The light on the robotic lawn mower blinks orange. Not because the battery is flat, not because a perimeter wire snapped. Because a server the owner has never laid eyes on was switched off somewhere…
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Sovereignty
There is a backstory few people remember anymore. In the eighties, the former Bundespost ran a service called Bildschirmtext — BTX. A closed system, proprietary pages, proprietary tariffs, proprietary…
There is a sentence that gets spoken more often than any other this decade, and it sounds like insight but is really capitulation: Well, in the end everything is transparent anyway. What it refers to…
There are numbers you don’t comprehend — you only marvel at them. The Android smartphone in your pocket runs on Linux. The server delivering this webpage runs on Linux. Your bank’s cash…
There is a moment everyone knows who has ever tried to keep using an older smartphone. The device works. The screen is intact, the battery holds, the hardware would be entirely sufficient for what you…
I have worked in this industry long enough to recognise how the end of an epoch feels. It does not begin with a bang. It begins with a sensation. An inkling that what you have done for years is not…
There is an image that repeats. Someone sits in a café. Four people at the next table, all mid-twenties. Nobody speaks. Everybody types. Four displays, four apps, four streams of messages flowing into…
There is a scene that has played out thousands of times this year. Someone owns a computer. Not old, perhaps three or four years. Decent CPU, enough RAM, an SSD, a perfectly usable machine. And then…
It usually begins with a simple question: Can I do this myself? A photo album. A file share. A team wiki. Something you are currently using — from a provider who offers it conveniently, free or cheap,…
Vendor lock-in rarely begins with a conscious decision. Usually it begins with a nice offer. Free trial. Easy migration. Everything from one source. And two years later you discover: switching would…