Untimely meditations

One man's thoughts, observations and rants

Welcome to the personal blog of Joop Beris. I blog about a wide variety of topics, ranging from atheism to information security and lots in between. I welcome feedback on my articles but there are some guidelines. Feel free to share articles you like by using the sharing buttons but please give me credit if you want to share something. Also, check out my privacy policy and other legalese.

Below you’ll find the most recent things I’ve written. Feel free to check them out, leave a comment and share them with others who might be interested.

Latest posts

  • ACTA moves to European Court of Justice

    ACTA moves to European Court of Justice

    Rather unsurprisingly, the ACTA news of today is that the European Parliament has suspended the ratification of ACTA. The matter will now be referred to the European Court of Justice. I write ‘unsurprisingly’ because this is exactly what the new rapporteur on ACTA, David Martin, suggested more than a week ago. So is this good…

  • ACTA is not dead

    ACTA is not dead

    With all the recent news, several European countries announcing they were going to hold off on ratifying or signing of the ACTA agreement, major newspapers announcing that ACTA is dead, the EU Court of Justice ruling that social networks can’t be forced to monitor their users for copyright violations, it would be easy to make…

  • Common myths about ACTA

    Common myths about ACTA

    The discussion about ACTA is unfortunately polluted, by both sides, by myths, half-truth and false information. This post is an attempt to provide people with correct information (as far as I can ascertain) about what is true and what is not about ACTA.

  • Breaking news: Dutch parliament against signing ACTA

    Breaking news: Dutch parliament against signing ACTA

    This was just announced by Dutch news network NOS: apparently the Dutch national Parliament has accepted a motion not to sign ACTA, due to concerns about human rights. A majority in Parliament consisting of D66, Groenlinks, PvdA,  SP and PVV stated that the ACTA agreement might conflict with the European declaration on the Rights of…

  • Lies, damned lies and ACTA

    In a response to the day of international protests against ACTA, Dutch NOS news asked the Dutch negotiator on ACTA, Minister Maxime Verhagen, for a response. In his response Minister Verhagen mentions that he doesn’t understand the commotion and that ACTA is actually good, since it enables us to take a child pornography sites offline,…

  • ACTA protest day, February 11, 2012

    ACTA protest day, February 11, 2012

    Post edited 2012-02-12: more videos added and the reaction of Minister Verhagen has been given a post of its own, so it has been removed here. Bonus points if you can spot yours truly in any of the videos below. I was at the protest in Amsterdam today and boy, was it ever cold! Still,…

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“There are two different kinds of people in the world: those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosopher