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Comment by gitweb | Hacker News Reader

I don't think we have made peace. The issue is the market is being flooded with new recruits that don't care and grew up in the cloud, and these companies are actively involved in the education system to make it the new norm. We used to have actual computer science degrees and now we have IT training camps ran by the companies that have their own selfish interests.

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You know that we still have actual computer science degrees though, right? I don’t even know what point you are trying to make with this misinformation.

I'm not convinced a CompSci degree actually teaches the history of the internet and why being decentralised might be something worth having. I didn't learn ideals from my university, or certainly not the ideals they want me to learn.

Well I guess it depends on where you study. My university was full of profs that never dared to even recommend proprietary software to us and always preached to us about the open web.

Though, I should disclose, that this was in Germany, and for some reason I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things.

> I have found Germans to be particulary strong advocates of the decentralized web and general FOSS things.

With apologies to Mr. Godwin, I think it's simply that Germans have (in general) learned what is possible when data is centralized and administered in one place, easily accessible.

Additionally, I find an strange sense of pride (seeing as, again, I'm not German) that there are still some people who still live to fight all this data-collection and privacy invasion. I always look forward to, e.g. every year's C3 talks.

I'm German and would like to confirm this. How both fascism and communism (in East Germany) relate to (among others) data collection is in the mind of rather many people here, including young people. Sadly tho our leading politicians forgot history already.

[Disclosure: I'm president of a CCC local chapter and regularly advocate for the CCC's positions on privacy and IT security concerns in public and towards the press.]

I frequently and publicly complain about crazy surveillance policy as much as the next guy. But I find it important to understand that the politicians in the interior and justice branches are not pushing mass surveillance because they're evil. It's because of perverse incentives: They know full well that, when the next terrorist attack happens, everyone who didn't push hard enough for law and order will be portrayed as an enabler. Or at least they think that this will happen. It can be argued if it really would, but them thinking that this is how the world is is my best explanation for their behavior. I don't think they want to build the next Stasi or Gestapo.

To your last point: no, surely not. I think it's a failing of our current public view (daily news cycle perhaps?) of politics where politicians always have to be seen 'doing things' about all this evil lurking about, and if they aren't, then should anything happen, the blame lies squarely in their lap.

This, I'd argue, leads to it always being essentially career-wise risk-free to be more tough/stringent/et c. on <evil thing du jour>. And why not? There's hardly any downside. It's all unfortunately about optics.

EDIT: re-reading your comment, I realize I'm just stating in more words your salient point. It is, however, a particularly difficult hole to dig ourselves up from though.

Godwin recently suspended Godwin’s law, so no need to apologize to him:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/08/14/godwins_law_creator_r...

Unscientific gut-feeling as an American who has visited Germany for ~1 year in total: Germany remembers fascism. Not necessarily in the direct sense of people who lived through it, although there is that too, but.. It is hard for me to describe.. I get this feeling that much of their government and society is structured along a guiding principle of "This must never happen again."

I'm currently studying CS in Germany at a big university. Yes, the profs seem to all run Linux and they usually recommend free software. But then COVID-19 happened and they all caved in to using Zoom/Teams. Those are now heavily recommended, even for use in smaller groups. When promted about it a few of them might say that they care about privacy, too, but that's then not reflected in their actions. Even those doing research on privacy or security related topics heavily embrace Zoom/Teams. And as if that's not enough, the administration seems to view things like the GDPR as a nuisance, especially since the privacy shield has been invalidated.

You might argue that the professors have no choice. But then there actually are non-CS professors from other universities that won't even put recorded videos of themselves online. They teach by uploading a few documents. Some stopped teaching altogether. None of that is particularly great. But it shows that professors have some power and would have even more of it as a collective. That in turn means that all those CS professors chose not to exercise it. From what I know it's the same at many other universities.

I seriously doubt anyone is taught any of the values you're talking about any more. The opposite is the case - if you held any of them before you'll have to be practical and let them go.

Isn't that more a history course and less a computer science course?

I've always thought a little history makes the lecture more interesting. Yet dry and boring lectures seem to be the norm.

Lectures should be recorded by the most charismatic person that is sufficiently knowledgable about the subject and available on demand, rather than the archaic bored professor talking to a hall of 150 students, 5 of which are massively engaged, the rest are either going too quickly, too slowly, hungover, or distracted by something else.

That CS degrees get rarer or at least lower percentage compared to people with incomplete education from big corps.

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