Just two memos: There is a talk tonight with Thomas Länger from the Viennese quantum encryption project (BBC article about the project), co-organized by quintessenz (an organisation devoted to civil rights in the information age) and Transforming Freedom (who are dedicated to documenting the discourse of the battle zones of digital culture; I volunteer for them). ORF wrote a German article about it, with information about the venue and start time. The key issue quintessenz want to raise with this talk is: Who is going to benefit? Will “unbrekable” quantum encryption become available to citizens, too? Quantum encryption cartridges for your PC, anyone?

Secondly: I published an “inaugural interview” Marion Fugléwicz-Bren did with two of my colleagues, Matthias Samwald and Thomas SchandlThomas Schandl studied business administration at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, where he was also employed at the Dept. for Advertising and Marketing Research. In the course of his studies, he specialised in Business Informatics, writing his diploma thesis on ... (not so inaugural for the former, as he already joined SWCThe Semantic Web Company (SWC), based in Vienna, provides companies, institutions and organizations with professional services related to the Semantic Web, semantic technologies and Social Software in January). I’d like to extract this quote by W3C member Samwald regarding privacy on the (corporation owned) social web and the future (user-managed) social semantic web:

I also think that Semantic Web technologies will receive a lot of media attention when the first big, public breach in security / privacy happens in one of the websites that currently dominate the whole world wide web. At the moment, we all are uploading most of our private and business lives to web sites such as GoogleGoogle Inc. is a multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was ..., Facebook, FlickrFlickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that ... and others. It is just a matter of time until a big scandal happens, be it the companiesA company is a form of business organization. In the United States, a company is a corporation—or, less commonly, an association, partnership, or union—that carries on an industrial enterprise. " Generally, a company may be a "corporation, partnership, association, joint-stock ... themselves that misuse the vast amounts of data they have, or be it a government agency in an overzealous effort of crime prevention.

When this will happen, people will re-evaluate the trend towards massive centralisation on the web, and will search for opportunities to make the same feeling of being ‘in the network’ happen in a distributed environment, without selling ones soul to a multinational corporation. Then we will find that such an opportunity already exists — the Semantic Web.

Read the whole interview here.