The expert jury of this year’s legal tech hackathon awarded the first prize to PseuDocs on Monday. It’s about on site pseudonymisation of legal documents before sending them to an LLM like ChatGPT.
Let’s see what students will make out of this now.
NSFW (Nikolaus’ Song For the Week)
This week is a good week to chose the Viennese Version of Danger Dan’s “Das ist alles von der Kunstfreiheit gedeckt” as NSFW.
I don’t know why one needs to climb on the roof of Volkstheater to sing this (and I would die from fear of heights if I needed to join them there), but that’s what they did - and the view is gorgeous.
Is it an ironic reference to the iconic rooftop concert?
Retrospect
USA
The list of irritating and intimidating news about the US gets longer and longer, every day. One of the - many - new escalations is the arrest of a judge gor alleged obstruction of a proceding in their own court building. The criminal complaint in its technocratic detailness is just - unbelievable.
This happened on Friday, 25/04, exactly the day when I had my conversation with Dr. Peter Köppl.
Köppl’s summary of Trump’s self understanding is “L’État, c’est moi” that can also help how such incredible security incidents as a minister of defence sharing attack plans on Signal can stay without consequences for many days (and why the New York Times and the Washington Post are no longer politically important).
Interestingly, in the moment I am finishing this, rumors appear that, finally, Michael Waltz and his deputy will need to leave office as national security advisors. And new stories about Harvard appear and opinion pieces on the privacy disaster we see are published.
Surveillance
I also mentioned this Hegseth story in a one hour radio conversation I had the privilege to have on OE1 - to illustrate how critical vulnerabilities in mobile phones can potentially be as they are used for everything by everyone.
When doing my research on this I also stumbled across this very noteworthy society report on the opening party of Sebastian Kurz’ company subsidiary - Dream - in Austria. It’s really remarkable who of Austria’s media and politics still goes to such events without feelings that that might not be right. (See also Christoph Schattleitner on this now on Bluesky.)
Netzpolitik has (some) background information on the company that is - allegedly - worth more than 1 Billion $ now - as Kurz himself announced on LinkedIn - for doing what, with whom, exactly?
What, exactly, does a company do that promises on their website: “Dream is developing an AI platform that enables cyber resilience and protects nations from hostile nation-states cyber attacks. Dream’s advanced platform strengthens national security by providing governments with unmatched visibility, predictive defense, and real-time threat mitigation by solving the massive data problem in cyber.”? Excuse me? What?
However, I enjoyed the studio a lot - and appreciated the microphones and the headsets (Beyer DT 770 PRO, of course). I still need to understand why all these studios use YELLOWTEC Mika boom arms, I am not (yet) fully convinced of them (but don’t like my much cheaper Elgato Wave Low Profile either).
The sound engineer told me that the mic was a Neumann TLM 104, but that’s - to the very best of my knowledge - wrong. I believe it’s very much the usual TLM 103 that I have at home as well. A TLM 104 doesn’t exist (at least as far as I know), and a BCM 104 looks very different. Could be, that it’s a TLM 102 though, but that wouldn’t really be professional, would it? Whatever it is, it managed to produce a just wonderful sound.
And Xaver Forthuber was the nicest host possible. We had a very nice conversation.
Jodel
I would (seriously) recommend to everyone teaching at a large institution to sometimes read the relevant Jodel-channel (in my case in particular “juridicum”). Jodel is an “anonymous” (to the users only, as it’s almost exclusively advertisement driven, exploiting personal data) messaging board, somehow similar to Reddit, but with more geographical separation and more “anonymous” - like a toilet wall in the 80ies.
It’s quite intensely used by (Vienna law) students. It helps therefore to get unfiltered anonymous feedback (from some). And sometimes it’s just funny.
I am seriously considering to wear one of my beautiful #arsboni-hoodies in my next TV-interview with Armin Wolf now (I don’t really dress up for radio, as one can see above). But having read my Bourdieu in the 80ies (a book every law student and even more every law teacher should still be obliged to read!),
I am not that sure that the hoodie alone will help.
Law and Journalism
Mag. Birgit Schwarz gave a lovely interview on her law studies and her career.
She gave a very authentic, personal and unpretentious interview on her law studies, on her engagement in university politics and challenges in journalism (in principle and in her career). Her sincerity and reflectiveness were very much appreciated by students, I received lots of positive feedback on this - also from the department’s team. Two team members said that this had been the best ars boni episode they had ever seen.
Legal Tech Hackathon
We had the final pitches of this year’s Legal Tech Hackathon on Monday. We saw 6 different student projects, each of them very nice, in particular the three winning ideas. Vice Rector Evelyn Süss-Stepancik from University of Applied Scieces Campus Vienna was present during the whole event and also announced the over all winner - PseuDocs. She wrote a very nice LinkedIn entry on her perceptions.
And this was the expert jury - with many good old friends:
Prospect
Reserach (Ethics) and AI
The Austrian Agency of Research Integrity (OEAWI) has its annual conference on Thusday, May 8th.
I will be there as a member of the OEAWI-Commission on research integrity.
Legal Literacy Project
On Wednesday, May 7th, at 19.00, we will have the second episode of the LLP-Podcast.
Look and Feel
Microphones - Win a Hoodie!
Editing the interview with Peter Köppl was very time consuming for a stupid reason. I did a fully edited version that I decided not to publish as I couldn’t manage to improve the creepingly bad sound in my intro here (starting at 26’’).
Two hours later, I finally found and corrected the - very stupid - reason, redid my intro, processed the full video again so that the published version sounds much better (starting, again, at 26’’).
Question to you: What’s the reason for the bad sound in the first intro?
It’s possibe to see the reason on video. Can you spot it? I will be happy to offer an #arsboni-hoodie for free to the first person correctly explaining the problem in the comments of the not publicly visible version. I will announce this contest via social media on Friday afternoon only - if the puzzle is not solved then yet. Weekly-subscribers have a substantial advantage for their loyalty, therefore! :-)
And one more microphone rant: I managed to lose one of the minipopfilters of my Rode wireless pro backup mic in the laundry. This is nothing but plasticfoam, less than 1 cm of length.
Guess what a replacement can cost? Laesio enormis, usury, anyone? An it doesn’t even fit!
So this is the - much, much cheaper - alternative that I try out now - 6 € for 20 pieces in a vacumised envelope. I think I know why they send it in a transparent wrapping. :-)
Daisy
knows that shakehands are a nice gesture when meeting, in particular early in the morning, before breakfast (but still works on the left and right issue).
Have a wonderful week!
Kind regards
Nikolaus (Forgó)