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Comment by wyattjoh | Hacker News Reader

From the promo video of it running an ancient version of iTunes on Windows Vista and the brochures it seems they inject their malware via software updates in general, not just iTunes.

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I wouldn't be surprised if they force the installation of a certificate root they can use to serve malicious updates (for German OS X users, at least). That's a tactic used by agencies in other countries. Apple et al could probably mitigate this with certificate pinning in their updaters but I'm not sure they can get away with that without running into trouble with other countries that expect to be able to MITM updates.

I would be surprised. IIRC those "other countries" are countries like Iran that have also just shut off access to the internet for the country. I still think we have a few more years of internet freedom in Germany before that happens.

Internet freedom in Germany?

https://stadt-nachrichten.de/fahndungen/hasskommentare-im-in...

https://www.bild.de/news/inland/news-inland/hass-kommentare-...

https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/gesetz-gege...

Boy China is childs play compared to us.

uh, if you actually read the links you posted...from the second article one of the people visited by law enforcement said "In my opinion, gasify everyone" [google translate I must admit, but there were plenty of quotes like this that I think its safe to say this is the intended tone]

I don't see how there is any justifiable grounds to talk about killing people with gas in any context, particularly not in this context.

That's the examples they put in press releases. Just for a sanity check on what tiny harmless things are punished by those laws:

https://www.vice.com/de/article/8xe7jg/kuchen-tv-volksverhet...

A Youtuber made a video about an incidents between students where one made a racist joke. He [the Youtuber] said about that joke "that wasn't a bad joke" and got convicted for Volksverhetzung - one of the harshest crimes we have. If you get convicted for that as a non-VIP, your life is effectively over in Germany. That's socially worse than a rape conviction.

And back to the point: whether you consider it right to put people in jail for saying mean things or not - it is absolutely not internet freedom. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

This has nothing to do with NetzDG. If he would have spewed something of that caliber openly on the street he would've had to expect the same thing (depending on where in Germany of course).

That there is no "free speech" in Germany in respect to hatespeech has been the case pre-internet too. I'm not a big fan of NetzDG, but I also have to say that I expected much worse censorship-wise when it passed and I haven't heard of gross misapplications of it so far. If anything Facebook and Twitter show that you can still post a lot of hatespeech despite its existence.

You can do many things: You can pass those laws, put people in jail, make up the term "hate speech" and condemn everyone who does that. But you can not say that we have internet (or any other) freedom in Germany. There is some nice english proverb about a cake and eating it too

You can try to argue that certain things aren't "hate speech" but I don't understand how you can claim it to be a made up term. Hate is a real thing and if you channel that into certain language you get hate speech, plain and simple.

Germany has an interesting history with regards to what various constituents view as protected speech. As someone who hasn't lived in Germany I freely admit that I have a limited view of such things, but as the other poster mentioned these issues precede the internet.

hate itself is real - a word that has a negative connotation, but was never illegal in itself. You could always hate a person or a football club. That word was taken, rebranded to include among other things everything critical of government and made illegal. That's why hate speech is made up. What is called hate speech today was called a rant, "hot take", an insult or whatever just a couple of years ago. Today we literally have a law against "hate crime" - another doubleplusgood word. These things are not real, they're tools to oppress a critical population. Also note that even true things fall under those "crimes". It doesn't matter if what you say is true as long as it's "insulting" to someone.

There are more parts to freedom than just freedom of speech.

What does this have to do with "internet freedom" (whatever that means)? Statements that would get you prosecuted when shouted in the streets have that same effect when posted online. Surprised Pikachu face?

By that logic, China is doing excellent on internet freedom, since whatever is banned online, is also mostly illegal in the streets too.

No, that's not "by that logic". The entire point is that internet freedom is about things that are conceptually impossible to do on the streets. Like using a VPN or having net neutrality. It's not about whether you get to do things on the internet that are otherwise forbidden.

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