corty

In Germany you do not get all the cases, just the ones the courts deem important enough. E.g. if the ruling is different from earlier ones in some aspect, if it is a higher court or if the case was of particular public interest.

Regular courts are already responsible. They can and do order illegal content to be removed, accounts blocked and users punished.

Some new legislation in Germany requires Facebook to also proactively remove posts from users that have been reported and are "obviously" illegal, even without waiting for a court order.

But Facebook goes even beyond that and uses standards that are stricter than current laws, and processes that are simpler, harsher and stricter than the usual court proceedings. The court judgement in the article limited that practice a bit.

You may be right in that the legislation described in the second paragraph requiring Facebook to be proactive may be expanded. I do find this tendency unfortunate, because free speech is put in the hands of a private for-profit entity that is by law required to be very quick about its judgements.

The above article isn't very elaborate on that, but the heise one[0] cites the judges:

'Es bedürfe "einer umfassenden Würdigung und Abwägung der wechselseitigen Interessen", insbesondere der "kollidierenden Grundrechte", betonen die Richter: "Auf Seiten der Nutzer die Meinungsäußerungsfreiheit, auf Seiten der Beklagten vor allem die Berufsausübungsfreiheit."' roughly: 'One needs "a comprehensive judgement and weighing of mutual interest", especially of the "colliding basic rights", as the judges emphasize: "on the users' side freedom of expression, on the side of the defendant [FB] freedom of trade and profession".

This is a high standard that needs quite some text and elaboration to fulfil, not at all doable by form letter.

'Im Sinne des Interessenausgleichs müsste sich Facebook aber verpflichten, den Nutzer "über die Entfernung eines Beitrags zumindest nachträglich und über eine beabsichtigte Sperrung seines Nutzerkontos vorab zu informieren, ihm den Grund dafür mitzuteilen und eine Möglichkeit zur Gegenäußerung einzuräumen, an die sich eine Neubescheidung anschließt".' roughly: 'However, in the way of balancing interests, Facebook has to pledge to "inform [the user] about removal of a post at least after the fact and about planned blocking of an account before the fact, to name the reason thereof and offer an opportunity to issue an opposing statement, which is followed by a subsequent further decision and information.".'

So they are relatively explicit in how Facebook must do things and that they cannot just file the opposing statement to the recycle bin. Facebook's lawyer called this "completely impractical" (but of course he would...) because of the hundreds of daily cases.

[0] https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Facebook-muss-geloeschte-Hassr...

Oh, and btw., the court that decided this is the highest regular court in Germany, setting a binding precedent for all other German courts. There are many more cases than just those two, all the others you just don't read about because everyone knows that lower courts' decisions aren't that important and frequently overturned. So even if it was just about 2 posts, this decision is important and will shape all future cases.

Canned responses from a bot and answers without weighing the arguments given will loose them the following lawsuits. And Germany is a looser-pays country, so given a lost lawsuit after each deleted post or blocked account, they'll be out of a lot of money. And Germany's equivalent of ambulance chasers ("Abmahnanwaelte") are certainly cooling the champagne already.

What the article is also missing and what will be a major problem for FB: FB will have to give the user the opportunity of a statement _before_ blocking their account and give reasons for blocking and why the statement was not acceptable. https://www.heise.de/news/BGH-Facebook-muss-geloeschte-Hassr...

There is a huge difference between "incredibly carcinogenic" and "potentially carcinogenic".

Basically everything that comes out of a pan or fryer and is even slightly darker than "basically raw" will have some carcinogenic compounds. Frying any biomatter will create some measurable quantity of carcinogens, depending on the temperature and composition. First you will get the likes of Acrylamide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (e.g. Furan), Amines. In the presence of salt, spices, certain oils you can get even nastier stuff like Dioxines. And if you heat it even further, getting a few black spots, you are left with basic carbon. Even that isn't harmless, carbon modifications that you will produce in some minute quantity, like nanotubes and fullerenes, are carcinogenic.

Denaturing hydrocarbons like in cooking will inevitably produce some of the above compounds, there is no way around it. You can try to avoid producing some of them by carefully steering conditions in a way that reduces some of the above compounds. But usually that increases the risk of other ones being produced. You can also undercook everything, but then you'll be left with unsafe food because of the bacterial risk.

All of the above are carcinogenic in (comparatively) huge quantities. Usually "in mice". The link to cancers caused by preparation of food is vague at best, totally speculative at worst. I don't worry about it, and neither should you.

If you really want to learn about risky foodstuff, read up about cyanide in almonds and other fruits with a stone (people even eat that stuff "for health reasons"..., e.g. https://www.webmd.com/cancer/cancer-apricot-seeds ), coumarin (basically an anticoagulant, in higher doses rat poison) in cinnamon, tonka beans and woodruff, and the funny flourinated compounds you get from overheated PTFE-coated cookware (the presence of acid lowers the "fun" temperature but at least might prevent production of gaseous hydroflouric acid). There, the risky dose is much much much closer to the usual kitchen use. In comparison, all of the kitchen cancer scare is harmless.

Rented or not doesn't matter. If you rent a rack or more in colo, you get your uplink fibres and starting there can use your own network equipment. And for big enough customers, the uplink fibres aren't necessarily ethernet but optionally MPLS, some patched dark fibre somewhere or whatever you like and want to pay for. So I don't see how not owning the building would make any difference.

Yes really. With DKIM, you blacklist domains, not IPs. Of course, only if you do it properly. Hotmail doesn't...

Same with GCP, they just announced IPv6 availability for VMs in the last few days. Unbelievably you couldn't even get a IPv6 address for a GCP instance up to now! APIs don't work over IPv6, and lots of other stuff doesn't as well.

Even before the pandemic, in the office, most of the collaboration was remote. Even with people in the same building, because lack of meeting rooms, noisy open-space office and loong looong walks down endless hallways we'd all rather do a quick telephone conference. My direct colleagues were just a table away of course, but collaboration isn't just with them. On the other hand, teams were also spread out across half the world, so lots of things could only be done remotely. Working from home wasn't much of a change there. In total, 90% of communication wasn't done in person but by some kind of remote com.

And since the current trend in our company (and I guess a lot of others) is "hotdesking", where you pull a ticket when entering the building which tells you what desk might be free. Well, no sitting near direct colleagues anymore. So the last advantage of the office is gone as well. Unfortunately it doesn't stop management from hallucinating the great back-in-the-office future after the pandemic...

Yes, I'll also be looking for a new job.

The entire premise of the article is untrue. Larger farms always had paid or unpaid laborers who where not "the Farmer" but still farmers. With the industrialisation this tendency increased as mom&pop farms got fewer and average farm size increased. In the whole eastern block, private small farms were absent or an exception, the rule was the kolkhoz model, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landwirtschaftliche_Produktion... Farmers were employees with regular work time, fields of employment like operating machinery, milking or tending lifestock. The author ignores all this and draws conclusions from a mostly-wrong stereotype.

"Big pockets" isn't really true in this aspect. Part of the problem with the automotive chip crisis is that car companies are stingy customers and treat their suppliers badly, with insane contracts. So when production was stopped, they cancelled orders. When they restarted production, not having any stock, suppliers gave them the middle finger because they had other less stingy customers to serve.

Automotive is influential, but all their suppliers hate them with a passion.

They just didn't decrase as fast as they could have, given falling prouction cost. But then again, the market was heavily distorted by German and Chinese subsidys anyways, so it is hard to know what the subsidy-free "real" market prices would have been.

Since it is about corruption, of course there is only wild speculation. Maybe in 20 years someone will confess in their posthumous memoirs or something. Until then, there is only speculation, inference and the recognition of parallels to cases in the past.

There is no overt pushback. That doesn't mean that there is none. And the presence and activity of the usual environmental NIMBY organisations like Deutsche Umwelthilfe, NABU, BUND, etc. point to at least some covert opposition, since those organisations happily serve as fronts for non-environmental interests.

And state politics, especially in the east, is rife with people using it as a stepping stone to the federal level. Famously there once were more prime ministers from the west governing the east than eastern-born ones.

Maybe. But I think all the politicians Tesla could have bought are already owned by their German competitors.

Problem with new players imho is the high level of corruption in certain parts of government and industry. While you cannot usually bribe a policeman in Germany, construction, permitting and industry subsidies and politics are heavily corrupt. Old-school industries are propped up by an old-boys-network and revolving doors between political parties, unions, administration and industry. Many politicians who did well by the coal industry for example got their comfortable retirement position in the boards of energy giants. Same for the car industry. Parts of those industries are even still owned by the state or federal government, e.g. Volkswagen is partially owned by the state of Lower Saxony and Germany.

That is also possibly the reason Tesla is in such trouble over their new factory. While they are a car manufacturer, and a modern, hip and green one at that, which politics openly hails as good, secretly they are damaging established interests by the traditional German car manufacturers and their allies in high positions. So the administration will nod and smile, but try to find ways to hinder them.

Practically all went bancrupt between 10 and 12 years ago. Starting around 2000, Germany began to heavily subsidize private solar panel installations with guaranteed prices around 1Eur/kWh (later falling to 0.5Eur/kWh, now around 0.1Eur/kWh). With subsidies falling, demand dropped. And initial high subsidies (some claim, see [0]) made the industry too lazy to get competitive abroad, so around 2008 China began to ramp up production for cheaper panels at dumping prices. Politicians failed to react with import duties until it was too late (around 2013). Falling domestic demand, lower prices and higher production in China and political failure to protect domestic production all lead to the death of Germany's solar industry. Even big names such as Siemens solar branch, who could have easily weathered the storm and buy up their competition on the cheap, got out as fast as they could. Because political flailing signaled imminent doom and no betterment in the long term.

Of course nowadays there is again political hypocrisy mounting around the need for shorter transport routes, domestic independence, more capacity, etc. But even so, measures to prop up European solar manufacturers are very weak, import duties have been lifted and China's production has now become too strong to oppose. So there is a little useless promising before an election, then silence.

[0] https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/industrie/studie-zu...

see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27942010#27943382

In her case: Der Apfel faellt nicht weit vom Stamm. She is a chip of the old block.

One of the things that got her famous in Germany was her persistent lying and schemeing, including "think of the children", including showing actual child porn to journalists[0], to get her internet censorship and surveillance scheme passed. Definitely her father's footsteps.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/blockade-illegaler-sites...

Yes, mostly you are right, nowadays. Problem is, imho, only in 2007 or 2008 China surpassed Germany in production (I can't find a source atm, just from memory). That would have been the right time for the EU involvement, but they took 5 more years where German manufacturers were hung out to dry.

It is possible to compete with China on things that require special knowledge and are rarely needed. "Special knowledge" because China doesn't have the local skills to produce it (yet). "Rarely needed" because China didn't prioritize acquiring said knowledge. Case in point: Germany mostly exports production machinery (rarely needed, last forever, very special knowledge) and luxury automobiles (rarely needed, last quite some time, some special knowledge needed (mostly on how to appear "luxury")).

But in general, I firmly believe that western nations with high social, environmental, legal standards cannot compete with China, except in areas where China didn't yet have the chance to catch up for some reason. I think we are going back to a world where most nations know how to produce almost everything, so competition will no longer be on that knowledge but more on the other necessary factors to make production cheaper.

The "making silicium" part is indeed similar enough to making aluminium that there shouldn't be much of a problem there. It needs lots of electricity, but isn't terribly hard. The complicated part is in growing silicium monocristals, slicing them up, doping them, adding contacts and concentrators, etc. Kind of like building microchips, only that the structures are in mm sizes instead of nm.

From clicking around a little, it seems they were bought by elecnor, who seem to, among other things, use the solar panels to build power plants. So they found a buyer who just bought its own manufacturer, selling the excess on the side. Nonetheless, half the models they are offering seem to be made in China.

Mostly sand for the silicium. A little doping materials, phosphorous, arsenic. If you want to get fancy, cadmium, tellurium and selenium (but mostly that fad is over I think). Aluminium and copper for the frames and connectors, a bit of the usual plastics.

The big issue isn't resources, those are either present anyways or needed in very small quantities (dopants). The big problem is electricity for splitting up silicium oxide (sand) into usable silicium by electrolysis. You can do it in Germany, but then the power used will be mostly from lignite, so not very green most of the time.

Oh, and I forgot, glass for the cover. But again, mostly sand and heat.

Germany once had a flourishing industry producing solar panels. Domestic demand was high, supply followed, driven by high subsidies to home-owners producing solar electricity. For a few years all was fine, until Chinese manufacturers provided lower-priced panels. Instead of protecting domestic manufacturing through import duties (which would have been justified because Chinese were dumping below cost at times), the government stood by and did nothing.

Now politicians are crying about the long way panels travel over from China and that we no longer have domestic manufacturing...

Maybe. Germany had a very rainy summer this year, and the flash floods were just single-day events in a long period of cloudy, rainy but noncatastrophic weather. The regular, noncatastrophic rain actually made up for most of the draught in the last three summers. So I would be hesitant to interpret this data either way.

The slight unbalance and the not-totally-uniform looks make cmr much more readable. The breaking with the typesetting tradition makes it better, because it is unhindered by such useless flourishes as "must taper" or "must look like any other letter fitting into a uniform box of equal greying when smudged". cmr does this while still looking good and pleasing when viewed in whole paragraphs as opposed to single letters.

And where cmr absolutely excels is the accompanying greek, math symbols and typesetting. Nothing else comes even close in getting it readable, pleasing and uniform.

E2EE isn't forbidden per se. But if you are a public communication provider over a certain size you need to provide access upon request if technically possible. It isn't really clear even in the case of Tutanota if they fall into that regulation, however, they had to preliminarily comply anyways: https://www.heise.de/news/Gericht-zwingt-Mailprovider-Tutano...

Healthcare providers operating a Matrix server won't be communication providers to the public, and if they aren't using a web client or some similar crap, breaking E2EE won't be possible. Webmail providers claiming E2EE like Tutanota are imho liars anyways, because Javascript on a website isn't a secure "end" for the encryption.

So use client software that isn't attacker controlled easily, keep your keys private, only encrypt to trustworthy keys and you'll be fine. Matrix ticks all those boxes if you don't use the web client. And the only legal way in for German law enforcement would be to infect your device with some trojan ("Bundestrojaner", like e.g. NSO Pegasus).

Well, yes. Matrix is a federated protocol like IRC, XMPP/Jabber, IRCv3 and a few other less known ones. Being federated is basically what made Email so widespread, and I guess in the long run that model of doing things will be the only viable one. For most people, states, companies and organisations, using a centralized foreign service, no matter how trustworthy it were said to be, isn't an option.

Well, they could still have opted for something proprietary, weird and broken. See for example the De-Mail desaster[0] and the beA desaster[1]. Both supposedly better and secure email/messenger replacements with huge problems like lacking end-to-end encryption, design problems, laughably lacking security, high cost, low adoption (except were required by law), no usability, etc.

I'm really glad that at least someone here might have learned from those mistakes.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Mail https://netzpolitik.org/2015/de-mail-das-tote-pferd-wird-wei...

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besonderes_elektronisches_Anwa...