Shame

Today is a sad day to be a German. The parliament passed the "Child Porn Access Complication Law" [German, PDF]. The federal police will develop a secret list of websites with child porn. It will force national access providers to DNS-resolve the porn site names to an IP of one of their servers. People will see a STOPP! sign, and that's the end of it.

This is sad for a number of reasons:

1. There is no judge involved, and the police operates in secrecy. Talk about division of power and accountability of police action. That politicians in Germany can pass such a law is beyond belief.
   
2. There was a huge petition of 130.000 people warning about the re-dawn of censorship in Germany. The politicians just ignored it. (For comparison: The next-largest petition to the national parliament has about 5000 supporters.)
   
3. The law doesn't actually bother to persecute the pornographers. That would be way too expensive. Also, the access attempts are logged and reported anonymized to the police. A German compromise.
   
4. The law does not actually prevent access to the sites. It only requires a change in domain name resolution (i.e., the translation of www.bka.de to 62.156.153.38). Someone really looking for child porn can just use the number directly.
   An international DNS provider such as OpenDNS will provide it. On Linux doing
   sudo echo "nameserver 208.67.222.222" > /etc/resolve.conf
   will prevent from ever being redirected to a police STOPP! sign. The politicians actually knew that and that's why they called it "access complication law" (meaning: it's complicated to them). It remains to be seen when and how these huge gaping loopholes will be closed.
   
5. The most interesting question of course is if the law will remain about child porn only, or also about violence, terrorism, politically dangerous opinions, etc.
   
6. The ineffectiveness of the effort and the grave violation of democratic principles makes this an enormously stupid law.
   

The last hope is the Supreme Court where the law will go next. These are actually smart people, and because they don't need to be re-elected they can act smart, too.

UPDATE. Bruce Schneier on why Technology Shouldn't Give Big Brother a Head Start

Sechselaeuten

Today was Sechselaeuten. A half holiday. Zurich was in traditional middle-age dress on the streets. A snow man (the Boegg) was burned. It exploded after 9min. This means we'll have a nice summer!

Swiss

The other day there was a discussion on what can be called "typically Swiss". The mountains, the cows, the chocolate, etc. There was no real agreement reached but shortly afterwards I found this note in the local tabloid 20minuten.

Awards for Taxpayers Among punctual tax payers the town Gansingen (Argau) raffles attractive prices. "The main price is a week in a hotel in Berner Oberland -- for the whole family.", so the spokesman of the town Martin Steinacher. The people of Gansingen shall so be motivated to pay their taxes earlier than usual. The small town has 680 taxpayers.

Economy

Spring Break

Back from vacation. One week. Cheap flight. Sun. Beaches. Friends.

UBS

UBS is Switzerland's biggest bank. It lost heavily in the subprime crisis and its aftershocks, needed government assistance, and now had to pay $780 million to the U.S. government because UBS systematically helped U.S. clients to commit tax fraud. According to U.S. officials about 20.000 clients withdrew approximately $20 billion from taxation.

For the first time ever information about 300 clients was transferred from Switzerland to the IRS. This means the Swiss bank secret is no more. There is a huge outcry in the press, naming the data transfer (not the money transfer) "illegal", calling for a new (i.e., legal) strategy for Swiss banking. It's all very interesting.

The worst taste showed a local yellow press paper with a picture of Obama: "Yes, I can half the U.S. deficit by 2012 - thanks to the many billions that we'll get out of the Swiss banks."

New Years

After Christmas I've visited Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Upsalla. Watched fireworks with friends.