09:55 <whitequark> ooh finally some sanity https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2016/05/finally-germany-abolishes-open-wi-fi-liability-users-behavior/

10:29 <wpwrak> now they just have to get rid of the "abmahnung", and we could welcome them back to civilization :)

11:26 <whitequark> huh

11:45 <wpwrak> whitequark: you know that "abmahnung" thing ? it works like this: if you see something that seems illegal and you're entitled to legally act against it, e.g., if some of your rights are being violated or if, say, a competitor is (supposedly) getting an unfair advantage by not following some regulation you're bound to as well, then you can send them a "cease and desist" letter - and charge for this service.

11:46 <wpwrak> so instead of having to send a friendly letter reminding them to be good citizen, or else, you can already collect money. the idea is (nominally) that this would just compensate your effort/costs and reduce the number of issues that go to court.

11:47 <wpwrak> the real-life consequence is of course that a lot of lawyers realized that this is a license to print money. all they need to do is find some trivial violation of some regulation, then find someone who is entitled to sue, then work with them to send that c&d letter on their behalf

11:50 <wpwrak> those violations can be slightly incorrect company details on the web side, incorrect use of units in produce descriptions (e.g., 23 in screen instead of 58 cm), and so on.

11:51 <wpwrak> and of course, any sort of copyright infringement is pure gold. in many cases it wouldn't be worth the effort to actually sue, but with these c&d letters the numbers work

11:51 <whitequark> yeah, just looked it up in the wiki

11:51 <whitequark> enwiki says basically what you just did

12:25 <DocScrutinizer05> ((germany-abolishes-open-wi-fi-liability)) not exactly right I guess. for now they only retired the idiotic "you must protect your WLAN against unauthorized use" rule

12:25 <whitequark> oh

12:26 <DocScrutinizer05> I guess they still can rape you when somethign bad happens over your internet access,

12:26 <DocScrutinizer05> maybe you can actually point to your access protocols now and tell them the MAC of the offender, to get rid of liability

12:27 <whitequark> MACs are trivial to change...

12:27 <DocScrutinizer05> sure

12:27 <whitequark> and they're also very not unique

12:28 <DocScrutinizer05> but that's all you can reasonably provide from any protols

12:28 <whitequark> iirc about 1-2% of MAC addresses in any 1000 selection will have duplicates

12:28 <whitequark> based on some real-world datasets I've seen

12:29 <DocScrutinizer05> basically it's probably sufficient to prove there been *any* unknown user on your WLAN at that time

12:29 <whitequark> I don't see how that proves anything. you'll need logs that can't be trivially spoofed

12:29 <DocScrutinizer05> so far it's been you who paid all the fines since you couldn't argue that it wasn't you who offended any copyright or whatever

12:30 <DocScrutinizer05> whitequark: it's not about what *we* consider reasonable

12:30 <DocScrutinizer05> this is legalese

12:30 <whitequark> judges are not idiots

12:30 <DocScrutinizer05> yes they are

12:31 <DocScrutinizer05> for finding evidence, just review all court decisions around WLAN et al of the last 10 years or so

12:32 <DocScrutinizer05> people got to pay C&D and copyright royalties for allegedly participating in a peer2peer sharing while they evidently were in holiday and nobody at home

12:33 <whitequark> and courts ruled that they did break law?

12:33 <DocScrutinizer05> yes

12:33 <whitequark> hm

12:33 <DocScrutinizer05> not criminal laws but civil laws

12:33 <whitequark> well, you know, I did run a torrent client in background without turning off my PC

12:33 <whitequark> so I can actually see that happening

12:34 <DocScrutinizer05> meh

12:34 <DocScrutinizer05> the judge had no idea about the technical details

12:35 <DocScrutinizer05> judges are as uneducated and stupid when it comes to internet as any random average joe is

12:37 <DocScrutinizer05> thus this new law is pretty relevant,particularly when it comes to judges deciding if or if not you're "guilty"

12:38 <DocScrutinizer05> so far you were guolty no matter what, now you're generally not guilty when you can argue that it's not been you who actually did the download

12:39 <DocScrutinizer05> to do so, you don't necessarily need to provide the name of legit MAC address of the real offender

12:39 <DocScrutinizer05> s/of/or/

12:39 <qi-bot> DocScrutinizer05 meant: "to do so, you don't necessarily need to provide the name or legit MAC address or the real orfender"

12:40 <DocScrutinizer05> this implicit /g in that bot's sed function sucks big time

12:43 <whitequark> unrelated; did you have any success with solvespace UI since then?

12:43 <whitequark> I think I fixed all your kwin woes...

12:58 <wpwrak> alas, the text window still doesn't stay on top in fvwm. i can work around it by keeping the virtual screen empty and lowering GW whenever TW has been lowered (i.e., on startup or when a modal dialog pops up), though

12:59 <whitequark> wpwrak: yeah. set_transient_for worked for KDE, window type utility worked for Unity (and I think gnome too)

13:00 <whitequark> I suspect that trying to force-lower/raise it will just break things for someone else

13:00 <wpwrak> now you just have to find whatever magic combination works with fvwm ;-)

13:01 <wpwrak> but given how difficult all this is, i wonder if you may be using a mechanism that isn't really suitable

13:01 <whitequark> I think fvwm is just broken

13:01 <whitequark> it doesn't respect the above flag, the transent for property...

13:02 <whitequark> the utility window type, too

13:04 <whitequark> well, I guess it doesn't have to respect the above flag as it's discouraged to set it in the program by very ICCCM

13:14 <wpwrak> yes. btw, the same happens in gimp. but there i'm not even sure if the intention is to really have these subwindows above the main window all the time.

13:19 <DocScrutinizer51> whitequark: (solvespace) it worked, both windows come up in sync

13:28 <whitequark> cool

13:50 <DocScrutinizer51> whitequark: what did you patch?

13:51 <DocScrutinizer51> in short IRC compatible

14:04 <wpwrak> now, let's break something ...

15:10 <wpwrak> the solution for fvwm: Style "*" RaiseTransient, LowerTransient, StackTransientParent

15:12 <wpwrak> now i wish i knew why fvwm thinks it can't print full error message. all it does it say "<<ERRROR>>". ah well, it didn't bother me in the last one or two decades, so it shan't bother me now