politicians will react on this. Our minister of the interiour, Wolfgang Schäuble, announced fast steps to declare new laws on online surveillance and I'm not sure if he understood yesterday's judgement completely. We'll stay tuned.

At least one minister of justice (North Rhine-Westphalia's Ingo Wolf (FDP)) and a complete political party - SPD - disgraced themselves: the first by implementing that law that has been declared anticonstitutional yesterday, and the Social Democrats by waving through Schäuble's draft laws on online surveillance, waiting for the courts to overturn them. I call this a poor performance.

Of course with best intentions, researchers at the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright Patterson Air Force Base are developing a system for detecting insider threats within organizations. This is done by data mining operations on the organization's emails, thus revealing social networks within that organization. Even individuals "who feel alienated within the organization" can be spotted by analyzing certain changes in their social behaviour, tracked by that software.

I've read about many paranoia systems but this outweighs others by far. If an individual "feels alienated", she has reasons for this. So going to the workers' council becomes a subversive act again! If people learn that they are monitored, they will change their behaviour, anyway. And if somebody really wants to get information that wasn't intended for him, or if he wants to destroy something, he won't wait for that until you're ready with analyzing his profile.

Dear researchers: Is your hubris that big that you don't even consider abuse of your system and its data? There are still enough people in Germany who have a lot of experience with a totalitarian state (the former GDR), a governmental system based on nosing the own people and draconian penalties for subversive elements. Go out, ask them and take some history lessions about dictatorship and Big Brother scenarios! (Source)

Having read about minuscule RFID chips I imagine a rotating door system that you have to enter and that lets you breathe in several of these mini RFID chips. And whoops - you're tagged! With a scanning distance of 30 centimeters you can be easily tracked.

What's next?