I was too busy to read my favourite tech news the last few weeks. This sunday I finally started working on the backlog. Parts of it - I'm not going to try to catch up with Slashdot... And most of the time, I'm only reading the headlines, too.

Most of the stuff here will be in German; since I'm also interested in the politics surrounding technology here in germany, a local ticker such as Heise is most useful for me.

• If you're living in germany, please sign the Petition against the use of voting machines in germany. Read my german blog post on it for the reasons why voting machines undermine democracy (short version: most citicens can't verify their vote was counted, or that the system is fair)
• Nvidia closed-source drivers had a security issue. German article on it. Another example why closed source drivers are bad - they don't get the security verifications and support that opensource software has. Apart from being badly integrated and less reliable.
• Google bought YouTube. IMHO a bad idea. YouTube is full of copyright violations, and there is not that much original content or community, actually. Having the financial background of Google, it's now much more interesting to actually sure YouTube.
• Buchpfade.de a community platform created by friends of mine, centered around books. Don't ask me about details, I havn't used it yet. I think you can see what your friends have been reading, and get some book recommendations based on the reading habits of others.
• Kiss or Diss. Like Hot or Not, but with video. (aka: "totally better"). Though not too interesting for the tech crowd, it actually is quite addictive. The official launch should happen sometime the next few days.
• the Novell and Microsoft deal: I wonder if it's mostly to show an act of good will, to calm Europe in preparation of the Vista release. This and the new API for third party security software may get them to launch Vista on time in Europe, too.
• Contact information on web pages. May now be reachable with two clicks from the first page, if the wording is obvious. Germany used to require contact information to be reachable with a single click for commercial web pages.
• Flash 9 for Linux. Beta. Closed source, and it frequently locks up my browser. Probably has a lot of security issues, too; so better use it only with flashblock, and load flash only from somewhat trusted sites. But it works, and it finally allowed me to see that I don't care about MySpace videos and similar crap.
• New Ubuntu release. Congrats, but I havn't tested it yet. I considered going Ubuntu for some of my computers, but ended up with Debian on all of them. I just feel more at home here, and there is not much that Ubuntu has in extras for me that I really need.
• My new laptop has harddrive encryption, and encrypted swap. Suspend works, thanks to David Härdemann for helping me with that.
• I missed the Debian bug squashin party, which was kindly hosted by the LiMux team, responsible for the Debian Linux installation at the city of Munich. This deployment may become one of the most prominent examples of good Debian use: customized, to offer the best end user experience.
• Debian renames firefox and thunderbird. Welcome iceweasel and icefox. The official mozilla stuff is somewhat written for Windows, and needs modifications for proper Linux integration. This violates Mozilla trademark policy. In fact, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions would have to do this renaming, too!
• BenQ Mobile crash in Germany. IMHO this was planned by both Siemens and BenQ to get rid of "liabilities". Reminds me of the famous un-word "Kollateralschaden"...
• Firefox 2.0 - does this mean it has more features I do not need? I'm using epiphany; it has almost all the features I need, but a much nicer, less cluttered UI. Some say it's also faster, and it's Gnome integration definitely is better. The only thing I sometimes use firefox for is the web developer extension, which is a really nice tool when you have to fight HTML and CSS.
• Java to become OpenSource. Well, I hope they use a sane license... but at least that should finally clear up the licensing issues many people still see with current Debian Java packages. But I fear it might already be too late - Mono support has been better than Java for some time now.