A few years back they raided a German host of the Riseup email service due to some alleged online threat [0]
They didn't just stop there, they also moved on to the nearby CCC maker space, for which they didn't even have a permit, and also raided that.
Among the things they found there was 3D printers, chemicals to feed said 3D printer, and a small 3D printed model of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.
They confiscated all of that under the suspected offense of "trying to create an explosive device" [1]
Can't make this stuff up, reality is stranger than fiction.
[0] https://www.golem.de/news/zwiebelfreunde-polizei-durchsucht-...
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/hausdurchsuchungen-bei-n...
[1] https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/the-cdus-leaky-campaign-a...
Seems like government assisted bullying is the default M.O. in Germany if you're the little guy and happen to step on the toes of the rich and powerful.
IMHO, in this regard, Germany is way worse than the US.
Much worse than that, they raided the private home of one of the members of the nonprofit organization Zwiebelfreunde that passes on donations to riseup and runs a few tor exit nodes. That person has kids and family, he couldn't even work because they took all the hardware.
But Julia Reda, the CCC and netzpolitik.org are just great!
It's always the same excuse every single time. I have to wonder if this stuff actually protects children.
This gives such a bad image. They should be ashamed!
Any idea when we can suggest the Germans have a sense of humour?
We're approaching a situation where even electricity providers, not to mention OS and browser providers, can be forced to do the bidding copyright holders, to the detriment of everyone else.
I can see Govt's in particular NSA, GCHQ, aka 5 eyes, 7 eyes etc losing alot of control over the internet in the foreseeable future.
If anything it would be funny to see what creative means the morons come up with to try and stop them.
Perhaps then will these verehrende Richter be able to grasp the matter.
Or how some gyms required the membership cancellation be done by post during the 2020 lockdowns.
Paper based bureaucracy in Germany is an exhaustive tradition that has survived the internet age and seems is not going away anytime soon.
https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article191846877/Hotelanmeldu...
Doch die Hotels dürfen nicht, und daran sind die Sicherheitsbehörden schuld, vertreten durch Bundesinnenminister Horst Seehofer (CSU). Die Ermittler wollen die Möglichkeit haben, über Fingerabdrücke und DNA-Spuren auf dem Meldezettel, Bösewichten auf die Spur zu kommen. „Das klingt wie ein Aprilscherz“, sagt Hotelsprecher Luthe, „ist aber keiner.“
They notified me by post that I needed to provide them with some information on their online tool. Here was the process: 1) Go to link, fill in form with personal detailed. Print, sign and post. 2) Receive a login password via post after 1-2 weeks 3) Login and do the the thing they asked.
Honestly why bother with an online system, just send me the form and I'll send it back. Done.
Also, applying to universities here also involves sending NOTARISED copies of all your documents, via post, along with the application. I don't think I've ever in my life applied to university by sending a thick brown envelope.
Besides that, all of our policies and national decisions are still heavily influenced by Germany like most EU countries.
I wanted to vote in German elections but that requires me sending 2(!) letters because for some reason web forms don't exist.
That's how you open new User accounts (Active Directory) in one of the biggest insurance company's in Germany (from Local-IT to HQ-IT) ;)
Not limited to germany.
/S
Already leapfrogged Germany in payment tech, in terms of open geodata the same (opened up most GIS datasets, even if sometimes quality is mediocre).
Now, if it weren't for the clowns in the government that got inflation out of control...
When I saw it, I slammed the laptop shut and was so disturbed that I went to wash my hands
The regional court were the ones according to which the operator of a commercially operated website is liable for copyright infringing content that he links to, even without knowledge.
The local court is even worse regarding copyright infringement.
That only means that her father was crazy, I don't know a single shop that closes during lunch time. The smaller places I know intentionally shift their opening hours to explicitly open early, during lunch or during closing hours.
> and only took cash
Afaik most electronic payment providers require that you hide their transaction fees in the normal price, so a shop that doesn't offer electronic payments can be cheaper. However most places support contact less payments so that must have been some years ago.
And then of course there are many smaller places that only accept cash payments for the same reason they only enter half of your order into their cash register.
I think the culture around employment contracts preventing people from quiting when they want, penalty free, and the letter of recommendation requirements from a previous employer are insane. Seems like you would really have to go above and beyond to not get screwed on your next job by a bitter ex employer.
Also find the gov owning large shares in the private sector (Volvo.. Ect) to be a conflict of interest and may encourage them to bypass emissions laws for example.
Just seems like a lot of institutional trust.
The three strike / hadopi bullshit was clearly a political move to satisfy the biggest copyright holder, a lot of it was completely unenforceable and even unconstitutional from the start. In the end, very few people even got to the third strike, and they couldn't even do what they "promised" (forbidding the person from having an internet connection) and had to go through costly court procedure just to give fines in the end. It was just a machine to burn public money for the miniscule benefit of a few. It died very fast because nobody wanted to try to make this bullshit actually work and burn even more money when they have to get re-elected.
PS: I moved to Germany and I want to move out asap because of how outdated everything is here.
Or lets not concentrate on persons, but on concepts instead. What makes anyone competent to be at the top of any branch, resort, ministry? Their staff? Then why not appoint someone from the staff to that position?
It's all non-sense now, a tragicomedy at best. Regardless of party and age.
So they're like the East District of Texas of the EU?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_District_Court_f...
* https://www.logikcull.com/blog/the-supreme-court-frees-paten...
It would seem to me that the definition of a good judge is one who always predicts how a higher court would act, and acts the same.
I was in court the other day when a criminal defendant's case was brought back up because it had been reversed on appeal due to the judge making errors in his instructions to the jury. The defendant had already spent five years in prison and to avoid another trial decided to take an offer by the prosecutor to go home that day in exchange for his guilty plea. The judge just chuckled as they read out the reversal order and basically said (not verbatim) "Whoopsie, my bad." For wrongly convicting a person.
In fact, now you have me thinking about it, I can't remember a single time being in court where a judge has taken a reversal seriously. All of their reactions have always been flippant and jovial.
Some judges get extraordinary amounts of reversals.
Judges regularly piss the appellate courts off with their shitty work. I can think of two local criminal cases recently where the appellate courts were mad because they ruled in both cases that there was absolutely no evidence of the guilt of the defendant. Another one I was in court for - a prisoner presented a 17 count suit against the prison guards for essentially torturing him over a decade-long period and the judge flicked through it and simply said "case dismissed". The guy flipped out in court. The appellate court reversed, but they were shocked because each of the 17 counts needed a several-step analysis to determine its credibility and the judge did nothing -- and the appeals court then had to do all the work. That particular judge is super hilarious when his robe is off and we are all waiting around in the courtroom - he'll shoot the shit with me all day, and then put his robe on and deny all my motions lol.
The most prominent example in more or less recent times is also from Hamburg: Ronald Schill, nicknamed "judge without mercy" for his harsh sentences, who was a judge at an Amtsgericht (the lowest level of ordinary jurisdiction) in Hamburg from 1993 to 2001. He then went into politics for a right-wing law-and-order party he founded, that prospered for a short period of time in Hamburg that even entered into a coalition government with the CDU and made him second mayor and senator of the interior of Hamburg.[2]
[1] Art. 97 GG. [2] The Wikipedia article about him at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Schill contains some hair-raising details about his views and actions.
Main problem with german law is that the courts have too much freedom because they know, the lawmakers produce low quality laws nowadays.
Just compare any old law with any of the newer ones… Germany is losing it, sadly.
Is that just me?
The Oberlandesgericht Hamburg was particular known for a Richter with the name Buske. He was well know for his "interesting" rulings. It went so far that IP/copyright/personal rights/media lawyers coined the term "Buskeismus" (Buskeism). He is retired since about a year, but his spirit seems to still live on especially in Hamburg's courts.
Needless to say that there is billions of recursive DNS around the world. Their own FritzBox runs a damn recursive DNS server that is able to resolve whatever they request. What - will they now sue themselfes to make that right? The spooky internet made me do it!!
Maybe they file a lawsuit against a weak player so that they can reuse the result against other bigger players.
When it comes to laws and their enforcement, I often wonder what HN users think would be a good approach. Most often my impression is that the favored approach seems to be of the form "the internet does not need any laws" paired with a condescending tone that everyone else doesn't understand the internet.
Explanation:
DNS blocks are the easiest hurdle to put up to deterrent most people. Sure DNS blocks can be easily circumnavigated, but so can locks. (It being easily avoided by more informed users might actually be a plus, preventing overzealous censorship being too effective.)
Actual enforcement of domestic law on providers based in other countrs (of the deemed illegal content) is not realistically possible/not a good tradeoff of using resources and most importantly: Not their business. But that does not mean that a country has to accept everything that is legal somewhere (or at least not persecuted in that jurisdiction).
Similar reasons prohibit enforcement on foreign DNS zones. Therefore, local DNS resolvers, even if just relaying to those foreign ones, would be the target of enforcement.
Does a DNS-Server from a Non-profit needs something like content-ID from youtube?
Or does a Non-profit DNS-provider needs hordes of lawyers just to check every single complaint in the future?
Would you like that?
Germany already has a law to block websites at ISP level, why bother a DNS provider with it? ...oh i know why, because it's not enough to block it, Sony knows it and the hordes of lawyers at telecom etc knows it, so you go after the easy prey.
That's the problem!
Yes, that is a problem, but not the one I thought people complain about. Maybe the comments doing so stuck with me the most and I overestimate how many there were, but even rereading most comments with what the problem is according to you in mind, many do not seem to address this problem at all.
> Does a DNS-Server from a Non-profit needs something like content-ID from youtube? > > Or does a Non-profit DNS-provider needs hordes of lawyers just to check every single complaint in the future? > > Would you like that?
No. Quad9 was also provided with a deadline way too short to implement anything.
But after researching that bit a bit more, I changed my mind a bit about the process: I initially wrote that quad9 is in the wrong, I don't believe that anymore.
On one hand it would be more efficient to directly contact the providers that can do something about the infringement (youtube, DNS providers, whatever your prefered target would be), on the other hand it makes it easier to abuse. I still don't know of any good solution that's not just telling one side to go and shove it.
> Germany already has a law to block websites at ISP level, why bother a DNS provider with it?
My understanding was that this is also a DNS block and is frought with the same criticism (I may have accidentally projected that topic on the commenters here though, as the complaints seem to be the same). I'd gladly change that understanding :)
You've answered your own question. DNS blocks are not just "easily circumnavigated", they're completely ineffective. Use a different resolver, run your own resolver, add the domain to a hosts file… DNS is the simplest and easiest method of finding a site's IP address, but hardly the only method. Even very non-technical users can locate and follow simple step-by-step guides to get around a DNS block. This order is akin to having someone's name purged from the phone book when there are many other ways to find the same information. Given that the DNS block will be ineffective in preventing any of the (alleged and mostly imaginary) harm from the (alleged) copyright infringement which the target of the order isn't even involved in, what purpose is served by issuing the injunction?
At the very least Quad9 deserves compensation for any costs incurred in implementing this injunction, given that they are being unwillingly dragged into the middle of a dispute between two other unrelated parties. Ideally this compensation would come directly out of the judge's salary for issuing such a pointless injunction, but I suppose it could be paid by the plaintiff instead for requesting the injunction in the first place.
Who or what pays their bills, though? Servers burn up electricity, consume bandwidth and require maintenance. None of that is free.
> Quad9 is a not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.
Huh? So what does Quad9 do? Block or not block?
Some of the people may be more sympathetic towards privacy-first tools than the european average, but that doesn't mean the government/leadership is.
Quad9 was the most interesting free DNS service out there, better than google/CF imo.And i'm not saying this as an "anti-german" talking-point,but there are actually very few countries were privacy was pushed as a principle in institutions, see Nordic countries or even to an extreme: CH(where if i recall correctly you cannot record someone even in public w/o their permission). However this smells like something that is not germany-specific but colluded across countries & big corporations: keep cracking down on piracy(even though it's basically a fact that these P2P methods of sharing copyrighted content actually made Sony/Hollywood/etc more money than not)
