As always on my blog, I am speaking for myself only.

Yesterday, flickr launched their German service and at the same time, disabled access to pictures marked as “moderate” as well as “restricted”.

flickr (speaking through staff member heather) justifies this as follows: “The central problem is that Germany has much more stringent age verification laws than its neighboring countries and specifies much harsher penalties, including jail time, for those with direct responsibility”

flickr users in Germany (and surrounding countries) complain about flickr’s censorship policy.

What seems to have happened here is a misinterpretation of German law. (But please remember that IANAL, I am only spending 20% of my studies on law, not 100%) Read on »

At last month’s Firefox Summit, everybody got a nice name tag on a lanyard to carry around their neck. That was extremely useful, especially since people frequently put their real name as well as their IRC nick on there.

This is how it looked like (involuntary model: Mike Shaver):

After the summit, though, the name tags and lanyards went into everybody’s bottom drawer. Well, everybody’s but mine

I removed the name tag from the lanyard and connected a key ring to it, turning it into the coolest keychain ever:

A week ago, the Firefox crop circle (finally) made it into Google Earth. This is a screenshot of how it looks like:

Now, as Asa found out, today the photos also made it into Google Maps:

Very nice! And well done, dear friends from the OSU Linux User Group!

(thanks to bagawk on #osu-lug for the Google Earth screenshot; thanks to Asa for the link to the Google Maps location!)

Today, I am mo-blogging from Oregon State University, while I am here for work and “turkey week” reasons.

I came across this neat poster for the Open Source Education Lab featuring the Firefox Crop Circle. (The OSU LUG, in case you didn’t know, were the people who made that famous crop circle last summer, realizing an idea by the two former Mozilla interns Matt Shichtman and John Cary!)