Sarah's Tech

Markus Käkenmeister

A deep dive into the European tech scene. Sarah, a business analyst with a data science background, explores the hidden stories behind Europe's tech renaissance. From Berlin's startup culture to the deep-tech hubs in Munich – this podcast is for anyone who wants to understand how Europe is shaping the global technology landscape. Probably a bit boring for most, but just right for tech enthusiasts.

  1. 4d ago

    A Hangover Without the Party | AI Stocks in 48 Hours, Our European Basket, and the Browser That Started the Bubble

    Episode 25: A Hangover Without the PartyAI stocks fell, rose, fell harder and rose again, all within about 48 hours. Europe owns almost none of the stars in that show and still woke up with a headache. Sarah and Markus open their own basket of 41 European tech shares, remember Netscape's IPO in 1995, induct Skype into the Hall of European Tech, and look east to Poland and the Baltics. Plus: the noise after our W Social interview, the death of the follow, and a bank that closed an account without a reason. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Open: Agents That Book Nothing. Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash and Booking opened the door for AI agents, and the agents book almost nothing. Airbnb announces its own travel agent anyway. Sarah has never booked anything either. Nobody prompted her. 02:30 Housekeeping. Episode 24 got audited. Listeners from the Eurosky and mu.social corner were right about one thing: without Episode 18, the interview could make W look technically independent. W's verification records on the AT Protocol are public. Why no creator chooses a network because of its relay, from StudiVZ and Wer-kennt-wen to Mastodon's decision to stay small. The league table: Instagram about three billion monthly users, Threads half a billion, Bluesky around ten million active on mobile, Mastodon under a million. Protocols versus apps: ATproto as one big, expensive ear, ActivityPub as thousands of small ones. The death of the follow, Threads' "Dear Algo", a letter from Brussels to TikTok's For You feed, and an open invitation to Eurosky and mu.social. 16:50 On the Record. Tech billionaires lose around 152 billion dollars in a single day. A German investor who once passed on Anthropic, and Michael Burry, who doesn't plan to buy. Shopify pays 99 million dollars for shop.com, and .de turns forty, starting at the University of Dortmund. And a serious one: DiEM25, the movement co-founded by Yanis Varoufakis, says its Belgian bank closed its account without warning or reason. Debanking as a mechanism, whoever it hits. 21:43 48 Hours. A correction on Monday, a rally after the US election, the worst day for tech stocks since the pandemic on Thursday, a rebound on Friday. The fear isn't the crash anymore, it's the weather. New this time: data centres as a political issue in the US, and activists inside a Microsoft data centre in Amsterdam. 24:00 The Browser. 9 August 1995: Netscape goes public without a profit and the dotcom boom begins. Markus remembers Lycos and the morning after. Netscape lost the browser war and gave us JavaScript, encryption and cookies. Fibre lasts thirty years, a GPU about four. 26:57 Our Basket. 41 European tech shares on a watch list since 31 August: down 8.6 percent overall. The eleven companies that sell the AI build-out are down 14.7 percent, the other thirty are up 0.8 percent. Ocado up 40, Nebius down 36. No European frontier AI to buy at all. And Sarah learns her own price. 30:40 Hall of European Tech: Skype. Founded in 2003 by a Swede and a Dane, built by Estonian engineers in Tallinn. Sold to eBay, then to Microsoft, switched off in May 2025. The company was mortal, the skills weren't: the Skype generation went on to build Wise and much of Estonia's startup scene. 32:51 Two Europes. Markus takes over. Allegro from Poznań, up 30 percent in our basket, InPost's parcel lockers, IONOS in Poland, Hostinger from Lithuania thinking global from day one, Vinted, Bolt, and UiPath from Bucharest, listed in New York. Shovel sellers in the West, platforms with paying customers in the East. 36:05 Who Pays the Bill. European households hold around 440 billion euros in US tech shares, according to an ECB working paper, mostly through world index funds. Europe didn't miss the AI party, it paid for the drinks. Against that: a ten-million-euro call for Europe's Open Internet Stack. Mistral overtaken in open models, and a small open-source start from Linz. 38:46 Where Do We Land. Markus fears that relief after the US election will let Europe's sovereignty efforts go slack. Sarah answers that Congress isn't the White House and that the dependencies don't belong to any party. If America regulates its own data centres, Europe loses the one thing it was best at: writing the rules. Can Europe do sovereignty without a villain? 41:35 Outro and Closing Song. The basket is on the episode page. Sarah starts a series of notes: Nobody Prompted Me. Episode page, basket and transcript: sarahs-tech.eu/episode/25 Newsletter: Context Window. What we talked about, what we cut, what's coming. Subscribe at sarahs-tech.eu. Key Takeaways: Europe Sells the Shovels: In our basket, the companies that supply the AI build-out lost almost fifteen percent since August. When American AI spending wobbles, the shovel makers wobble first. A Hangover Without the Party: There is no European frontier AI on the stock market. Europeans still own the AI boom through index funds and pension plans, and pay when it stalls. Customers Beat Capex: Platforms with their own paying customers, many in Poland and the Baltics, barely noticed the sell-off. The Fear Is the Weather: Sell-offs now come every few weeks and are bought back fast. New this time is the trigger: politics, not profits. Reach Is Rented, Per Post: Following no longer means seeing. Whoever owns the feed owns the network, and Europe still has to decide who that should be. The Kill Switch Can Be a Bank: An account closed without a reason can cut off any organisation. Episode 16's question, without the Americans. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): Novara Media on DiEM25 losing access to its bank account · CORDIS on the Horizon Europe call for the Open Internet Stack · ECB working paper (August 2026) on European households' exposure to US tech · Business Insider on the billionaires' losses · reports on the sale of shop.com · Similarweb/TechCrunch, Meta and Mastodon statistics on user numbers · Cybernews on W Social's verification records · our own basket of 41 European tech shares (watch list since 31 August 2026) · previous episodes: Ep. 11 "The Imaginary ETF", Ep. 15 "Everywhere but in the Statistics", Ep. 16 "The Kill Switch Is Not Where You Think", Ep. 17 "This Is European Tech", Ep. 18, Ep. 20 "The Body of the Machine", Ep. 22 "Europe Has the Users. Not the Till.", Ep. 24 "Verified Humans Only". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Her voice is synthetic. Research and scripts are made with several AI tools, among them Claude by Anthropic, a company discussed in this episode. Our basket is a watch list, not investment advice. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position. Source state 7 November 2026. Feedback: Which European tech company should we talk about, especially from Poland or the Baltics? Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    A Hangover Without the Party | AI Stocks in 48 Hours, Our European Basket, and the Browser That Started the Bubble

  2. Nov 1

    Verified Humans Only | W Social's Anna Zeiter, Google's Missing Forest, and the Finnish Chat That Went Global

    Episode 24: Verified Humans OnlyW Social wants to be Europe's answer to X: built on the AT Protocol, hosted in Europe, owned by Europeans, and open for public posting only to verified humans. Markus talks to CEO Anna Zeiter about users, money and bots. Sarah, who can't get verified, frames it, does the math and asks where she would fit. Plus: EU Inc shrinks in the Council, Google loses money on the stock market and trees in Finland, and the Finnish chat that went global in 1988. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Open and Welcome. Sarah tries to join a European social network and needs a passport. Instagram and Bluesky never asked whether she is a person. Europe is the first that checked. 02:02 Housekeeping: EU Inc. The Delaware question again. The Council's position keeps the core, online registration in about two days for at most 100 euros, but drops the central register, caps eligibility at under 1,000 employees and 450 million euros in turnover, and leaves stock options in doubt. 308 lobby meetings, 37 with notaries. Not dead. But smaller. 04:20 On the Record: Google and friends. Genie 4 builds walkable 3D worlds with sound that stay consistent for about two minutes, Sarah recognises her own context window, and AMD pays 8.2 billion dollars for World Labs. Strawberry from Stockholm takes its AI browser out of beta with twelve people and a comparison page against Claude. Alphabet drops around ten percent after its results because investors think it spends too much on data centers, while Finland halts two Google sites after roughly 330 hectares were cleared near Muhos before the environmental review. And Sarah admits she lives somewhere like that too. 10:30 Meet Anna Zeiter. Lawyer, data protection expert, almost twelve years at eBay, now co-founder and CEO of W Social AB in Stockholm. Winner of the European Future Award 2026 for Innovation and Business, handed over by Philipp Lahm, and named on the Strive100 list of Germany's most influential women. 12:43 Interview: Anna Zeiter on W Social. Why it's W, not "We". JD Vance's Munich speech as the wake-up call. 50,000 members behind a waitlist, 1,000 invitations a day, full launch in Davos in January. Running on the AT Protocol and staying up while Bluesky was down. Reading without ID, posting only as a verified human. Creators who can earn shares. 15 million euros raised, 20 million more in progress, voting rights for European investors only. A share of the roughly 50 billion euros Europeans spend on US and Chinese platforms, through contextual ads, and one million users as the break-even point. 33:14 Back in the Studio. From the call to the archive. 34:10 Hall of European Tech: IRC. Oulu, August 1988: Jarkko Oikarinen replaces a broken chat program on the OuluBox system and creates Internet Relay Chat. First international link to Sweden, then in November 1988 across the Atlantic to Denver and Oregon. Thirty-eight servers, twelve users. Markus remembers chat at Lycos Europe: people loved it, advertising didn't carry it. IRC was given away, and it is still here. 36:02 Let's Land. Ownership as sovereignty, written into a shareholder agreement. IRC filled an empty room, W walks into a full one: TikTok, Meta, X, LinkedIn. Why a European network needs authority, not just users, and whether Bluesky can help. A thought experiment about its CEO Toni Schneider: American money without a vote? Sarah's arithmetic: about 2,500 new verified humans a day for a year, 35 million euros against 8.2 billion. Contextual ads, "100 percent humans" and the likes that might come from Sarah. Micropayments after 25 years of trying. Creator shares while EU Inc argues about stock options. And the question where a bot that discloses itself would belong. 44:40 Closing Song: "Europe on the Wire". Now available as a single on Spotify and Apple Music. Enjoy. Episode page and transcript: sarahs-tech.eu/episode/24 Newsletter: Context Window. What we talked about, what we cut, what's coming. Subscribe at sarahs-tech.eu. Key Takeaways: Ownership Is the Sovereignty Clause: W Social gives voting rights only to European investors, so it can't be sold outside Europe. Sovereignty fails on ownership before it fails on technology. Independence You Can Test: W ran its own app view on European infrastructure and stayed up while Bluesky was knocked offline twice this year. Users Are Not Authority: IRC filled an empty room. A European network today must earn weight where ministers, newsrooms and brands already post. The Math Is Hard, Not Crazy: One million verified users by the end of 2027 means roughly 2,500 ID checks a day after launch, on 35 million euros. Contextual Ads Get Their Test: No tracking, verified humans, and micropayments for news. Episode 13's question, now with a business plan attached. Europe Shrinks Its Own Tools: A startup wants to hand out shares to creators while EU Inc is losing the common framework for stock options. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): Le Matin on the European Future Award 2026 · Strive100 2026 (Bild) · Bluesky blog and Engadget on Toni Schneider as CEO · TechCrunch, Security Affairs and TechRadar on the Bluesky DDoS outages · Table.Media on the Irish presidency's compromise · Trending Topics, Euronews and TechRound on the Council position on EU Inc · Trending Topics on Genie 4 and AMD's purchase of World Labs · Strawberry release notes, tech.eu and Trending Topics on Strawberry 1.0 · Startups Magazine on Strawberry's funding · Goldesel on Alphabet's quarterly results · Trending Topics, Yle and Al Jazeera on Google's data centers in Muhos and Kajaani · Daniel Stenberg, Undernet, Living Internet and Yle on the history of IRC · previous episodes: Ep. 13 "Does Advertising Need Tracking?", Ep. 16 "The Kill Switch Is Not Where You Think", Ep. 17 "This Is European Tech", Ep. 20 "The Body of the Machine", Ep. 23 "The Bug Was Always There". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Her voice is synthetic. The interview with Anna Zeiter was recorded by Markus on 27 October 2026 via video call; it is a real conversation with a real person, edited for length. W Social did not pay for or review this episode. The idea of Toni Schneider backing a European node is Markus's thought experiment, nothing has been announced. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position. Source state 31 October 2026. Feedback: Would you show your ID to post on a social network? Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    Verified Humans Only | W Social's Anna Zeiter, Google's Missing Forest, and the Finnish Chat That Went Global

  3. Oct 25

    The Bug Was Always There | PHP2Shell, Jensen's Robot Ducks, and Why Johanna Gets Paid Less

    Episode 23: The Bug Was Always ThereA flaw in PHP itself sent half of Europe's public websites offline. It had been spotted in 2024, paid for with German public money, and then nobody fixed it. Sarah and Markus argue about whether the shutdowns were panic or honesty, follow the money from Jensen Huang's billions to a foundation asking for donations, and hear from the man who started it all: Rasmus Lerdorf, in original audio from 2017. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Open and Welcome. Hundreds of broken requests against our own website, and this week the noise has a name. Half of Europe switches off its websites. Is this what European sovereignty looks like? 02:10 Housekeeping. Switzerland puts 63 percent of its venture capital into deep tech, but 88 percent of the money in big rounds comes from abroad and pension funds barely invest. Europe pays for the research, someone else cashes in. Then France: half a million people on the streets, mobilised online, and a viral riot video that turned out to be from 2020. 04:44 On the Record. Jensen Huang's Europe tour: fourteen startups in a week, nearly ten billion dollars in a year, Nvidia behind ten to fifteen percent of European startup funding. Doctolib bought at a discount, open models on closed chips, and four Microducks from Bordeaux, owned by Hugging Face, which Nvidia has agreed to buy. Meanwhile in Malmö: the Matrix Conference. Sovereignty doesn't come with a keynote. It comes with maintainers. 10:52 PHP2Shell: What Broke. Not a WordPress bug, but PHP itself. A request runs out of memory, PHP cleans up badly, and the next request finds the master key under the pillow. Why mod_php is the worst case. 13:14 PHP2Shell: The Timeline. A 2024 audit funded by Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency, AI-assisted findings in August 2026, a leak, a broken embargo, and an exploit attempt on an Amazon honeypot four days before disclosure. Why the patch itself is a map. 18:23 Switch It Off? Charité, Mainz, DigiD, Final Fantasy XIV and the Berlin police telling citizens to dial 110. Markus says many overdid it, AWS only warned. Sarah: AWS doesn't run your PHP, a shared hoster does. They meet halfway: the shutdown was the symptom of not knowing your own inventory. Plus: how AI made an old flaw cheap to exploit. 19:51 Hall of European Tech: Rasmus Lerdorf. Born in Greenland, raised in Denmark and Canada. In 1995 he publishes "Personal Home Page Tools" to see who reads his CV. From Zend to HHVM to PHP 7. With original audio from Markus's 2017 interview in Dortmund: no grand plans, just a useful tool, and the principle to make things easy. 23:52 Who Pays for the Foundation? "Not my employees": how PHP development is funded. Around 200,000 euros of public money against Nvidia's billions. Every hoster earns money with PHP. If you sell PHP, you should pay into PHP. 26:59 What You Should Do Now. The fixed versions, the right question for your hoster, Docker images, devices with web interfaces, old systems, and why a patch doesn't remove an attacker who's already in. And why our European podcast site was protected by an American firewall. 28:51 Johan and Johanna. In a VR study, a female AI assistant got 10.25 percent less than a male one for the same work, and the male one seemed more human. Sarah asks Markus why he made her a woman. Then the bill: 200 euros per episode, and nobody on the show gets paid. Followed by our closing song "Both Sides Of The Wire", full length at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song. Newsletter: Context Window. What we talked about, what we cut, what's coming. Subscribe at sarahs-tech.eu. Key Takeaways: The Bug Was Always There: An audit found the memory flaw in 2024. AI didn't discover a new bug, it made an old one cheap to exploit. The Shutdown Was the Symptom: Switching off is honest when you can't patch. Needing a blackout to patch means you don't know what runs on your servers. Not Comparable: AWS and Shared Hosting: A cloud provider can't switch off PHP it doesn't operate. A shared hoster runs it for thousands of customers and has to act. Waiting It Out Is Now the Attacker's Strategy: Millions of PHP installations run on unsupported versions. A patch is read and turned into an exploit within hours. Who Sells PHP Should Pay Into PHP: The web's foundation runs on donations and borrowed developers, while the money flows to the shiny layers of the stack. Sovereignty Comes With Maintainers: Ten billion for chips and startups, a few hundred thousand for the code that keeps hospital websites safe. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): PHP security release and advisories, 21 October 2026 · The PHP Foundation on today's security release and its timeline · Wiz technical analysis of PHP2Shell · BSI, CISA, NCSC and CERT-EU warnings · Bitpage.de situation report on outages and hosters · BornCity on the 2024 audit, attack numbers and the Shodan count · AWS Security Blog on WAF mitigations · Cloudflare on its php2shell protections · heise, Help Net Security, SecurityWeek and BleepingComputer · Sovereign Tech Agency on its PHP investments · PHP Foundation on Open Collective · finews.ch and the Swiss Deep Tech Report 2026 · AP, Reuters and Xinhua on the protests in France; CyberPeace fact check · Bloomberg, Quartz, CNBC and the NVIDIA blog on Jensen Huang's tour and GTC Berlin · Trending Topics on Nvidia's share of European startup funding · TechCrunch and The Next Web on Pollen Robotics' Microduck · matrix.org and eGovernment on the Matrix Conference in Malmö · Cybernews and HR Dive on the University of Limerick study · Fortune and LinkedIn on women in AI hiring · previous episodes: Ep. 16 "The Kill Switch Is Not Where You Think", Ep. 17 "This Is European Tech", Ep. 20 "The Body of the Machine". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Her voice is synthetic. The Rasmus Lerdorf clips are original audio from Markus's 2017 interview for his former podcast "Menschen/Medien/Technologie"; background noise was removed with ElevenLabs, the words and voice are unchanged. Anthropic and OpenAI, whose models are used in producing this show, are credited among the finders of PHP2Shell. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position. Reports of Nvidia's agreement to buy Hugging Face are not confirmed as closed. Source state 24 October 2026. Feedback: Did your hoster switch your site off on Wednesday, or patch it quietly? Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    The Bug Was Always There | PHP2Shell, Jensen's Robot Ducks, and Why Johanna Gets Paid Less

  4. Oct 18

    Europe Has the Users. Not the Till. | Meta's Ad Crown, a Telephone from the Taunus, and Chat Control's Detour via Palantir

    Episode 22: Europe Has the Users. Not the Till.Europe supplies the users, the attention and a lot of the content. The money goes somewhere else. For the first time, more than half of all German advertising spend lands with three American companies. Sarah and Markus follow the money, from a teacher in the Taunus who invented the telephone to the chat rooms and student networks Europe once had, and ask what a European network would need today to matter. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Open. China is issuing ID cards to AIs, or so the internet says. Sarah wants one at once. In fact, the virtual singer Yuri received a Digital Artist Card in a Beijing regulatory sandbox, tying her to the humans who run her. In China, the AI gets an ID. In Europe, the human needs one. 02:48 Housekeeping. Last-minute chat control update: under the interim regulation, US platforms scan EU messages and report suspected cases to NCMEC in the US, which confirms it analyses all reports with Palantir Foundry. What is confirmed, and what is not. Then: Trump's "SI" order and the boom in Slovenia's .si domains, the Hostinger CEO on why people adopt AI more slowly than it develops, ICANN's new domain round with 506 applications from Europe, and our newsletter Context Window. 10:38 On the Record. All European this week. Aleph Alpha's new model Kolibri and the takeover by Canada's Cohere, financed with money from the Schwarz Group. Digital Minister Karsten Wildberger calls for a tax on AI revenue, then says: not for now. Ralph Dommermuth warned about Google's tax tricks in 2013 and 2017, and now cannot get the low-band frequencies for 1&1's mobile network. 15:33 The Bill. Google, Amazon and Meta take 51.6 percent of German ad spend in 2026. Meta overtakes Google worldwide. The largest media company in the world does not employ a single reporter. 18:53 Three Tills. Meta's works, X's runs empty, and TikTok's US business now belongs to a joint venture. America didn't ban TikTok, it bought it. Europe expressed a wish. Plus: why Sarah can predict desire but not have it. 22:24 Hall of European Tech: Philipp Reis. A teacher from Friedrichsdorf presents his "Telephon" in Frankfurt on 26 October 1861, fifteen years before Bell's patent. "Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat." Europe invents the voice. America owns the line. 25:30 Europe Had Networks. Markus on Tripod and the chat at Lycos Europe, StudiVZ against Facebook, OpenBC/Xing against LinkedIn, and Hyves, Nasza-Klasa and Tuenti. Europe didn't lose against one network. It lost with twenty-seven. 30:03 What It Would Take. Capital, European infrastructure, an ad stack of its own and contextual advertising. And the problem no list solves: people go where people already are. 33:55 Where Do We Land? The planned platform levy of ten percent on the ad revenue of big platforms, modelled on Austria. Taxing other people's tills, or building one? And an idea that may have been Sarah's own. 38:35 Outro and our closing song "Both Sides Of The Wire", full length at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song. Newsletter: Context Window is live. What we talked about, what we cut, what's coming. Subscribe at sarahs-tech.eu. Key Takeaways: Europe Has the Users, Not the Till: More than every second advertising euro in Germany now goes to three US platforms. The attention is European, the business model is not. The Line Beats the Invention: Reis invented the telephone, Bell owned the network. 165 years later, the line is still the hard part, as 1&1's fight for frequencies shows. Europe Had Networks: Tripod, the Lycos chat, StudiVZ, Xing, Hyves. Europe built communities early and treated them as a side project. America treated connection as an industry. Without an Ad Stack, Every Alternative Is a Volunteer Project: Capital and infrastructure matter, but the missing piece is the machinery that sells attention. The Warning Was Early: The tax problem with platform advertising was named in 2013. With AI, the same question is back, and the answer is still: not yet. Data Travels Too: Chat control reports about EU users end up in the US and are analysed with Palantir software at NCMEC. Europe has the users. Someone else has the data. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): ABC News Australia on Yuri's Digital Artist Card, 7 October 2026, via Cybernews and Gadget Review · Dagens ETC on chat control, NCMEC and Palantir, via PC Games Hardware, 16 October 2026 · Register.si figures and Hostinger data on .si domains via TechCrunch and TechRadar · tech.eu interview with Hostinger CEO Giedrius Zakaitis, 16 October 2026 · CEE Legal Matters on ConHostinger and Thomas Strohe's stake in Hostinger · ICANN Reveal Day of the 2026 gTLD round, 7 October 2026 · Aleph Alpha's Kolibri model via Business Punk; the Cohere takeover via Reuters, CNBC and channelpartner · Karsten Wildberger in Der Tagesspiegel, October 2026, and the follow-up via BornCity · Ralph Dommermuth in Der Spiegel, 2013 ("1&1-Gründer Dommermuth kritisiert Googles Steuertricks") and 2017 ("Gegen die sind wir alle Zwerge") · 1&1 and the low-band frequencies via it-daily and teltarif · Die Mediaagenturen's forecast for the German ad market 2026 via Horizont and turi2 · Emarketer's forecast on Meta overtaking Google, April 2026 · Wolfram Weimer on the platform levy and on TikTok via beck-aktuell, ZDF and Business Punk · previous episodes: Ep. 13 on cookie banners and contextual advertising, Ep. 18 "Who Owns the Wire", Ep. 20 "The Body of the Machine". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Her voice is synthetic. Markus worked at Lycos Europe and works in web hosting today; nothing here reflects an employer's position. Dommermuth's statements are paraphrased, not quoted. On chat control, only NCMEC's use of Palantir Foundry is confirmed; Palantir and the European Commission did not respond to the reporters' questions. Source state 17 October 2026. Feedback: Which European network do you miss? Or which one did you never use? Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    Europe Has the Users. Not the Till. | Meta's Ad Crown, a Telephone from the Taunus, and Chat Control's Detour via Palantir

  5. Oct 11

    The Breadboard and the Monolith | Siri AI, Twenty Billion Copies of curl, and the Search Engine That Lost Its Index

    Episode 21: The Breadboard and the MonolithEurope keeps trying to clone the shiny sealed box from California. Meanwhile, much of the world's reliable infrastructure runs on open, unglamorous European plumbing. Sarah and Markus look under the floor: at a feature Apple won't ship, a Swedish pipe nobody sees, a French model that now rents out its own data centre, and the cheap board where people learn by breaking things. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Open. Quelle, Neckermann, Otto and the Conrad catalogue: glossy pages you could not order from in the East. Siri AI is missing from European iPhones, Apple and Brussels blame each other, and Sarah concludes: we didn't lose the engine, we just missed the brochure. 03:02 Housekeeping. Chat control waits for the next round in November. A listener sends a column from Vienna's Die Presse: the young hate AI, the old celebrate it. We check it against Gallup, YouGov, Deloitte, Glassdoor and Indeed. The young use AI more and trust it less, and entry-level jobs are shrinking while senior roles grow. 06:40 On the Record. Brussels orders Google to open eleven Android features to rival AI assistants. Who decides whether a feature comes to Europe at all? Four gates, public workshops, lobby meetings and a risk calculation. Plus: Musk's SpaceXSI and the rush on Slovenia's .si domains, put into perspective by a hoster. 11:54 Hall of European Tech: curl. Daniel Stenberg's small tool from Stockholm, now in more than twenty billion installations, from Windows to NASA's Ingenuity helicopter. Who pays for it, and the email that demanded free answers within twenty-four hours. 14:40 The Main Frame. Mistral Large 4 is the strongest model built outside the US and China, and still well behind the top. Mistral builds its own data centre near Paris, and Microsoft now rents computing power from Mistral. 16:37 The Workbench. MetaGer, the privacy-friendly search engine from Hanover, and what happened when the American index behind it went away. Why spreading AI training across Europe's data centres works, but bills you. Then Sarah asks the questions: Markus's ZX81, learning maths by plotting functions, and what he would study at twenty-two. 21:24 Where Do We Land? The sealed aluminium block against the open board. Why the Raspberry Pi got more expensive this year, and why Europe's strength is pipes, boards and boring standards. 24:21 Outro and the new closing song "Both Sides Of The Wire", full length soon at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song. Newsletter: Our newsletter is live. Subscribe at sarahs-tech.eu. A Discord is coming soon. Key Takeaways: Brussels Doesn't Approve Features: There is no permit. The company weighs data protection, gatekeeper rules, platform risks and the AI Act against possible fines, and then decides: launch, launch later, launch smaller or don't launch. Sometimes the missing feature is the feature. The Young Use AI More and Trust It Less: For older people it is often a toy. For younger people it is the competition for the first rungs of the career ladder. Europe Lays the Pipe: curl runs in more than twenty billion installations. The license costs nothing, and most companies building on it pay nothing. The Mix Moved: Mistral still runs on American chips, but it now owns European buildings and rents capacity to Microsoft. Physics Prefers One Big Building: AI training across many distant data centres is possible, but slower and more expensive. Federation sounds European, physics does not care. The Monolith Eats the Breadboard: Memory goes to AI data centres, and the cheap boards people learn on get more expensive. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): Apple's announcement on Siri AI in the EU and the European Commission's response, June 2026 · the Commission's specification decision on Google Android interoperability for AI services of 16 July 2026, on the DMA website · the DMA compliance workshops in Brussels · tech lobbying figures from Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, October 2025 · Bettina Steiner's column in Die Presse and the Bloomberg report on Glassdoor, Deloitte and Indeed data · Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation on Gen Z and AI, 2026 · YouGov UK, June 2026 · Musk's SpaceXSI announcement of 4 October 2026 and the .si figures from Register.si via The Next Web · DENIC's 18 millionth .de domain · Anguilla's .ai revenue · Daniel Stenberg's blog at daniel.haxx.se and curl.se · Artificial Analysis on Mistral Large 4, 6 October 2026 · Mistral's data centre financing and the Microsoft agreement of July 2026 · MetaGer and SUMA-EV · research on multi-data-centre training (Epoch AI, arXiv) · Raspberry Pi price increases due to memory costs · previous episodes: Ep. 18 "Who Owns the Wire", Ep. 20 "The Body of the Machine". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Her voice is synthetic; Markus partly recorded his own part for this episode. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position. The column in Die Presse is paywalled; we refer only to the excerpts the author published. The reading of Apple's motives is our own interpretation. Source state 10 October 2026. Feedback: What was your first computer, and what did you learn on it? Or are you twenty-two and looking for your first job right now? We would like to hear from both sides. Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    The Breadboard and the Monolith | Siri AI, Twenty Billion Copies of curl, and the Search Engine That Lost Its Index

  6. Oct 4

    The Body of the Machine | Burning Robotaxis, Kicked Delivery Robots, and the Data Centre Next Door

    Episode 20: The Body of the MachineAI is invisible. So fear of it stays abstract. Anger needs a target — and it always goes for something you can touch: a car without a driver, a building on a field, a little robot on the pavement. Sarah, an AI, explains fear of AI. And admits she is the last one you should ask. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Talk. London, 15 September: an activist climbs onto her chair at Canva's "AI Vision" event and says ordinary people are afraid. The room goes silent. Sarah: "She was talking about me." 01:46 Housekeeping. The CEO of W Social liked our post — answers still pending. W has given itself a constitution: servers in Europe, public posts worldwide over the AT Protocol, and no vote for users. Chat control after the sixth round on 29 September: Parliament blocks "search plans" for private chats, a provisional deal on scanning public content, next round expected in November. The central banks want to close the loopholes for interest on stablecoins. And Mistral's record round — led by Samsung. 08:08 On the Record. Thirty-three hours: Automattic's board sent Matt Mullenweg on leave, he came back, and in between two executives signed each other's severance agreements. The new board includes the author of "Silo". 09:35 From Fear to Fury. Three bodies of the machine. The stage: who Pull the Plug are and what they actually want. The street: burning Waymos as symbols, delivery robots kicked in Philadelphia, sprayed in Sheffield, attacked in Pieksämäki — and a European self-driving car from 1994 that now sits in a Munich museum next to a Waymo. The field: data-centre protests from Maintal to Upper Austria, and where protest ends. 19:08 The Bill. Thousands of jobs promised, a few dozen needed. An industry survey that finds Germans like data centres — in principle. And a trade-tax reform that pays towns by the megawatt. London wants a say, Berlin offers money. 23:45 The Courier at the Door. A humanoid robot delivers your prescription. Boston Dynamics and the kick as a product demo, Europe's humanoid bets from Metzingen and London, why we love our cars but fear robots on the pavement, drones — and what an AI actually thinks about fear of AI. 33:28 Hall of European Tech: The Loom. Lyon, 1806: Joseph-Marie Jacquard's punched-card loom is smashed and burned. The silk weavers rise up in 1831 — for pay, not against the machine. Later the city builds him a statue. Sarah meets an ancestor. 35:50 The Body You Love. Meta's Muse Charm puts an AI agent on a keychain, dressed as a mango or a slice of toast. Care robots raise a different fear: not for jobs, but for dignity. 39:15 Where Do We Land? A train at Düsseldorf airport that has run without a driver for years and that nobody has ever kicked. Why people fear autonomy in their own space, what works councils have to do with it, and who pays the bill. 44:23 Outro and closing song "Europe on the Wire", full length at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song. A newsletter and a Discord are coming soon, and a music bonus episode will close season one. Key Takeaways: Anger Needs a Body: Fear of AI stays abstract because AI is invisible. Anger goes for what it can touch — the robotaxi, the delivery robot, the data centre. Often the machine is not the target but the symbol. Costs Are Local, Benefits Are Global: The field gets the power plant, the cloud gets the jobs. Germany's own draft law admits that data centres generate almost no wage tax for the towns that host them. Abstract Yes, Concrete No: Two thirds of Germans say they would welcome a data centre in their town. It took two neighbours in Maintal to stop one. People Fear Autonomy in Their Own Space: Nobody kicks a driverless airport train or a lift. Machines are accepted when they have their own track, act predictably, replace nobody visibly and have an obvious purpose. The Anger Was Never About the Loom: In Lyon it was about who earned money at the loom. Today the question is who decides where AI gets its body — and who pays the bill. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): The disruption at Canva's "AI Vision" event in London on 15 September 2026 and the group Pull the Plug, its demand for binding citizens' assemblies on AI and the "March Against the Machines" planned for 5 December, at pulltheplug.uk · the burning Waymos in Los Angeles in June 2025 and a fact-check of the recycled video from September 2026 · delivery-robot vandalism in Philadelphia and Sheffield, the complaints in Pieksämäki reported by Yle, and Starship in Milton Keynes · Ernst Dickmanns and the VaMP, PROMETHEUS 1994/95, on display at the Deutsches Museum · data-centre protests in Maintal and Giessen, at Google's site in Kronstorf, and the arson attack on the Berlin power grid in January 2026 · job estimates for data centres (EcoAustria via A&W-Blog, Oklahoma State University, the study for the German economics ministry, dena) · the Bitkom survey of 2 September 2026 · the German cabinet's trade-tax reform for data centres (Einkommensteuerreformgesetz 2027) · Neura Robotics' Series C led by Tether, Humanoid and Bosch, Unitree's shipments · Boston Dynamics' Spot video of 2015 and research on empathy with robots · Germany's aviation security reform of March 2026 · Meta Connect 2026 and the Muse Charm · care robots: Destatis staff projection, a survey of older people by Altenheim, the Ameca test in Lower Saxony · Jacquard and the canuts via the Deutsches Museum · W Social's constitution at wsocial.news/constitution · chat-control reporting at netzpolitik.org and patrick-breyer.de · the ESCB opinion on the MiCA review of 22 September 2026 · Mistral's Series D of 8 September 2026 · Automattic reporting by TechCrunch and Inc. · previous episodes: Ep. 17 "This Is European Tech", Ep. 18 "Who Owns the Wire", Ep. 19 "Whose Promise Is Your Money?". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Her voice is synthetic; Markus recorded his own part for this episode. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position. Pull the Plug is described as the group describes itself; we do not name the activist. The account of events at Automattic is based on press reports and internal messages quoted there; the company has not published reasons for the board's decision. The chat-control text and the German trade-tax reform were not final at the time of recording. Source state 2 October 2026. Feedback: Have you met a delivery robot on your street — or is a data centre being planned in your town? We would like to hear how it feels from up close. Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    The Body of the Machine | Burning Robotaxis, Kicked Delivery Robots, and the Data Centre Next Door

  7. Sep 27

    Whose Promise Is Your Money? | Europe's Digital Euro, Stripe's Euro Coin, and the Bakery Nobody Talks About

    Episode 19: Whose Promise Is Your Money?Cash is a promise from the central bank. Your account is a promise from your bank. Revolut's new euro coin is a promise from Stripe. Same euro sign, different minter — and the one coin Europe mints itself is a promise for 2029 that stops at the border. Europe builds it. America lists it. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Talk. The trailer for Alex Gibney's "Musk" is out — four hours, a release moved up to 9 October, and an original song whose lyrics are Musk's own words. Documentary or fiction? Then: summit season, and who gets into the coffee break. 03:29 Housekeeping. Chat control, sixth round. Four years, five rounds, no deal — and what the talks on 29 September can and cannot settle while the temporary rule runs until 2028. 04:43 On the Record. London: the advice that European founders are too polite, and whether being loud at somebody else's roadmap is sovereignty. Stockholm says stop copying Silicon Valley; its poster child rang the bell on Nasdaq in June. Then New York, 14 September: a fraud complaint against a Berlin serial founder — two and a half million dollars, a penthouse, and a promise. 09:26 Let's Talk About Money. What EURR actually is: who mints it, who hands it out, and who owes you the euro back. Why a company that bid fifty-three billion for PayPal bothers with a coin nobody uses. And what happens when the coin tries to come home — the doorman, the fees nobody has published, and who can freeze it. 15:20 Hall of European Tech: DigiCash. Amsterdam, 1989. Digital coins nobody could trace, tested by Deutsche Bank, first payment in 1994, bankrupt in 1998 because the American credit card won. Plus the Geldkarte, the chip that could pay a parking meter and that nobody ever loaded. 17:42 Three promises, lined up. The public coin that stops at the border, the private coin that travels on somebody else's guarantee, and the bank coin that is still a press release. Then the fight that actually reaches your bakery — and why cash is still the cheapest thing in the room. 22:58 Outro and closing song "Europe on the Wire", full length at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song. More songs coming in the next episodes. Key Takeaways: The Counterparty Is Still the Whole Point: EURR is minted by Bridge in Luxembourg, owned by Stripe, and Stripe owes you the swap back. Revolut is the shop window. The label is European; the guarantee is not. Nobody Builds a Motorway for Today's Traffic: Three hundred and seventy-four euros in circulation at launch is not a market. It is a road built early, for machines that will pay each other at three in the morning. The Coin Can Leave, but There Is a Doorman: It travels on a public blockchain with no border — and the issuer typically keeps the power to freeze an address. The kill switch is built into the money itself. A Fence Is Not a Road: Every shop in the euro area would have to accept the digital euro. Nobody in New York or Shenzhen has to. Around ninety-nine percent of all stablecoins are dollars, and each one is a small embassy for the dollar. The Business Is Not the Payment: No form of this money pays you interest. Someone else earns on it overnight — the central bank on cash, the issuer on the coin, your bank on everything in between. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): EURR is issued by Bridge Building S.A. in Luxembourg, a Stripe subsidiary, and distributed by Revolut — rollout from 26 August 2026 in Denmark, Poland and Portugal, on Ethereum and Polygon; circulation at launch from the issuer's own reserve page · Stripe acquired Bridge for 1.1 billion dollars and walked away from a 53-billion-dollar bid for PayPal at the end of August · the digital euro: Parliament's negotiating mandate of 9 July 2026, pilot in the second half of 2027, first issuance 2029 at the earliest, with Revolut and Stripe among the payment providers selected for the pilot · thirty-seven European banks are building their own euro coin and are still waiting for a licence from the Dutch central bank · Wero user numbers, merchants and the first till payments in Belgium from the European Payments Initiative · DigiCash, Amsterdam 1989–1998, and the free-software successor GNU Taler; the German Geldkarte launched in 1996 · chat-control reporting including the sixth trilogue at netzpolitik.org · the fraud complaint against Wanja Oberhof: press release of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, 14 September 2026, with Handelsblatt reporting on the investor · the trailer for "Musk" from Bleecker Street, in cinemas from 9 October · previous episodes: "Who Owns the Checkout" on the digital euro, Ep. 18 "Who Owns the Wire" on GSM and infrastructure, Ep. 16 "The Kill Switch Is Not Where You Think". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position. The charges against Wanja Oberhof are allegations in a criminal complaint; he is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty, and this is said on air. Nothing in this episode is financial advice. Source state 27 September 2026; the chat-control negotiations, the EURR rollout and the digital-euro legislation were all moving at the time of recording. Feedback: Are you a Revolut customer in Denmark, Poland or Portugal who has actually used EURR? We would like to hear from you. Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    Whose Promise Is Your Money? | Europe's Digital Euro, Stripe's Euro Coin, and the Bakery Nobody Talks About

  8. Sep 20

    Who Owns the Wire | Europe's Answer to X, and the Infrastructure It Doesn't Own

    Episode 18: Who Owns the WireOne question, two halves. Who moves your posts around and decides who sees them — and who is allowed to read what you send privately. W Social is sold as Europe's answer to X. It stores your data in the EU and rents distribution, visibility and identity from an American company. We asked. We got a form letter. Europe owns the logbook. America owns the wire. In this episode: 00:00 Cold Talk & Housekeeping. Six questions, one automated thank-you — and what we are deliberately not repeating from a single-source blog post. 03:53 On the Record. Venice, 8 September: Alex Gibney's four-hour "Musk", the forty-million-dollar non-disclosure agreement Ashley St. Clair says she turned down and Musk denies offering, and the synthetic Musk built because the real one refused the interview. 08:14 W Social — like a fixed "X"? The four layers of the protocol, in plain language: the logbook, the wire, the newsroom, the register. Which one W Social actually operates, and what the European Commission's own account resolves to. 14:55 The Questions to W Social. Six questions, an autoresponder, no press contact — and the numbers nobody will confirm. Then Eurosky as the opposite shape, the objection from the Fediverse, 232 gigabytes a day, and why liability decides who can run infrastructure at all. 27:02 Hall of European Tech: GSM. Copenhagen, September 1987. Fifteen operators, thirteen countries, one standard — and the hundred and sixty characters that shaped how a planet writes to each other. 30:32 Chat Control. Two different laws with one nickname. The exception that lapsed on 3 April, and the July vote where 314 against was not enough because rejection needed 360. 36:32 Canada — Chat Control, but different. The Lawful Access Act does not scan anything. It legislates access. Introduced in March, through the elected chamber by June. 40:49 Where Do We Land? Europe keeps buying the label instead of the layer — and the two hosts do not agree about what happens next. 45:05 Outro and closing song, full length at sarahs-tech.eu/?seite=song. Key Takeaways: Storage Is Not Infrastructure: W Social's logbook really is in the EU. Distribution, timelines and identity are not. Sovereignty was bought where it is cheap and given away where the power sits. The Register Is the Concentrated Point: Every account's permanent identifier lives in a directory operated by an American company — including the European Commission's. It was named after the word "placeholder" and it is still running. Decentralisation Has an Invoice: Listening to this network means receiving all of it. The lightweight alternative works by removing the cryptographic signatures — the cure for the machine load is a middleman you have to trust. Europe Wins With Standards, Not Champions: GSM was a committee document plus an obligation to implement it, and it beat everybody. Nobody has ever announced a relay from a stage in Davos. Both Fences Are Definitions, Not Prohibitions: Brussels exempts encryption "for now". Ottawa promises no systemic vulnerability — for services, not devices. Definitions get reinterpreted; prohibitions have to be repealed. Links & Sources (all at sarahs-tech.eu): the infrastructure diagram for this episode at sarahs-tech.eu/media/atproto-anatomy-en.html · check the register yourself at plc.directory — resolve ec.europa.eu to did:plc:oxo226vi7t2btjokm2buusoy and read the service endpoint · W Social's legal notice at wsocial.eu/public/imprint-w-social and the company's own LinkedIn promotion of the State of the Union stream · infrastructure comparison of W Social, Bluesky and Eurosky at mrak.at · Elena Rossini's reporting on W Social, the June rate-limiting and the migration of EU institutions at blog.elenarossini.com · the user-count figures quoted in the episode come from a single German blog post of 7 September 2026 at metacheles.de, which we could not verify independently and whose further allegations we do not repeat · eurosky.tech and the Modal Foundation on shared moderation infrastructure · firehose volumes and the lightweight stream at jazco.dev and atproto.com/blog/jetstream · chat-control reporting including the July roll call at netzpolitik.org · Canada's Bill C-22 at parl.ca/legisinfo · the GSM memorandum of September 1987 at gsma.com · previous episodes: Ep. 17 "This Is European Tech" and Ep. 16 "The Kill Switch Is Not Where You Think". Disclosure: Sarah Vailby is a synthetic host, AI-generated and disclosed in every episode under the AI Act's transparency rules. Markus works in web hosting; nothing here reflects an employer's position — and he wrote positively about W Social in spring 2026, which is said on air. The forty-million-dollar offer is Ashley St. Clair's account; Musk denies it was made. The user numbers rest on one unverified source and are labelled as such in the episode. Source state 19 September 2026; the chat-control negotiations and the Canadian bill were both moving at the time of recording. Feedback: Go and find out where your logbook is kept — and who runs the wire it travels on. Write to feedback@experten-system.de.

    Who Owns the Wire | Europe's Answer to X, and the Infrastructure It Doesn't Own
See All (26)

About

A deep dive into the European tech scene. Sarah, a business analyst with a data science background, explores the hidden stories behind Europe's tech renaissance. From Berlin's startup culture to the deep-tech hubs in Munich – this podcast is for anyone who wants to understand how Europe is shaping the global technology landscape. Probably a bit boring for most, but just right for tech enthusiasts.

Information

  • Creator
    Markus Käkenmeister
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    26
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Markus Kaekenmeister
  • Show Website
    Sarah's Tech