In addition to tax stuff there's a card you can get in most states, issued by cities/districts based on certain criteria, like doing a certain amount of hours per week of volunteer work, that will give you a discount or free entry to museums, pools, movie theaters, events.. There's listings online of all the institutions and businesses that give a discount.

For this, and for the criminal justice use case, it seems to me that it isn't possible for "work on open source" to receive this kind of formal recognition. Anyone is free to self-certify that they're working on an open-source project headed by, and exclusively contributed to by, themselves.

You'd need to formally recognize open-source projects that the German state approves of, on a case-by-case basis.

And even then you have questions like "If Hans Reiser is sentenced to community service for killing his wife, can he satisfy that by working on reiserfs? How is that different from sentencing him to no punishment?"

the punishment argument makes no sense. it is already a problem if someone volunteers in any capacity and then commits a crime. sometimes community service is not the right punishment.

Community service is not supposed to be a punishment but rather an opportunity to offset wrongs done by doing more good than the average person. If someone was already doing good deeds before then that is not an issue. If anything, courts already consider past good deeds when determining sentencing.

It's obviously not something that is an appropriate remedy for all crimes.

True. It would need to be something associated with a registered non-profit organization/NGO. But isn't that already the case with other types of volunteer work?

But in that case, what is this petition hoping to achieve?

Maybe this would have helped with something like Mastodon losing non-profit status? https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/04/mastodon-forms-new-u.s...

To expand on that, those websites mostly operate on random volunteers self hosting a (starting price) fairly cheap receiver and antenna with an open source stack that feeds the ADS-B data to the website operator in exchange for nothing or free "premium" benefits.

The spoofer could have just sent them fake location information drawing an image using latitude, longitude and altitude for color (in the default view flight paths have different colors based on the altitude of the plane at that point in time).

They could have built an antenna and actually broadcast this data, but that would be a lot more effort and most likely some form of crime.

As a pilot I really hope it's the former. Broadcasting spoofed traffic at minimum would be confusing and distracting to both pilots and ATC.

That data is already available. Including torrents.

https://planet.openstreetmap.org/

Perfect. Now all they need to do is set up the redirect.

Every bot is doing something on behalf of a human. Now that LLMs can churn out half-assed bot scripts every "look I installed Arch Linux and ohmyzsh" script kiddie has bots too.

Bots aren't going anywhere.

"Use the web the way it was over 10 years ago plox" isn't going to do it.

Their data is freely available to download. There are weekly dumps of the entire planet and several sources for partial data. There's no need for most legitimate use cases to scrape their API.

So problem is someone is stupid enough scraping without realizing they can just download 100gb at once?

And there are so many of such idiots that it's overwhelming their servers?

Something doesn't math here.

That's exactly the case. It's been an issue for a while.

It's a universal setting. You have to enable it per third-party app, though. You get to choose whether you want to see them listed with WhatsApp chats or in a separate folder

30% of households living in single family homes is not insignificant. In the villages outside the large cities there's plenty of space to charge your car at home and an increasing amount of solar on the roof.

Not being able to access the web interface where you have to manually upload a new certificate due to HSTS and the old certificate having expired a couple hours ago...

I've been told that since the privatization, the funding was split between DB paying for maintenance while the state provided funds for replacement and new lines. Allegedly this provided an incentive to let things deteriorate until they needed replacement.

Projects are planned, coordinated and funds allocated far in advance, so if the government can't agree on a budget and projects are shelved or canned, restarting the process causes a significant delay.

To clarify: Deutsche Bahn is still 100% government owned. It operates both its train service and the railroad infrastructure in fully owned subsidiaries.

And that's exactly what's not reflected in management success metrics. They are basically incentivized to steal from their owners through systematic neglect, what could possibly go wrong.

I think it's only possible to understand German politics in two ways: either nobody in politics understands incentives, or they understand incentives much better than the voters and are fully exploiting this fact.

No need to place it anywhere on the incompetence/malice spectrum when it can be perfectly occamed with design by committee.

Same situation in Sweden.

It's a running joke in Stockholm that tracks, trains, signals, and people are owned/employed by 4 different entities

They can, but the list of "if..." and "it depends..." is much longer and complicated, especially when getting to the part how the obtained information may be used

Last time I had enabled RCS I received a flood of "DHL needs your address" and "Mom I have a new phone number" scams from the UK and the Philippines. So far I'm not aware of anything useful I've missed out on by not having it enabled.