Hurray for Lawyers

So, I am not allowed to write "GEZ Brief". I need to write "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird". I am all in favour to only allow completely correct law-speak whenever anything is published. No longer these spongy formulations, if GEZ-Brief actually means the "Informationsschreiben der GEZ und/oder Schreiben, mit dessen Hilfe der gesetzliche Auskunftsanspruch des § 4 Abs. 5 RGebStV geltend gemacht wird" or actually only means a love letter or anything else in letter form send by an "Beauftragtendienst der öffentlich rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten oder Rundfunkgebührenbeauftrag".#

BTW: that's the same guys who annoy the hell out of you with letters and threats if you don't confess that you have a TV. I am paying my TV fees, but nonetheless they sent my parents (sic!) about 20 letters that I have to pay my TV fees for the TV I have at my parents home for sure (I don't). They only stopped after we threatend to call a lawyer. Public Broadcasting Service Mafia, of the worst kind...

[Edit] Nice article from jetzt.de

Moving slowly to the 21st century...

Today a lot of laws got passed by the Bundestag. Inbetween them is §202 E-StGB, which makes software illegal which has the purpose of attacking other computers. This includes nmap, ping and other usefull network tools, because they can be used to figure out weak points in your IT. It also includes all the tools any decent IT security person would use to check the systems he is responsible for.

Also passed got the second bucket of the Urheberrechtsnovelle, basically the copy-right law. From now on you can only access electronic publications from your university's library on special computers. The electronic subito is no longer allowed. To access research result's which were funded by tax money, published with tax money paid to the publisher, peer reviewed by tax money paid scientists (who don't get anything for this review), you now need to spend even more tax money to access. Elsevier and others will get rich, science will go boink.

Hurray to our well informed and competent politicians. [Note to those who can't understand German: it's politicians saying: "Internet, yeah, I think I have heard of it..."]

Spam

Since some time I recieve quite often spam originating from portuguese adresses, most of them have some legal garbage in them that it would be allowed to spam according to european law. Well, it ain't. Actually, there's a portuguese law (Decreto-Lei n.º 7/2004, Art. 22.1) against it, which implements a european directive. So I tried to find where to complain, but unfortunately the website of the portuguese telecom legislative organ is an unbearable burocratic moloch. What I did find was the address of the OECD Task Force on Spam, so I sent a mail to them.

Today I received a mail from them, stating that they received my communication and are analysing it. It was a simple question: "To whom should I complain?"... If they need a Task Force to analyse this, I fear it will take some time till spam stops. Anyway, let's hope they can do something.

I also complained to the sender of the spam, which is a real estate agency franchising from cascais, which I hope won't do any buisiness anymore soon. I asked them to remove my mail from their databases and send me an acknowledgment that they did so. Up to now they didn't...

Maybe this is a little bean-counterish, but if I can find out the sender of spam, I complain and send them a link to the law which forbids spamming. It won't help, but it makes me feel a bit better.