The IT Blog

Author: Franz

  • Torture for Bitcoin: When Crypto Gets Brutally Real

    It’s one thing to know that each password can be stolen by kidnapping a person knowing the passwords and then “convincing” them to reveal it. But really reading that it (very likely) happened … feels strange.

    I just read an heise article (Um Bitcoin zu stehlen: US-Kryptoinvestor hat wohl wochenlang Touristen gefoltert), citing an NBC-article (Crypto trader tortured Italian man in NYC home in bid to steal his bitcoin).

    Oh well, that’s one of the services that traditional banks do. Making suchthings harder. Maybe not fully impossible, but harder than “enter password”.

  • Why “Open” may not Always be Enough

    If you care about open source, open data, or open standards, you should read “What we in the open world are messing up in trying to compete with big tech“.

    I found it a good critique on Open Source and why “technology” and an OpenSource Licence may not be enough to compete with BigTech players. The author doesn’t argue against OpenSource but he points some quite valid points.

    You might say “look at your own GitHub repo first” but wait: The difference in my view is: Do you open-source something just to make it available for others as well or do you make an OpenSource project to compete with a commercial product / to position yourself as a valid alternative …

    Anyways, give it a read – and maybe follow his Blog as well!

  • Buchempfehlung: Die Logik des Mißlingens

    Eine Kollegin hat mir neulich ein Buch empfohlen: “Die Logik des Mißlingens, Strategisches Denken in komplexen Situationen” von Dietrich Dörner. Klang ja wie eine Anleitung für Projektleitung. Kurz darauf lag also eine leicht vergilbte second-hand Ausgabe davon auf meinem Tisch.

    “Die Logik des Mißlingens” ist kein neues Buch – es ist von 1989, aber ein Thema, das zeitlos bleibt. Weil menschliches Verhalten zeitlos fehlbar ist und – wie ich glaube – sich die generelle Denkweise in nur 30 Jahren vermutlich kaum geändert hat.

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  • Podcast: Warum Arbeit häufig Zeitverschwendung ist

    Gerade von Kollegen empfohlen bekommen: eine Podcast Folge über Arbeit und Meetings. – Wird irgendwie nie alt.

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  • How to check the Email Security Level of your Provider

    If you’ve ever wondered which security protocols your email-provider supports, there is an easy way that I found via Mastodon:

    The European Commision provides My Email Communications Security Assessment (MECSA) (https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/) with which you can quickly check, which of the protocols your provider supports (StartTLS, x509 Ceerts, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DANE, DNSSEC).

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  • How to delete all content from LinkedIn

    As I’ve written earlier, I’m going more and more away from LinkedIn (like here and here). During my activity, I decided that I want to go a step further and remove all my content (posts, answers, likes) from LinkedIn. On Mastodon, I have auto-delete activated already for various reasons. Now I wanted to clean up LinkedIn, too!

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  • Oh Synology – what are you doing?

    I’m running a Synology NAS here at home for a few years now, and I admit: I’m quite happy with it. Even though I haven’t really utilized all of the services. But recently Synology reminded me why I don’t want to buy into one system too deeply.

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  • Myown #UnplugTrump to more digital sovereignty / digital independence

    If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’m gradually moving away from “classical” Big Tech social media, focusing more on Mastodon and my own homepage.

    On Mastodon, I came across Elena Rossini and followed her journey toward greater digital sovereignty. Inspired by her example, I decided to give up my YouTube channel in favor of a self-hosted PeerTube instance.

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  • How I Gave My Old Computer Parts a Second Life

    At the end of last year, we replaced our PCs that were over 10 years old. And with new equipment there is always the question: What to do with the old one?

    We haven’t had the best experience of trying to sell old PCs in one go. So throw them away? But … they work quite well! It would be sad to see them just go to the bin. Also, it just felt wrong to throw away fully functional discs, RAM and graphics cards.

    So I decided to try a different approach this time. Disassemble the machines and put all the parts up for sale on eBay separately. Not with the aim of making a lot of money, but to avoid electronic waste. – I took pictures of all the parts, gave them a (really) short description and put them up for auction on eBay for €1. The SSDs and HDDs were reset/overwritten and put online with the corresponding SMART values. I didn’t want to cheat anyone who bought a used disc.

    If the parts didn’t sell within a few weeks, I could always throw them away. If each item sold for €1, it wouldn’t justify the effort, but at least the parts could stay in use! Maybe someone just wants to try / learn how to assemble PCs. You likely wouldn’t want to buy brand new components for that, right? Who knows (and actually I don’t care).

    The Result: after about 3 weeks, to my surprise, almost all the parts were sold! The mainboard and the DVD burner sold for 1€ and 2€ respectively, but all the other parts sold for more.

    And I admit: it was also a bit fun to disassemble the machines. 🙂

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  • Recommended talk: Digital Sovereignty Is the New Influencer Status

    This week I came across a post recommending the talk from Molly White (@molly0xff) at SXSW, talking about “Digital Sovereignty Is the New Influencer Status“.

    The abstract of the talk is: “The real power move for creators is ownership and control of their work and livelihoods. This freedom is actually closer for more people than ever before! Learn from two fediverse futurists how decentralized social media facilitates better publishing, community, and business models. These speakers will cover the theoretical and the practical, including how the landscape is evolving in 2025, where creators should focus their energies, and how they might thrive with or without “walled garden” social platforms.”

    It’s an interesting talk, where she’s talking about how (and WHY) she keeps her content mainly on her website and federates it to some social networks for discovery.

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