+1 to this!
I wonder if some of the horror in it (the constant threat of the Stasi and its implications) translates well to non-German audiences. In case you're wondering about Germany's strict privacy laws - this is part of why they exist.
It’s still a thing in some areas from direct experience recently. Hell it’s still a thing with former East Germans I know in the UK. And it’s not about interchange fees - it’s about purchase surveillance.
My ex partner wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos.
> wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos
This should be standard practice, I do it as well. Not East German but East European. We had our own Stasi that would terrorize youths for listening to Western music of Radio Free Europe.
Are you german?
Most of my german friends tell me it is because after the experiences of nazism and comunism (in the GDR), most germans value their privacy a lot.
The havoc that finding out your family and friends spied on you for benefits, can not be overstated. How deeply anti social and lonely such a divided and conquered socialist utopian society is can not be expressed in words, and yet it can.
These are two very different things. Significant parts of the German government and many German members of the European Parliament are proponents of Chat Control. The general population, however, still has a strong desire for privacy and a deep fear of surveillance and data collection, shaped by historical experiences with two dictatorships (the Nazi era and the GDR).
That said, there is a substantial disconnect between the substantive preferences of the voting population and the actual policies and decisions of the parties they elect. This is partly because promises like “internal security” gain much more traction in times of growing uncertainty and global instability, while only a relatively small portion of the population fully thinks through, or is willing to think through, the consequences and concrete legislative changes behind those promises.
Nevertheless, looking at both public attitudes and court rulings, it is still fair to say that data protection in Germany, even compared to other EU countries, currently enjoys a particularly high status.
In practice the average German voter is still supporting the coalition against the AfD despite that the coalition is implementing Soviet-like policies. They talk constantly about banning the most popular political party, for example, and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions. Germans who aren't actively supporting the AfD should feel no sense of moral superiority, there simply isn't anything in the historical context to feel proud of there.
> and they regularly imprison or fine people for anti-left political opinions
Do you have any sources to substantiate this claim? In particular, including under which law a prison sentence or fine was imposed for the expression of a constitutionally protected political opinion.
Nice try. The German constitution is a poor document and doesn't protect political opinion, so your "constitutionally protected" political opinion caveat just makes it useless. You'd just defend every example with "our constitution allows that" rather than recognizing that it just means the constitution itself is wrong.
Example: the American author CJ Hopkins has been repeatedly prosecuted in Berlin despite being acquitted the first time, because in Germany there's apparently no constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. His "crime" was criticizing COVID authoritarianism. You're now going to tell me why the German constitution allows this, and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
Any source showing people being imprisoned or fined merely for expressing an anti-left opinion then? Which specific law were they convicted under?
The claim that Germany has "no constitutional protection against double jeopardy" is false. Art. 103(3) of the constitution embodies ne bis in idem. The German criminal procedure allows legal remedies (appeals), including Revision (appeal on points of law), which can be brought by both parties before a judgment becomes final. That’s what happened in this case.
In the CJ Hopkins case, the issue was not "criticizing COVID authoritarianism" as such, but the use of a banned symbol under 86a StGB. One can freely say "the government acted authoritarian during COVID"; that kind of political criticism is protected speech under Art. 5 GG.
> and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
I’m not interested in moral justifications. Morality is a matter of opinion, and you’re entitled to yours just as I am to mine. The same applies to your view of the German constitution.
However, backing up claims about concrete cases with sources helps me (and others) understand which cases you’re referring to and whether they actually support your argument in a way that lets me learn something new (preferably) or whether we'll simply end up acknowledging that we have different opinions on the matter ;)
It's interesting that this is a serious movie by the director Michael 'Bully' Herbig, who is generally known for bad taste comedies, full of clichees about race and sexuality.
For the 80s it was intense yes. Watching it now that same tension feels milder but I guess that's because every single TV show now has to have constant explosions, car crashes etc in it.
There is actually gunfire in it and a teenager dies in the beginning but it still feels less intense due to the 80s pace IMO.
I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.
If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!
I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
There are some theories of negotiation that say it's good to pick an overly specific number like that specifically to imply that you've given it thought and aren't willing to change it without getting something in return.
I once had someone at a store ask me what something cost, and then got a blank stare back when I said "$90". I had to 'correct' myself and say "$89.99". We all live in very different worlds.
As a parent with two kids that used Scratch during 2020 or so… be cautious. The web community was an unregulated social network with follows, likes, comments, and a wide age range (apparently) of people interacting. Around that time, there was a lot of inappropriate content, some bullying, sketches about self-harm, sex, etc. Perhaps they’ve fixed the issue. If not, I would try to install it locally and keep them away from the official website.
Incidentally, I later came to believe that the visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding. That was just my experience and I don’t have formal research to back it up, but I still wonder about it.
> visual coding impeded their ability to learn text-based coding
As a former child, my opinion is the opposite. I learned visual programming with Lego Mindstorms NXT in ~2008, and later developed an interest in text programming on Roblox in ~2012. It's my belief that my fluency with concepts like control flow and values output from one part of the program serving as inputs for another part of the program were largely transferable to text-based programming. Learning a first programming language is 30% learning syntax, and 70% learning programming.
If you can afford to support yourself, which I’m sure he can, there’s a serenity to working on small projects that are nothin the public eye. It may simply be that he craves some quiet time that enables him to focus on his family and himself.
In the world of tattooing, it’s frowned upon for a tattoo artist to take another tattoo artist’s original work and replicate it without permission, yet it’s common practice to take well known IP (Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, etc) and tattoo that on a client. The ethical boundary seems to be between whether the source artwork was created by an individual vs. a corporation.
In the tattoo case, tattooing pikachu on a person does not harm Nintendo’s business, but copying another tattoo artist’s work or style directly takes their business. Tattoo art is an industry where your art style largely defines your career.
I can see the argument LLMs are transformative, but when you set up specific evaluation of copying a company/artist and then advertise that you clone that specific studio’s work, that’s harming them and in my opinion crossing a line.
This isn’t an individual vs corporation thing, (though people are very selfish).
There’s so much more here than just corporate vs individual. There’s the sheer scale of it, the enforcement double standards, questions of consent, and taking advantage of the commons (artists public work) etc. To characterize it as people not liking business is plain wrong.
Very well put. It boggles my mind that some people cannot separate individual from corporations. As if their mind are not able to comprehend how corporations can cause harm at scale.
Certainly we need to "right-size" our outrage. But especially with the tattoo artist side, it skews into a sort of weird nimby-ism, where tattoo artists have claimed some mantle where the ip of a Nintendo which spent multiple salaries over six months perfecting a pokemon is totally worthless and trash, while the ip of some dime-a-dozen flash art someone banged out over a weekend is invaluable.
I'd argue that if an art piece is famous enough, then it ought to become "public". In the sense that, yes, the artist made it and it became famous, but once it reaches a certain scale of fame, it means that the public itself made the work famous. So it's a kind of co-creation (eg for instance the fact that people were writing fan-fiction about Harry Potter or whatever, contributing to the fame of the book, etc). So in this case, after it has reached a sufficient level of fame, it should become public work
Technically the individual tattoo artist needs a license to reproduce the IP (unless the studio released the likeness into the public domain), but it's small potatoes and these IP holders know that the free promotion helps them infinitely more than whatever they'd get from trying to enforce IP licenses.
But the AI companies are making billions off of this (and a lot of other) IP, so it totally makes sense for the IP holders to care about copyright protection.
Nethavk is much much too baroque, a confusion of ideas and one-turn unavoidable deaths (well, avoidable if you know the secret handshake)[0]. It's like a cupcake recipe that has 40 ingredients and is dripping with extra stuff on top.
Brogue, on the other hand, is perfectly simple but perfectly well-executed, a five-ingredient recipe that lets every ingredient shine.
When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
I think a good thought experiment to consider, in terms of defining what your own views are, is to consider that if every single person had a mandatory 24/7 uplinked camera on them with redundancies, then the number of unsolved crimes would rapidly approach zero. It would be essentially impossible to get away with crime, so the only crimes that would happen would be those of passion, ignorance, or the political elite who would certainly excuse themselves from such social obligations, as usual.
But I definitely would not want to live in that world. And I think that's true for most people. It's kind of interesting too because there's some really nasty arguments one can make about this like, 'What, you'd rather see children kidnapped and even killed than consenting to surveillance that won't even be looked at unless you're under suspicion?'
But it's quite disingenuous, because with any freedom there is always a cost, and that cost is often extreme. 40,000+ people die per year because of our freedom to drive, yet few would ever use that as an argument to prohibit driving.
I think it's the opposite. I think people would prefer the peace of mind of living in a high trust society. People like predictability and being able to trust people. I also think people would enjoy that laws that people pass are actually applied and we can efficiently apply the will of the people to the country.
>with any freedom there is always a cost
Laws ultimately would be what restrict your freedom, not the enforcement of them. I don't think freedom should rely on poor enforcement of laws.
One of the biggest 'culture shocks' I had when first moving to Asia, that eventually I'd see in numerous places, is visiting a food court during business hours. There's people shoulder to shoulder, so everybody goes to claim a table before getting their food. They do this by leaving various things, including their purses, on tables while they went to go queue up to get some food. There wasn't a camera anywhere. That is a high trust society, and it's amazing. What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society - when you have a camera on every person for fear they might do something bad, it's a 0, if not negative, trust society.
Your perceptions of other peoples' views are also off. Even with the current scope of government surveillance, 66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits. [1] And laws would not be what limit freedoms. Government and authority is not some abstract holistic entity. It's made up of people, like you and I. Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life? The difference between me and the person who would end up doing so is not this great gulf you might imagine.
For instance Snowden revealed that NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance. [2] They'd also use their position to spy on their love interests to the point it gained it's own little sardonic moniker 'LOVEINT'. The people that would be looking through those cameras are just people. And the government leadership overseeing these groups would include those prone to go off to an island to screw minors, or more upstanding fellows like Eric Swalwell, cheating on his wife with a Chinese spy while serving on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that oversees the entire US intelligence apparatus, and would oversee this sort of surveillance.
>What you're describing here is the opposite of a high trust society
In such a society, people don't steal because thieves have been removed from society. You can trust others because they have proven through their life that they are trustworthy. By trust I was talking between the people in society and not about the government trusting that people would not break laws. Humans are not perfect, so it's a bad assumption to assume that citizens will not break laws.
>66% of Americans say that the potential risks outweigh the potential benefits
The article you linked was about the current benefits. This is different than what I am talking about where laws are able to be effectively be enforced.
>Would you feel comfortable with me being able to surveil every moment of your life?
What do I get in return from you? Nothing? Then I have no reason to do so.
>NSA officers would regularly collect and trade sexually explicit media obtained from surveillance.
This should be made an instantly firable offense, like it is in the tech industry for accessing personal data of users. There should be alerting when such data is accessed to ensure that systems are not being abused.
The article was specifically and explicitly speaking of potential benefits, not present. The problem with systems made up of people is that you can't just have turtles all the way down. Let's say that retaining sexually explicit media of surveilled individuals is indeed grounds for instant dismissal. Who enforces this? Okay, the person above the people doing surveillance, who's somehow going through the entirety of said surveillance. And what happens when he is the one saving such media? Is it then overviewed by another person above him? And so on.
You can't really have endless redundancies and, at scale, this becomes even more true where the vast amount of data and processing becomes ever less viable to filter. And when you had 24/7 footage of everybody at every moment, that takes scale and ups it to an inconceivably vast level. More generally I think removing thieves from society, with extreme prejudice, is a far more pleasant path forward for everybody than treating everybody like a potential thief.
> In such a society, people don't steal because thieves have been removed from society. You can trust others because they have proven through their life that they are trustworthy.
This is a very "Star Trek" view of the future and even Star Trek repeatedly demonstrates that the perfect society is an illusion.
I don't think it's necessarily an illusion, but rather its repeatedly demonstrated that it requires measure that some might not like. In "Asia" (quotes as it feels odd to characterize an entire continent of dozens of different countries, yet there is often a widely shared ethos on many topics) criminals tend to be largely ostracized from society. And it's not just the criminals, but also their family and relations. This is probably somewhat more akin to what Western society was in the past with things like pillories where the punishment wasn't just the humiliation, but everyone knowing that you were a criminal.
Even the justice systems tend to be different. For instance in the US you're expected to plead not guilty, even if you're guilty - and then work from there. In "Asia" 'falsely' pleading not guilty is often seen as a lack of remorse and generally results in far harsher penalties than pleading guilty. And when one pleads guilty, they're often even required to do things like reenact their crime and generally cooperate with the government in every single way. It's just a very different approach towards criminality.
Another problem is that “crime” is a very flexible term and when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Also the legal system specially in the US likes to equate convictions with solved cases which is not always the same.
I’m ok with that as long as I, the camera owner, am choosing to hand over the footage. At best I can see some sort of watermarking to ensure that it’s legitimate.
There are legitimate reasons to want a camera either at your front door or surveilling your property. These can range from an increased sense of security to having documentation to support insurance claims, or even for watching wildlife. We installed our Ring camera after an ongoing string of nighttime car break-ins hit us and we had no direct proof of what happened for insurance. It was meant to be both a deterrent to that type of event and also for documentation if it happened again. There's also a pack of coyotes that lives in the woods near our house and occasionally eats our chickens. While that usage was more out of curiosity (if you have chickens, you're going to lose one from time to time), we were able to develop a sense of when that threat was higher.
I live on a bucolic cul-de-sac in a house that I've lived in since the mid 1970s. Most of the neighbors are the same. I never in my life expected a random person to drive down the street, drag a lady out of his trunk, chase her around the cul-de-sac, and stab her to death in front of my house. I never expected to find the body in the woods 40' from my side door. This is when I also learned that nobody comes to clean up after a crime like that and that if I didn't want pools of blood in front of my house and a 50' streak of it crossing the circle or the splatters all over the mailboxes that I was going to have to go out there and clean it up myself. I was in PTSD therapy for a while after that. I'm glad the Ring camera caught some of the activity.
After an event like that, it's easy to lose a sense of security in your home. How are you supposed to sleep the night after that happens, when the perpetrator remains at large? You can't lock your doors hard enough or do anything at all to feel secure. That lack of sense of security does not go away in a day or a week or a month. It goes away when you can find "normal" again. It helped us to find normal by installing other cameras around the house.
I don't want Ring or Arlo or anybody to be automatically sharing my camera footage with anybody. Even with the murder event, it was my choice to go through the footage and share it with the authorities. I don't support authoritarian "law enforcement" activities, I don't want anybody tapping into my camera feed to find lost pets or for any other reason. They shouldn't be allowed to do it. Like many other services we all use, we're more of the product than the customer, as our data is harvested and used for other purposes.
Personal security is different than targeted advertising. Most people won't know they need or want a camera until after they have experienced something that makes them feel less secure in their home. I just hope they have the wits to read the Terms and understand what they're opting into before automatically accepting all of the opt-in-by-default data sharing.
Not one disagreement with what you're saying. I have cameras outside my house. I'd like them to be end-to-end encrypted and am perfectly fine with a voluntary self-report feature. But what Ring seems to be pushing for is opt-out mass surveillance, and once connected to AI this means we're going to the bad place.
Even in the most dystopian sci-fi future where a hostile and totalitarian government watches everything everybody does, they would still use the information to investigate boring everyday crimes.
The (non rethoric) question is, are people willing to pay the increasing price of non-crime related surveillance as we see diminished security margins.
When a man murdered a woman in front of my house last year, our Ring camera's photos of his car led to his arrest within 24 hours, so not entirely useless?
Your doorbell photo of a car was really the only evidence to convict someone of murder?
I'm glad I live somewhere that needs more proof that.
No, it enabled them to find him quickly. There was other evidence, but with no previously know connection to the victim and the perpetrator having no prior criminal record, I was told it was unlikely they would have found him otherwise.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082810/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7125774
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