It's on like place 10 out of 180, which makes it one of the least corrupt places.
It also has some surprisingly non-boomer departments, like the Sovereign Tech Fund. Either way you need to celebrate police doing good things and immoral actors being exposed, it can only have good outcomes.
Perhaps it deters them, or deters the next generation of such hackers. Or at least it makes their life less enjoyable, which is fair since they were only able to afford their travels due to their illicitly acquired wealth.
Well, to be honest, those old enough remember when cryptography was considered someting for the military and special services, and considering using encryption would put you under immediate suspicion. Now we can at least argue we need it to protect us from the cyber crime, even if we really have privacy and free speech in mind
Makes you wonder if the investigators discovered this independently, or decided to maybe ask the hackers already involved in defending against them for help...
I'm not deep into the topic, but AFAIK there generally isn't a warm connection between the CCC and the BND in Germany (in the recent years mostly due to the BNDs involvement ins spying on German citizens, but I think there is also deeper history there). If a hacker collaborates with the BND they do run a risk of many of their peers not wanting to collaborate with them anymore.
It also has something to do with the so called "Hackerparagraph" [1] under which whitehat hacking is basically impossible in Germany. Even writing a program that could potentially be used for hacking is a crime. If you followed the law word for word the authors of e.g. curl could be charged under this law.
Isn’t that by design so governments can prosecute citizens they don’t like? For example, curl is probably ok but that one annoying Kim Dotcom guy is probably going to catch a case under some dubious law.
The pirate bay case, one of the laws cited by the judges was an law written to target biker bars and their owners. It only takes a bit of creative work to bend laws and prior cases to match an already made conclusion, if that conclusion has enough political support.
In that way, I don't really think the government need to design laws to have loop holes in them. With enough political pressure they can get the judges to make any decision they like.
> If you followed the law word for word the authors of e.g. curl could be charged under this law.
They really couldn't. BVerfG (Germany's constitutional court) has clearly said that dual use tools have a presumption of not being tools to break the law. It's been very clear that mens rea matters. And that a narrow reading of the law is the only constitutional reading.
The problem here is taking "word for word" as "by dictionary meaning", which is never how laws are read.
It's still a problematic law (together with §202a/b) because it doesn't clearly carve out space for grey-hat activities (white-hat attacks with authorization really don't fall under it even with creative reading).
On the upside, Germany is considering fixing that. On the downside, it moves with the speed of classic German bureaucracy and is being "discussed" since 2024.
> The problem here is taking "word for word" as "by dictionary meaning", which is never how laws are read.
Back in the days of "smart contracts" and "DAOS" this was something many well-meaning technical people struggeled with. Humans and their societies are flexible and therefore laws must be flexible as well (to a certain degree before it becomes damaging).
It's also why a lawyer/expert is usually recommended when engaged with legal matters: We as layman lack all the context around seemingly "simple" concepts, procedures and definitions. You can learn all of that or hire a professional.
> some countries find such creative ways to stifle innovation while they look to be caring about safety or what not
I'm not sure white-hat hacking is broadly compatible with German culture. Keep in mind that going bankrupt in Germany permanently closes off lots of avenues, from future lending to whether you can be in senior management at a public company.
Bankruptcy does not usually permanently bar you from loans or holding senior management position, there are temporary restrictions, unless grossly negligent. But your point still stands I guess, when compared to the US
Well at least the german state can collaborate with russian agents in projects like wirecard and not violate any laws when threatening journalists reporting on its collaborations.
>There (...) isn't a warm connection between the CCC and the BND in Germany
Fun fact: In the 1990s, the CCC e.V. was declared a terrorist organization by the BND. Also, a lot of members have been sued for Landesverrat (high treason) for disclosing found vulnerabilities and/or doing journalistic work.
For example, the netzpolitik guys have been sued for high treason twice.
Just as a side note on how competent the German state is to use their existing talent to work on issues in cyber security.
> If a hacker collaborates with the BND they do run a risk of many of their peers not wanting to collaborate with them anymore.
Another fun fact: There is no effective witness protection program in Germany. You have to have been attacked almost murdered twice (with legal cases leading to prosecution) before you can apply for the witness protection program.
And they're asking themselves why all the witnesses in high profile cases from Europol/Interpol keep disappearing ...
Sadly, there is a rift now since quite a few hackers are left leaning and therefore are by definition activists.
80th, 90th were the last time were hacking was a means to an end. C64 and Amiga scene had skindheads showing up at copy parties but no one cared really.
Some were a bit unsure but the moment they talked about their craft there was no divide but hacker spirit.
In recent years this would be unimaginable. And guess what? Talking to each other made the skins disappear.
It was more of a niche expression without doing harm. Popper, Goths, Ted’s, Rockers - in comparison to today there was more unity than today.
Hooligans were the same. Many local groups that fought each other due to political stances befriended each other later because it was more of a ritual than ideology.
It is a bit sad because politics doesn’t belong to hacking, and never did.
Hacking is Boolean only in the sense of it either works or it doesn’t. Or does a computer care about left or right?
And BtW that’s why I find local attempts in Europe for “Go EU” pathetic. It is about ideology, not improvement.
Computers don't care whether they are used for good or for evil. I would rather have a culture that encourages using computers for good, and there is nothing sad about such culture existing. Computers are already used for evil on a much larger scale by meta, palantir, etc.
It's very difficult to stop them doing this. The extent to which it happens varies a lot, and some countries and places have a much worse problem than others, but fundamentally if you "cause trouble" to "respectable people and companies" you're going to get hassled by law enforcement. Yes, the sarcasm quotes are important.
Given that religions are losing members, especially the youth, and that the most people do not join the military, what will keep disseminating the ideas in the future?
For now, the neoconservatives are running the Republican party. They also have a pretty clear game plan that doesn't require constant chatter. I am just stating where the values originate, and of course things can get murky over time without stronger leadership.
The equivalent question for the Democrat party would be where they expect to find new leaders when their voter base is increasingly antisocial and doesn't believe in higher education.
People keep getting hung up on material implication but it can not understand why. It's more than an encoding hack--falsity (i.e. the atomic logical statement equivalent to 0=1) indicates that a particular case is unreachable and falsity elimination (aka "from falsity follows everything") expresses that you have reached such a case as part of the case distinctions happening in every proof.
Or more poetically, "if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike[1]" is a folk wisdom precisely because it makes so much sense.
Material implication was not the default implication historically; it came as a useful hack by people who hoped that by enforcing it they could formalize the whole math and knowledge and have a sort of a "single source of truth" for any statement, and evaluate all statements purely syntactically. This proved to be futile as incompleteness theorem showed, and which material implication directly enabled by allowing self-referential non-sense as valid statements. There were many attempts to reconcile this with different logics but they all ended up weaker and unable to formalize all statements. We are now entering the next phase of this attempt, by using hugely complex reasoning function approximators as our "single source of truth" in the form of AI/LLMs.
I used to do a lot of proofs coming all the way from Peano arithmetics, successor operators and first-order tableaux method.
One of the reasons relationship advice subreddits suggest divorce so often is because most people with "small" problems in their relationships don't write an essay about it on Reddit but are able to solve them with the tools/friends they have. So a Reddit post existing indicates the relationship has serious flaws.
This is not to defend the study, because asking AI has a lower barrier to entry.
No, a Reddit post indicates whoever posted is fishing for large scale validation from internet strangers. Their relationship may or may not even exist. Most of the posts are pretty obviously fake. Just like 90% of interactions in general on Reddit these days. That site should be taken out back and put out of its misery.
But nothing wrong about that. Some decisions are to made in a hunch. Even a therapist doesn't suggest to divorce or not. Victims are often not in a state to decide. They need support (as myself).
Humans often don't help. They often suggest - everyone goes through pain. It is part of life blah blah.
You can only show the checkbox on Linux. You can add OS detection to the checkbox and have it say "support our $OS dependencies" and put that into different pots of money. You can make the checkbox say "support our Linux dependencies" and then rely on Windows people not selecting it.
It's on like place 10 out of 180, which makes it one of the least corrupt places.
It also has some surprisingly non-boomer departments, like the Sovereign Tech Fund. Either way you need to celebrate police doing good things and immoral actors being exposed, it can only have good outcomes.
Perhaps it deters them, or deters the next generation of such hackers. Or at least it makes their life less enjoyable, which is fair since they were only able to afford their travels due to their illicitly acquired wealth.
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