strufe

CHI, Barcelona

Congratulations to the authors!
The paper “Do Citizens Agree with the EU AI Act? Public Perspectives on Risk and Regulation of AI Systems” by G. Gasiola, G. Lima, Y. Zou, and F. Zufall has been accepted at the CHI Conference, taking place April 13–17, 2026, in Barcelona. chi2026.acm.org

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Annika Sauer wins the excellence award of Université franco-allemande/Deutsch-Französische Hochschule, for the best graduate. Annika did her Master's with us on Attack Resilience in Differential Privacy, co-supervised by Héber Hwang Arcolezi and our Patricia at KIT and UGA/INP.
Congrats, great work!

Achten immer weniger auf ihr Äußeres: Erste Pinguine tragen Jogginghose statt Frack Antarktis (dpo) - Ein schleichender Kulturwandel macht sich derzeit in der Fauna der Antarktis bemerkbar. Dort beobachten Wissenschaftler seit Jahren,

Achten immer weniger auf ihr Äußeres: Erste Pinguine tragen Jogginghose statt Frack www.der-postillon.com/2025/02/ping...

This seems like one of the most US American things to read these days - you've been incarcerated falsely and shipped around the country against your rights, but getting home is your own problem. 🤔 That's why "land of the free", I guess?

Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE 404 Media is publishing a version of the user guide for ELITE, which lets ICE bring up dossiers on individual people and provides a “confidence score” of their address.

Nazi SS troops would have been grateful and much more powerful with Palantir software to select targets for deportation and executions. :|

Here is the User Guide for ELITE, the Tool Palantir Made for ICE

"The tool lets ICE populate a map with..."
www.404media.co/here-is-the-...

Yet another reason why Palantir software shouldn't be allowed in free, democratic societies.

Good reason why facial recognition is and should remain prohibited technology for public bodies in Europe.

Today in 1925, #ACMTuringAward recipient Douglas Engelbart was born. Engelbart received the Turing Award in 1997 for his inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision. amturing.acm.org/award_winner...

Social networks could be treated as publishers if they host illegal content, Minister of State says Government considering law that would ban ‘deepfakes’, Niamh Smyth says

Irland möchte Soziale Medien endlich wie Medien behandeln und regulieren. Das sind allerbeste Neuigkeiten! ❤️❤️❤️

"...that if a platform “doesn’t address the question of child sexual abuse material, or some of similar material against adults..."

www.irishtimes.com/politics/oir...

Microsoft Gave FBI BitLocker Encryption Keys, Exposing Privacy Flaw The tech giant said providing encryption keys was a standard response to a court order. But companies like Apple and Meta set up their systems so such a privacy violation isn’t possible.

www.forbes.com/sites/thomas...

And this is why I don't save my encryption keys to my Microsoft Account

Yet people act surprised every time.

Stop using Microsoft. Stop blindly trusting the cloud. FFS.

Screenshot of the title page of Alex' paper - "The Adverse Effects of Omitting Records in Differential Privacy: How Sampling and Suppression Degrade the Privacy–Utility Tradeoff"

💥The year starts with great news:💥
🍾Àlex' paper accepted at USENIX Sec🎉
He demonstrates how suppression (and: sampling as one special case) may amplify privacy but yields disproportionate utility loss.
It's been hard work: 🚀per aspera ad astra🌟
Congrats, we're proud!
arxiv.org/abs/2601.05180

NRA accidentally forgets to rise up against tyrannical government

Was Europa von Kanada lernen kann Kanadas Premier Carney lässt sich von Drohungen aus den USA nicht beeindrucken. Ein Vorbild für die EU?

Was Europa von Kanada lernen kann #Kanada #Carney #Trump

Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada Canadian PM Mark Carney stressed the end of the rules-based international order and urged middle powers to act together to counter the great power rivalry.

What an inspiration. Refreshing to see an honest, intelligent, and pragmatic politician, for a change. We could have had Robert Habek in Germany, but instead we can only envy 🇨🇦 Canada 🇨🇦 for having Mark Carney @mark-carney.bsky.social

m.youtube.com/watch?v=flsg...

www.weforum.org/stories/2026...

“We’ve invented a magic computer. It uses all of the earth’s resources, we’ve spent trillions on it and it’s the sole growth area of the US economy.”

“What does it do?”

“We were hoping you could tell us.”

Wegen Unklarheiten bei Anonymisierung: Pläne für Charité-Datenbank auf Eis Berlins oberste Datenschützerin hat Pläne für eine Gesundheitsdatenbank des Spitals Charité als „unverständlich“ kritisiert. Das Abgeordnetenhaus reagiert.

Wegen Unklarheiten bei Anonymisierung: Pläne für Charité-Datenbank auf Eis | heise online www.heise.de/news/Wegen-U...

Prof. Damiano Carra giving a talk in a lecture hall

We had the great pleasure of hosting Prof. Damiano Carra who gave a very interesting and entertaining talk on "Caching as an Online Learning Problem" - with everything from smart caches over adversarial traffic to NP hard problems.
Thanks a lot for visiting and the great talk!

Fake of German cops arresting us army personnel in front of Ramstein Air Force Base.

In a world's first, Germany's Dobrindt shows a spine and apparently has US military personnel arrested at Ramstein Air Force Base for their prime leader's repeatedly breaking international law.
/s

It's been a really amazing journey, starting with interest into networks in Dresden, and finding a passion in privacy of behavioral biometric data at @kit.edu, as part of CeTI and @kastel-labs.bsky.social .

Congratulations Dr. Simon! It's been a great pleasure!

It's one of the nicest moments in our academic life to see our mentees graduate, especially if they're as determined & perseverant, as patient with the most bizare ideas & tedious tasks by their mentors, and as supportive to their colleagues (impressively evidenced by the Doctor's hat!) as Simon!

Simon's PhD committee

Simon's Doctor's hat

Simon wearing his doctor's hat after his PhD defense.

🥂 It's with great pleasure that we can announce, that Dr. Simon Hanisch has successfully defended his PhD thesis, "Building and Evaluating Anonymizations for Human Motions"! 👏

Die EZB und die EU-Mitgliedsstaaten halten aktuell ca. 2,5 Billionen (!) an US-Staatsanleihen, UK nochmal etwa 800 Mrd. - hinzu kommen indirekte europäische Bestände im Besitz von Banken, Investment- und Pensionsfonds. Allein der norwegische Staatsfonds hält 157 Mrd. Dollar an US-Treasuries.
1/2

Geplante Digital-Reform: Hat Big Tech zu viel Einfluss auf die EU genommen? Zwei NGOs werfen der EU-Kommission vor, Lobbypositionen übernommen zu haben. Die widerspricht. Doch es gibt noch ein anderes Problem.

Die EU-Kommission schreibt bei ihrer Digitalreform von der Big-Tech-Wunschliste ab und schwächt damit den Datenschutz. Die Taz berichtet über unsere Recherche und zitiert die EU-Kommission: Alles sei ein „umfassender, transparenter Prozess gewesen“. Das sehen wir anders! /1
👉 taz.de/Geplante-Dig...

YouTube video by Miss GoElectric Industry Uncovering the details on Donut Lab's Solid State Battery

⚡ This is the best investigation I've seen yet into Donut Lab's highly anticipated solid state battery. (1/3)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbGx...

Interview: "Datenschutz schützt die Schwächeren gegenüber mächtigen Akteuren" Datenschutz steht politisch unter Druck. Warum er für Freiheit, Demokratie und nachhaltige Innovation notwendig ist, erklärt Prof. Tobias Keber im Gespräch.

Interview: "Datenschutz schützt die Schwächeren gegenüber mächtigen Akteuren" | heise online www.heise.de/hintergrund/...

At least defending Greenland is about to become much easier, now.

Buff Doge vs Cheems Meme: The EU: When the plan to fight CSAM is putting backdoors in all our secure messengers Also the EU: When Grok generates CSAM on X at an industrial scale every

What EU doing?

Anerkennung von Open-Source-Arbeit als Ehrenamt in Deutschland - Online-Petition Open-Source-Software bildet heute das Fundament großer Teile der digitalen Infrastruktur – in Verwaltung, Wirtschaft, Forschung und im täglichen Leben. Selbst im aktuellen Koalitionsvertrag der Bundes...

#OpenSource leistet einen wertvollen Beitrag für die #digitaleSouveränität unserer Gesellschaft. Doch diese Arbeit Tausender Freiwilliger wird in Deutschland bisher steuer- und förderrechtlich nicht als #Ehrenamt anerkannt.

Jetzt Petition unterzeichnen 👉 www.openpetition.de/petition/onl...