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I've just spent a week in Kosovo for an international tech conference and it's pretty clear that the article is shit-posting. Kosovo might be small and somewhat 'wild west' but you'd be very silly to take any of that advice.

Even if you believee the claims, the EU - especially Germany - is heavily involved in economic development of the country. Kosovo is very keen to improve their EU integration. So, you might be able to side-step Kosovar authorities, but gain the attention of the EU and you're not going to be protected by incompetance or bribery of local law enforcement.

As an aside - it's a great place to visit. Friendly, safe, cheap (for now), good weather. Looking forward to returning one day.

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Having spent some time there myself, I agree with this. The corruption is more than we expect in the US, but not on this level and getting better all the time.

There isn't an extreme level of corruption by any means described here. Getting tipped off to raids, warrants, inquiries, taps etc is pretty easy to achieve even in the United States. Even getting local authorities to run interference to give you some time is reasonably affordable.

Look at the corruption in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, New Orleans. Kasim Reed's staff selling machine guns, Burr Ellis hosting parties from his private floor in jail. Sydney Dorsey having his deputies assassinate the rival sheriff. A 10 year school cheating scandal, the 2020 election, kickbacks galore at the world's busiest airport. That's just Atlanta, many major cities have similar or worse corruption issues and it's fairly simple to tap into. In many cases necessary if you want to do business in the city at all.

> the 2020 election

I assume the corruption referred to here is trump's attempt to steal the election. The US is in a weird spot, corruption is rampant in rural America, spotty in some cities (usually noticed & prosecuted), but federally corruption has been low until recently. It's nice to see corruption being addressed in these cases (i.e., the trump indictments).

Hopefully the US doesn't slide into the everyday corruption common in some areas of the world, as long as the US prosecutes without fear or favor the country will end up in a good spot wrt not normalizing corruption, though it does feel like an uphill battle given the political situation.

What tech conference was in Kosovo? I feel like most are in all of the normal destinations and would like to add a few that are in more interesting locales.

There are ones that like this one https://doku.tech/ https://flossk.org/ https://ickosovo.com/events https://kosict.com/ https://itp-prizren.com/events/ https://makerspaceprizren.com/events/

Many more others, am also proud to be early student (shortly) of: https://frontendmasters.com/teachers/james-halliday/ who visited: https://flossk.org/projects/prishtina-hackerspace/ and mesmerized everyone with his skills and knowledge.

Thank you

FOSS4G (Free and Open Source for Geospatial Information Systems) - https://2023.foss4g.org/

It's a yearly global conference series run by volunteers. There are also regional versions, e.g. FOSS4G NA will be in Baltimore this year (https://foss4gna.org/), Asia will be in Seoul (https://foss4g.asia/2023/) and Oceania will be Auckland (https://2023.foss4g-oceania.org/). It's a great conference if you're interested in Mapping / Geo tech.

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