The security white paper of that luca app is available in English, if someone wants to have a look:
Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
111–120 of 164 posts
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#112For context: - We are talking about a file of 200 lines of code. - It's replaceable functionality that isn't exactly rocket science. - The issue was fixed within a few hours. [Edit: replaced "error" with "issue" to avoid implicit judgement and establish a common baseline]
When I was taking schooling at university a person was busted for 5 lines of code.
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most common bribes I see is when I go to some countries and I am expected to pay an undisclosed fee to get better service. My anti-bribery training mentioned how these are often quite normal, and dressed up in terms like "facilitation fee", or "tip", but that if I were to pay such a fee I'd be breaking UK law.
Interesting! So you can't tip restaurant servers legally? Most point of sale machines for restaurants ask you to select a tip from a list of several standard optiins that usually puts 20% in the middle to make it seem normal, and like 15% is reserved as a mild complaint. So its not exactly undiaclosed, you can guess pretty well what it will be.
The UK act says I (P) committe an offence if
(a)P offers, promises or gives a financial or other advantage to another person, and (b)P intends the advantage— (i)to induce a person to perform improperly a relevant function or activity, or (ii)to reward a person for the improper performance of such a function or activity.
The definition of improper broadly boils down to
> the test of what is expected is a test of what a reasonable person in the United Kingdom would expect in relation to the performance of the type of function or activity concerned.
Tipping at starbucks, or tipping a barman, or tipping a hotel member holding open a door, is certainly not what a reasonable person in the United Kingdom would expect.
"Tipping" is quite normal in the US. "Tipping" is quite normal in many African countries too. If you don't tip, you'll struggle to get any service (when you're running a project or whatever). It's a whole can of worms when normal activities in a country require a small payment.
Note also that if I tell my local project manager to make it happen, I'm on the hook for it if he "bribes" someone just as much as if I did it myself.
I'm sure the intent of the law is to prevent UK citizens from paying money to bypass bureaucracy (I had a very painful process importing some equipment at an airport once, they did not want to give me a receipt for the $1500 I wanted (and was supposed to) pay, they just wanted $50 to waive me through, or to stop me from paying an official $200k to let me build a pipe through a village, or whatever.
However it also means it's harder to make their project run smoothly in Guatemala ("Oh yes you can unload your lorry of course, this paperwork seems fine, but unfortunatly I need to check with my manager and he's currently out of town for 3 days. cough."), and means that you'll be subjected to a lengthy search at an airport (just long enough to miss your flight) for no reason unless you donate to their orphan fund or whatever.
I struggle to see the difference between that (which wouldn't be the case in the UK) and tipping a postman (which again I've never seen in the UK). The former I assume is illegal, the latter not, but it's not clear.
By enshrining English exceptionalism in UK law does seems rather off to me -- basically "treat all countries as if they were Britain, salute the Queen, and up the East India Company"
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely. Why is everyone acting like this is some high conspiracy or even blaming the entire project - this was probably some lazy dev that didn't want to deal with the hassle of including the licence and just copy pasted the class. I used to do this when I was learning to code, I often reimplemented stuff already available for learning and would just copy paste large chunks. I didn't publish any work back then and I…
> Why is everyone acting like this is some high conspiracy Because everyone here is a coder and puts a lot of effort into their work, and doesn't want it get stolen. We put a lot of effort into the Open Source projects we publish. Some of us are very generous and publish things to the public domain, but most of us at least want attribution for our work. If you copy & paste code, strip the license, claim it's your cod…
>If you copy & paste code, strip the license, claim it's your code, and sell it for money, we consider you the scum of the earth. That's just not something that decent people do.
Meh - I'd speculate it's a result of an underpaid coder with too much work - I've seen these kinds of projects before - people with connections in the public sector get the contract and then basically hire the lowest cost developers available.
> Just like a musician is expected to know that they need clearance for samples, or journalists know they need permission for publishing a photo, a programmer is expected to know that they need a license for reusing other people's code.
And yet those get violated all the time, even in big time publications and by big time artists.
I'm not defending the guy who did it - he did something wrong, but they corrected it and malice attributed to project seems misplaced.
On the flip side I think this could be handled better industry wide - like we already have security vulnerability scanning tools bundled with major code hosting platforms, they should probably figure out a way to do copyright infringement warnings .
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting! So you can't tip restaurant servers legally? Most point of sale machines for restaurants ask you to select a tip from a list of several standard optiins that usually puts 20% in the middle to make it seem normal, and like 15% is reserved as a mild complaint. So its not exactly undiaclosed, you can guess pretty well what it will be.
The UK act says I (P) committe an offence if (a)P offers, promises or gives a financial or other advantage to another person, and (b)P intends the advantage— (i)to induce a person to perform improperly a relevant function or activity, or (ii)to reward a person for the improper performance of such a function or activity. The definition of improper broadly boils down to > the test of what is expected is a test of what…
Does it matter that the tip is given after the service insteaf of before? My kids yoga teacher has a "pay what you can or what it is worth to you" scale so disadvantaged kids can come. I think of tips kind of like that.
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely. Why is everyone acting like this is some high conspiracy or even blaming the entire project - this was probably some lazy dev that didn't want to deal with the hassle of including the licence and just copy pasted the class. I used to do this when I was learning to code, I often reimplemented stuff already available for learning and would just copy paste large chunks. I didn't publish any work back then and I…
People see this as an act of either carelessness or malevolence which both is unacceptable in an application that collects and stores very personal data on a large scale.
I think you have unrealistic expectations of applications developed for public sector - I'm usually surprised if they do core of intended functionality correctly.
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#117Oh the irony. The LUCA app has been co-initiated and financed by Smudo [0], a famous German rapper. He was a supporter of Metallica suing Napster back in 2000 for copyright violation [1]. [0] https://www.chip.de/news/Kontaktverfolgung-mit-Luca-App-von-... [1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Smudo-vs-Napster-Da-...
> a famous German rapper I can understand in the abstract that of course you could rap in German, but it's quite another to encounter evidence of this in the wild so to speak. Having investigated further, I must say it's probably unfair against Gemany to not include the adjective old in the above statement, as Smudo (or at least the group he's in) is of early 90's vintage.
some of the biggest (tickets sold, streams etc) german speaking music acts are rappers
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#118Oh the irony. The LUCA app has been co-initiated and financed by Smudo [0], a famous German rapper. He was a supporter of Metallica suing Napster back in 2000 for copyright violation [1]. [0] https://www.chip.de/news/Kontaktverfolgung-mit-Luca-App-von-... [1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Smudo-vs-Napster-Da-...
> a famous German rapper I can understand in the abstract that of course you could rap in German, but it's quite another to encounter evidence of this in the wild so to speak. Having investigated further, I must say it's probably unfair against Gemany to not include the adjective old in the above statement, as Smudo (or at least the group he's in) is of early 90's vintage.
I'm surprised at your surprise. What languages do you feel it's appropriate to rap in?
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (you will never see a bribe in everyday life) That's not true, you can see lot of small bribes in normal day-to-day transactions. Almost every single technician I met (for internet installation, electricity, washing machine installation, etc. Even insurance brokers) offered me to pay them cash directly to get some benefits or falsify some recorded data.
Er... do you mean offering to work "off the record" without paying taxes for it ("Schwarzarbeit")? That't tax evasion, not corruption, but yeah, that's pretty common, even in Germany.
No, I mean someone offering you to give them some cash to ignore some rules (or not report what they should), or to actually change recorded data in a way that benefits you. A clear case: insurance brokers who offer you to change some records so that you can get a private insurance in cases where you shouldn't.
Re: Copyright infringement by German contact tracing app
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not too surprising IMHO, I would expect this to be more visible to foreigners. I myself have never seen any type of low-level corruption in my home country but I learnt that also happens quite often, it's just not too visible if you don't know where to look at. I'm not from Germany, and do have a foreign name, I guess that may play a role.
I wouldn't call this corruption, this sounds more like some one tried to fuck you over.
I mean, accepting a bribe or offering one is a way to fuck someone over.
But it's not "you have to pay more". More like "just so you know, I have access to this internal tool, you pay me now and this thing that isn't supposed to be possible due to your situation is now done".