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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

This is how Germany works. Everyone is monitored, everyone is liable for everything. You would think an ISP could say: why don't you sue our customer directly? But not in Germany. There you are liable for things you do, things your customers do, things your customers' customers do, things your customers' customers' customers do, and so on. This is really the country where regulation stifles innovation.

And you cannot have any type of internet connection without linking it to your passport and home address.

No other industry gets all these benefits - only the copyright industry. I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is some deep corruption there.

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Suppose I have a fantastic idea for a company: I start importing BAIC Beijing BJ90s to Germany, then I glue a new star-in-a-circle badge onto them and sell them.

Mercedes-Benz decides that I shouldn't do this, and gets a court injunction to stop me. Volkswagen thinks my company is hilarious, and decides to continue importing cars on my behalf. They don't actually do the badge-gluing -- I have to do that in a third location -- but they are more than willing to perform the actual import.

Should the court prevent VW from participating in the scheme? If they should, why is that different from the Cloudflare case?

Do you want a data confiscation regime along national borders? Because this reasoning leads to that.

It doesn't matter whether the people want it. It's only a matter of time until it happens.

I would like the rule of law to applies to all industries equally. I am mostly unconvinced by the special pleading of the technology industry. I am willing to be convinced, however!

> I would like the rule of law to applies to all industries equally.

The reality of universal punishment eventually degrades into two scenarios.

1) is that rigorous enforcement eventually erodes for the powerful or

2) it's encouraged by the powerful as they can best afford the consequences.

I'm no legal expert but one obvious difference is that you're talking about trademark rather than copyright infringement.

Why is it VW's problem what you do with the car after they sell it to you? Surely the court should go after you?

A few years ago before they changed the liability laws you wouldn't find free wifi anywhere because they would be liable for anything. So this means places you would normally get free wifi didn't. It's been quite nice having free wifi in public places since the law has changed.

There is actually a Chinese solution to this which you wouldn't prefer at all. Legally every place who provide free wifi will need you to do sms verification with your smartphone, and record your ip with your smartphone number (which in China is connected to your identity). Then they need not worry about liability, because if anything goes wrong, they can tell the police exactly who you are.

If you want both privacy and liability, it seems indeed only you can do is to be harsh on larger entities like cafe shops who provide free wifi.

> In this case, the Court established that CDN services can be liable but drew the line at DNS resolvers.

Imho this a misunderstanding of paragraph 9.1 of the Telemediengesetz. The paragraph only forces caching providers to remove or block content once the original content has been blocked or removed.

Wouldn't that interpretation work itself out in a number of hours? CDNs are usually just a hot cache no?

If the web server sets an Expires-At header with a date far in the future, none of the rechecking headers like etag, and the CDN endpoint isn't pressed for storage (or the site is requested enough to not be evicted), why would the CDN stop serving it?

Cloudflare makes this a feature, to continue serving your website even if your server is down.

If Cloudflare provides a caching proxy, it isn't really known where the original content is hosted.

They can subpoena Cloudflare to find out.

It used to be like that but these days you can get free internet with no strings attached at fast food restaurants like McDonalds.

They carved out a special exemption from the law for free wifi.

I live in the EU. I don't think you can get a SIM card or a home-internet-connection without of ID or Passport (if you are a foreigner). Unless you got a cafe/hotel/restaurant/neighbor and you steal their wifi you are correct - I don't think you can have an internet connection what cannot be traced back to you.

Last time I heard, prepaid data SIM cards were a thing, so I guess you could just get a second-hand one?

You can either order them preregistered from ebay or your local slightly shady phone resale store. It's also likely possible (though i havent tried) to use eSim and global providers like airalo.com to get one without enforced controlled registration (unlikely that they check, specially if you register via proxy).

And lastly, especially if you live in west german you can just take a train to the netherlands and by a sim there, no registration required.

Cellphone networks are not required to support unlimited roaming within the EU, although there are some basic roaming requirements.

You can get prepaid data SIM (I think also regular but not 100%) without ID in at least some EU countries. And they work across the EU usually

They will work but you are at risk of the provider cutting you off for "abusing roaming" and I'm not sure if they can also sue you to recover their roaming costs. The EU cellphone network isn't integrated between different countries - roaming works the same as roaming from the EU to the USA, besides also having some consumer fairness laws.

Most of them do not even come with roaming plans. If you want roaming you need something like a >10€ recharge to activate a plan with roaming enabled.

I don't think this is true anymore. Since 2017 the "at home" roaming works in the EU. It's a bit funny around prepaid SIMs, but I'm almost certain that it's just a cap on the price of data around €2/gb. That sounds like a lot, but my carrier plan is honestly not far off that price. (£25/mo for 12GB data)

It is true, I am on such a prepaid SIM plan where I pay 5€ and get like 1000 minutes and 30Gb of data with it, plus bonuses. But it doesn't include roaming. There is a subscription plan starting at 7€/mo, also without roaming, however it provides less flexibility than prepaid. When I go abroad I change my plan to one that includes roaming and costs 15€/3 weeks. Other operators have prepaid roaming plans for 11€.

£25 for 12Gb of data would be ripoff here, unless it's roaming data.

> £25 for 12Gb of data would be ripoff here, unless it's roaming data.

EE [0] are one of the bigger carriers here, and the only ones with decent coverage where I live, this is their list of plans. You can get cheaper, but it often comes with limited speeds.

[0] https://ee.co.uk/mobile/sim-only-deals

Wow, that'a expensive. I checked my prepay plan and I'm actually getting 150Gb and 2000 minutes for 5€. No roaming though. But the EU will regulate that some day, like they did with bank wire fees.

At least in Germany, you can, but it's still tied to an ID, so you'd need to find someone who's willing to sell it and potentially get in trouble. When you buy a prepaid SIM in the supermarkets, one of the first things you have to do when installing it in your phone is do some kind of ID verification, either with the digital functionality in your ID or via some app like Postident which will do a face and ID verification.

Someone should check whether the app can be bypassed by DNS, ICMP, etc.

Prepaid data sims will not activate until you either talk to a store employee and show them your ID, or use a service online to videocall with somebody and show them your ID.

Not continental Europe, but 3 weeks ago I bought a sandwitch, drink and a Vodaphone sim card at Dublin international, right outside Terminal 2. I paid cash for it. Came with 20GB of data. I never tried it, but apparently you can buy topup vouchers at retailers also for cash.

I converted my number to a bill-pay last week, and I had to submit proof of residence for that. I think they also asked for proof of ID (passport) and proof of residence status.

Didn't they ask you for your boarding pass? Far fetched, but it could be the reason they didn't ask you anything at the airport.

They said they were outside the terminal. So, I imagine it is like here in Amsterdam where there is an entire shopping mall outside.

There's a WH Smith in T1 in dublin that sells prepaid sims.

> I never tried it, but apparently you can buy topup vouchers at retailers also for cash.

You can, yep. We do it once a month for my partner's mum who would be considered "unbanked".

That's actually where I got my sim. So I went out of T1, and not T2 then.

UK isn't in the EU anymore, but here you've always been able to get anonymous pay-as-you-go SIM cards at the shop and top them up with cash. We don't even have a national ID card. If you sign up for a contract, which is cheaper, you do need to provide some proof of identity though.

SIM cards are associated with a cell tower, which is located in a population, so your anonymous card is tied to your image in any of the billions of CCTV monitors which track citizens as they move

Moving the goalposts!

Claim was "you can't get a SIM card without a passport or ID" which was disputed.

I live in France. It is very easy to get a prepaid card without any id.

In the Netherlands you can get a prepay SIM with no ID. I have a friend that visits for a month or so every so often and buy one then.

I'm Dutch, and can walk into pretty much any supermarket to buy a prepaid sim card without identification and pay with cash.

In Finland you can go to any corner store to get a 300mbps 4G SIM or even 600 mbps 5G SIM and use it as your home internet in a LTE modem (which is very common)

This is almost correct. Most EU countries require that you register your SIM card with your ID, before using it. This was a very controversial move from the EU, taken to the European Court of Human Rights, where it was given the green light [0].

Only a handful of EU countries didn't follow through with the ruling [1]

Landline is a bit different, as you need proof of residence to contract it anyway.

[0] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-200442%...}

[1] https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_P...

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