2730 - Even A Palm Tree

We’ve got a palm tree. A small one, but it has a chance to get bigger, because Kazuuu doesn’t like it 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Even A Palm Tree” from Paul Heaton’s album “Acid Country”. Hear it on YouTube. It’s kind of love story. Kinda 🙂

By the way, today has been a good day. Yes, we’ve had a devastating bug in OpenSSL, the software base of most security systems on the Internet, but that is nothing against the good news:

The European Court of Justice, the highest court in Europe, has torn to shreds the European Data Retention Directive. If you’re not familiar with European politics, let me explain. Politicians of all EU member states simply love the EU. Whatever they want to get done but can’t because of domestic resistance, they delegate to the EU. When it comes back in the form of a directive (not a law, but kind of a mandatory template for a national law), they invariably blame the EU - and people tend to believe it. As a result, the image of the EU is much worse than it should be, but that’s only natural for an institution that is constantly abused as a scapegoat.

It does not always turn out like that though. This time it was a European court that has annulled a directive that (of course) had been justified with the war on terror and child porn (as always), but that had mostly been used against all sorts of petty crime, a directive that nobody wanted but secret services and the content industry. It’s not the end of the war of our governments against the people, but I’d say we’ve won a pretty big battle today 😄

Finally, Andreas Mölzer, a right-wing politician notorious for his extremist views, has stepped back. In the end he has said the N word one too many times. What a day 🙂