I am an IT security expert and co-founder of Lutra Security GmbH. My motivation is to make risks understandable and to contribute sustainably to a safer internet.
Besides that, I am an active open source contributor. The modern digital world as we know it would not be exist without open source software. Not only is much of the end-user software I use open source, but the key technologies of the Internet and most IoT devices and smartphones are based on open source software. That this is possible is not a given, and that’s why I believe we should all give something back from time to time, whether it’s a bug report, a bug fix, or a new application.
Read moreThe image that manufacturers paint of their LLMs (Large Language Models, the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) is that of an answer machine – the knowledge of humanity just one prompt away. However, they are at best a simulacrum of such a machine, the answers mere platitudes from an immortal idiot. Taking a step back, it’s rather the opposite: instead of providing universal access to knowledge, LLMs are destroying our knowledge and cultural heritage. And I’m not referring to Elon Musk wanting to use Grok to rewrite history1 or the inevitable errors (aka “hallucinations”) in the answers. I mean this very literally.
Read moreJan Wildeboer’s thread on setting up a cooperative CA inspired me to finally write down (and then forget about them again for over a week) my thoughts on a related topic: Email encryption.
With PGP and S/MIME, we already have two mature solutions for sending encrypted emails that have been around for decades. And while there are a few issues here and there, we can essentially consider the problem solved. If it wasn’t for the UX…
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