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The 3.5- by 8-inch template resembles an IBM punch card

So the Hollerith machines returned to IBM from Auschwitz after liberation had been gathering dust?

Mind you I wasn't there, I'm trusting Edwin Black's research

Unless you consider computerising the Third Reich as not particularly evil.

You didn't think millions of Jews across Europe were catalogued by pencil and paper did you?

It was the IBM Hollerith Punch Card systems leased to the Nazis and billions of punch cards sold to them from 1933 to the end of the war.

There was one at just about every death camp, the Allies were kind enough to even give them back once the camps were liberated.

no, actually it was more "the truck driver worked for an 'out of control subsidiary' which still reported back his profit to NY and asked for help some times (and got it) but was officially AWOL".
try here
For just a bit of enlightening.
I guess you didn't even knew that the code tatooed on death camp's prisonner's arms was a IBM/Hollerith code.

IBM might well be the hand holder of OpenSource freedom these days but the company is bigger and darker than it's Linux initiative.

IBM Global Services started life as The Third Reich's data center when they [literally] muscled in to the punch card market, dominated it, and then leased the Nazi's the machines and sold them billions of punch cards to process everything from the railroads to the work rota's of the death camps.

Did you not ever wonder how the SS identified & catalogued millions of people. It certainly wasn't with pen & paper.

In 1937 IBM founder Thomas Watson was even given Germany's highest honour for a non-German, "The Cross of the German Eagle". It was not until 1940, while the bombs where dropping on Europe, that he reluctantly returned it.

They even managed to get their equipment back from the camps when they were liberated !

The path to redemption is public revelation
You cannot be forgiven, until you say sorry.

http://www.edwinblack.com

Pol Pot, Stalin, Ceausescu, Galtieri, Noriega, Marcos, Hitler, Mao ... the list goes on.

When the government decides to start purging it's own people you are going to really wish that they hadn't been spying on you.

http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Ultimately one must mention the Third Reich.

Ever wondered how 10 million people were identified and transported with such efficiency in a time before computers?

They didn't just turn up at the synagogues and cart people away. They used the census data. Who were the largest collators of census data in Europe in the 1930s?

I B M

As the SS arrived in the newly conquered countries of Europe IBM was there to meet them with the census data ready to sort. They took the documents from churches & town halls and fed it into the Hollerith machines. Some unfortunates got the knock and the train ride and even they didn't know they were of Jewish decent.

read the book

Not just to see what capital will do but to see where dismissing privacy as a liberal whim could take you.

You never know who will be in power next time round or in ten years time.

and so do all my friends

IBM were prosecuted by their own government for exploiting their own people and helped the Nazis find the Jews

...if I recall correctly, IBM is an American company. Although I haven't read it (it's on the list of books I have to read) this book deals with the assistance that the 3rd Reich got from IBM.

Choise Linux - a billion Chinese can't be wrong

I wonder, given China's record on Human Rights, whether the Linux community will find itself in a similar situation to IBM?

Yay! Germany and IBM getting back together! We all know how well that turned out last time.

Interesting book BTW.