The article makes it sound like there was some ringing, but instead of looking out of the window or checking the door the residents called the police - probably because they were afraid of kids from across the road, which is a framing that their source, the very shitty Bild, just _loves_.
What really happened is that the ringing happened multiple times, residents looked out of the window and out of the door but couldn't find anyone, and only then called the police. More trustworthy sources than the Bild do not mention any abandoned house over the road, just that they assumed it must be someone who does the ringing, which is a very sensible assumption.
I suspect that German media only picked up on it because they could end their articles with the pun that "the perpetrator has been turned into a slug", which is a direct translation of a proverb which means that the perpetrator has been dressed down.
I had a report from a business of possible unauthorized remote access in a point of sale. A touchscreen system was found logged in by an unknown admin overnight. There had been weird reports of the mouse cursor moving on its own.
After a lengthy quarantine and investigation that turned up nothing, I decided to go see this machine myself for context. While I was standing there taking everything in, a fly landed on the dirty touchscreen on a smear and tripped an on-screen button as it rubbed its legs together.
Everything clicked - it was just a fly and eventually some digging revealed someone had carelessly left an admin user available: ID 2, no password, which the fly inadvertently tapped into the touchscreen login UI with two lucky clicks.
To think that previously upon hearing "system so insecure it could be penetrated by a fly" I would have thought it a ridiculous hyperbole
"I thought it might be the kids from the abandoned house over the road,” Lisa, 30, a shop sales assistant told the tabloid Bild.
There should be those sorts of houses everywhere, or the feral children would roam in street gangs, steal pies from window sills, and ring doorbells.
the way the world economy's going I could see Oliver Twist becoming relevant again.
Please sir - can I have some more...screen time?
no go and play with your friends... oh yeah thats right they live miles away and the only way to get hold of them is via a screen but because of hysterical adults (who decry the ills of social media from social media) theyve banned me from using it because it will do general detriment to me much like TV was feared to cause, much like books were feared to cause. This time is no different, hysterical parents
Well, maybe it actually didn't work out so well because in a society where information can travel so fast, we have more and more people thinking hoaxes are real because they've been trained to do it... I'm not saying there is a conspiracy behind this, just that maybe we are ignoring the bad outcomes and mark them as "bah, it's normal, we always behaved like this"
> This time is no different, hysterical parents
How do you know this?
because it it were so toxic to health the parents themselves would stop using them
This seems to forget the difference between adults will fully-developed brains, and children who are still forming. I hope you'd agree with the principle through this analogy: an adult who looks at pornography would not want to show their child pornography.
> I hope you'd agree with the principle through this analogy: an adult who looks at pornography would not want to show their child pornography.
but its nothing like pornography. were talking about "screen time" which is a vague generic idea, just the same as "social media" encompasses pretty much any major tech companies website/app instead of actual mediums for socializing like IRC, forums etc that were around for decades prior just never called that
But you agree with the principle that parents doing things they don't let their kids do is not evidence that the thing would be fine for their kids.
Who knows if that interview even happened. Bild makes up stuff all the time, or bends the truth to make it more interesting or fit their narrative better.
My ass would be offended if so wiped it with a BILD "news"paper.
Im the world of tabloids that’s a profitable allegation.
[deleted]
Actually, what they mean is squatters. In many parts of Europe -especially germany and spain- it's quite normal for 16 to 25 year olds to squat abandoned buildings and live there until the police kicks them out. These kids tend to get intoxicated and do stupid stuff. Like ringing a bell in the middle of the night. The squatting thing is seen by many as a measure against speculation on living space and at the same time giving young kids a cheap place to live and get on their feet. In most places in Europe the squatting is semi-allowed because of remnants of old roman law. It's quite fascinating and -in my opinion- a tragedy that it is disappearing.
Where do you get all that from? Except for famous cases like the Rote Flora in Hamburg or i guess Berlin in general there's not a lot of squatting going on in Germany, or is there?
In Germany squatting laws dictate you have to openly live at a place for 30 years and the property needs to be registered to your name in order for you to be able to claim ownership.So here it can hardly be a measure anyone can take to get a cheap place to live.
I have several friends who have squatted abandoned buildings in Europe. I have other friends who live in otherwise abandoned buildings under agreement with the owner to prevent squatters breaking in to the building. When I moved into my house several years back it looked abandoned (because it had been before buying it), and when I invited friends over for the first time some assumed I was squatting there upon arrival. Squatting is really not an unusual thing. Squatters aren't squatting in order to claim ownership. Often they're students looking for a cheap place to stay.
No, there is not a lot of squatting going on in Germany. AFAIK, the only EU countries with rather active squatting scenes are Italy and Spain, but my information is probably 20 years out of date.
Same as in Spain. I know multiple cases of "okupas", not of what OP describes.
Drunk kids unable to afford housing, in a society where owners of property would rather let it get run down instead of develop it or sell it, and where it's expected that the homeless youth will harass their neighbors, sounds like a failure of society.
The young people shouldn't have to squat and abandoned buildings shouldn't be allowed to just sit and rot.
> in a society where owners of property would rather let it get run down instead of develop it or sell it,
Nobody would "rather" do this. They are incentivized to, typically as an Nth order consequence of public policy.
you think nobody runs out of money, or finds themselves up shit creek? what about inherited properties that you dont have the money, time or ability to renovate and youre waiting for someone else to buy it from you?
You are making too many assumptions. Some squatters are the homeless, some are young-ish adherents of the far left, for whom this is a lifestyle choice.
The most famous Prague squat, Klinika in Žižkov, was full of blue-haired nepo babies whose parents were well connected politicians or businesspeople. That is also why it was tolerated for a fairly long time, and it was always able to summon a crowd of friendly journalists whenever someone tried to empty the building.
(Note that this is something that actual poor people rarely are able to - but lifestyle squatters who studied the same faculty before dropping out can do easily, as they still have the phone numbers of their graduated friends).
The common feature is freewheeling attitudes to drinking and drugs. Most homeless shelters or cheaper landlords won't tolerate too much consumption on the premises, or even have a dry policy. In a squat, anything goes.
A friend of ours is an old lady who needed to spend a few weeks in the hospital. While she was there, her house was squatted and removing the squatters took a bit more than a year during which time she was effectively homeless. So I am glad that the laws are gradually being tightened against squatters
Yep, a very common story. Or someone whose parents pass away, they take a few months to put affairs in order and start selling the house, only to find out the house is now being squatted and they have a nightmare to deal with.
But somehow people much prefer the “bohemian squatters sticking it to greedy capitalistic landlords who don’t use their property” narrative.
Apparently in France it’s common enough that you can hire people, effectively goons, to harass and intimidate them into leaving.
I think it was in Andy Mcnab's autobiography, where there was a story of a British SAS (Elite special forces) soldier who came home from an overseas tour to find squatters in his house. Apparently he sent flowers to them while they were in hospital.
Be careful though when hiring goons, you might get involved with the wrong kind of people.
did you learn about the world from a comic book or something?
It didn't take a year to remove the squatters. In fact, it probably took about 10min.
It took a year to remove the squatters without risk of government violence being applied to the owner.
There's a subtle difference.
What's the point of what you wrote here?
Think about that a little more.
It's not uncommon to be able to illegally do something very quickly that would take longer to do legally. I'm sure most of us are already aware of that.
> The squatting thing is seen by many as a measure against speculation on living space and at the same time giving young kids a cheap place to live and get on their feet.
This is true for abandoned empty buildings. If the owners are not using a building and someone starts to live in there, they are allowed. The idea is that the right to housing is greater than the right to own empty buildings just for speculation.
In cities were housing offering is lacking this is seen as a measure to push speculators to sell or rent their properties.
this was known in the US as "squatter's rights." unfortunately it's mostly vestigial now.
Underage kids that ran from their family should be brought back to the family or into foster care, not live in crack houses, that's not a tragedy, it's progress.
If you're an independent and clever 16 year old you might be better of on your own than in foster care.
There are enough foster care horror stories that I don't think anyone "must" be there.
Young teenagers live in streets and squats are abused a lot. By a lot I mean, massively lot.
That they will do with anyone below 18.
But there are some rules that allow teens above 16 to work in certain jobs and they may be considered adults depending on the circumstances depending on a judge interpretation. Below that age the police will bring the kids to their parents or to a foster home.
You make it sound like a common occurence in Europe. For my country (Germany) it has been only 1000~ buildings in total since the 1970s and I am pretty sure 90% of that has been in Hamburg in Berlin. So no, it's a very unlikely explanation for an abandoned building in rural Bavaria.
So yeah, feral children
[deleted]
Kids hanging around in abandoned houses to smoke or do dumb shit is like a staple of childhoods.
There’s an alternate universe where programmers are fixing slugs because it wasn’t a bug that died in a mainframe transistor
I think that was a relay back then (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/First_Co...). Also, if the climate inside your mainframe is so humid that it attracts slugs, you have bigger problems...
You wouldn't get the same pride in development on your liquid computer if you didn't have to wrestle with some slugs now and then :D
Etymology of "bug" goes back far more than that.
I need to deslug my computer, it's getting sluggish.
A long morning of slugfixes awaits me...
Will you do a hotslug release today?
At least Firehen has released new deslugging tools.
Meh, a month ago slug destroyed a robot lawnmower: https://imgur.com/a/k6guVxi
I’m guessing it was mutually assured destruction.
We had physical buttons for decades. That required a certain amount of deliberate physical action and force by a person to press the doorbell.
Now designers and manufacturers have decided that everyone wants and needs touch sensors.
Sacrifice in the process -
Inadvertent triggers and lack of tactile feedback.
They didn't even decide that we want them, from what I've heard, capacitive "buttons" are simply cheaper as they require not additional parts.
They are cheaper and they pass IPXX requirements on dust/water protection easily. But they seem to be good enough because customers, despite some complaints, keep buying devices with capacitive buttons.
Also, mechanical stuff eventually wears out - at best with good quality ones, the product becomes obsolete before they do. For instance potentiometers [1] used for volume control on stereos rust over time and eventually become unusable. So there's a durability argument too.
In the case of cars, isn't it simply that there is no other option on the market?
Yes, now the cheap cooking stoves have touch interfaces which is an OBVIOUSLY bad idea, much worse even than touch buttons in cars. The expensive professional stoves however...
The touch buttons on my stove are easy to clean, but I think that's the only advantage.
Expensive stoves also have touch screen, just with much better UX.
I didn't realise that it was a touch sensors, and was wondering through the article how on earth a slug was pushing the buttons to bell people, and maybe somehow its slime was conductive enough to get inside and short things?
if you look on the top of its head its got two arm like appendages that it can touch things with, probably did it with those
Those are its eye stalks. I don't imagine pressing with a lot of force on its eyestalks is something a slug likes to do, but then again I haven't asked any yet.
it was ringing the bell somehow, what else could it have been? even a particularly fat slug would have trouble pressing the bell as its vertically aligned.
Still miss the keyboard on my HTC Tilt2
Indeed. Especially as I get older and my accuracy on a virtual touchscreen keyboard gets worse.
It WAS playing ding-dong-ditch, but it couldn't get away fast enough
I have a spider named Billy (Silly Billy) that lives behind my doorbell and occasionally sets off the motion sensors when he ventures out. Thankfully, mine is still the physical push button, so he hasn't managed to ring it yet.
Since slugs are cold-blooded, I wonder if it was captured by the (presumably backlit) doorbell touch panel because of the panel's warmth.
I live in a pretty rough neighborhood - it happens around here a lot.
Teenage slugs causing havoc on a Saturday night after drinking beer in the park.
Slugs aren't known for quick getaways. Did no one check the doorbell before calling the police?
Slugs could probably have beaten the police response time in my country.
You could probably see there was nobody there without going outside and check the doorbell panel. So they would come to the conclusion they were too late to catch the little brat
That still makes it at best a fun story to tell during family dinner, not on international press.
Why is this on hackernews in the first place...
They move a few inches per minute, so it's easy to ignore the irrelevant slug that is nearby but not over the button.
IME they tend to leave a lasting conspicuous shiny trail....
Over the years, I've had a few instances of spiders causing a related issue with our Ring doorbell camera. Like getting a notification of someone at the front door in the middle of the night, then you load it up and a giant spider is just sat right on the lens. Never had any bell presses, but I guess in this case it's one of those conducting plates.
Sounds like a broken doorbell button design.
Okay, I can see that maybe this could be a funny story in the local paper, but it's quite strange that it ended up as _international news_.
I think it's quirky enough to be amusing, maybe even better that it's from "another" country.
Pre internet age I worked in a store where one "unlucky" guy out of reflex asked the king of Sweden for identification when buying with a credit card (fully aware of who was in front of him, it was a toy store and the king used to shop there once a year for Christmas). A colleague told the story at dinner, the colleagues father worked at an evening news paper and wrote a small blurb about it. The following two days news papers from (literally) around the world tried to get an interview with the guy.
Anything can become international news.
Hey, we can't just go around accepting credit cards without ID from anyone who just happens to look like the king!
It's regional "news" to me, but I have no doubt that I would not have heard of it if it had not somehow eddied it's way onto hn.
Regional media is dead, it's attention bandwidth has been taken up by spacially distributed, but otherwise super narrow opinion bubbles. And unfortunately I don't see any substitute for the kind of local information that we should have, like communal level politics. For a while it looked as if Facebook might survive filling that gap, but that's not really what happened.
I had a similar experience. It was a dark summer night, 03:00 o'clock. Me and my partner were semi-asleep when suddenly a loud noise from the kitchen wakes us up. It sounds eerily electro-mechanical. And then some seconds later, it happens again. And again. And again. We had no pets, no one else living with us, so we were concerned someone had broken into our apartment in the middle of the night. I mustered up the courage to enter the kitchen. There are no people there, not even a small animal. I turn on the lights and confirm that. But I see the lid of our bin is open. It was a stupid purchase from costco, this household bin with an automated lid that used a depth sensor. Turns out, there was a slug walking all over the sensor. This is how we figured out we had a big hole somewhere under the kitchen furnishings that was a source of slugs. We moved away in less than a year, but boy was it not fun to think about the slimy mess that may have been left on the countertops.
Sadly it is not a new species, otherwise what a name it could have slagged...
Nacktschneckecus Klingelstreichus
Also mysterious... why did nobody just... walk downstairs to look? Use them peepers? At least we know no software engineers are to blame. Along with the slug, we are the one group most reluctant to walk.
> It kept ringing even as we telephoned and despite the fact no one could be seen at the door.
> Together residents and police discovered the slug
they did?
If they could tell no one is there why didn't they ring the electrician rather than the cops? Doorbell going off? No one there? Must be crazy invisible teens next door, not a short in the doorbell.
It sounds like they called the police first before going down to check.
If the slug violates the terms of release, there is a DIY Perks solution for that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAA9nCqNfR4
I went through several emotions reading this article.
It has to be said, that I probably have the habit of most people: skim the title, skip to the comments, skim the article, skip back to the comments, and maybe if I am intrigued enough (as I was this time) read the article.
Well, the more I skipped back and forth the funnier it became. Realized it wasn't the UK started trying to find that abandoned feral children apartment and what not. Then I decided to the read the whole article when a depressing thought mixed with indignation hit me.
The article reads like the following llm prompt: "translate this article from BILD to english make it short and funny" voilá. I still hold the Guardian in a little higher regard than other online media, but this ended up being a small gut punch. But I had fun, thanks chatgpt.
OMG I've been telling a joke about a slug that rings a bell. This used to be so unreal
A joke about a slug? That rings a bell.
To me it doesn't, tell the joke!
A man opens a door after the bell rang. Outside is a snail, asking if they can use the bathroom. Annoyed, the man picks up the snail and throws it back to the street. A few weeks later, it rings again - when the man opens the door, the snail asks "what the hell was that just now?"
... That's German humor for you
Almost the same in Polish. But the beginning was different - a man was talking up the staircase when he noticed a snail on the stair railing and flicked it so that it fell down 3 storeys"
>German humor
To be fair, the joke scans better in german, where "snail" is something you call someone who is being slow, and the Snail will often appear in jokes as the archetypal "slow" character, like the clever fox or the wise owl or the dumb blonde.
> At first they had suspected the so-called klingelstreich (bell prank), a sometimes popular pastime among German youths.
Does German sound funny to everybody or just the English speaking world?
Probably in large part because all after WW2, German has been used exclusively when making fun of a certain dictator, in English. You've been taught that it's funny, if you're in the Western world.
Of course, before the radio, making fun of languages couldn't spread that quickly, so German was probably the first language to lose a war (or two) after globalization had started.
I don't think that's it; the usual stereotypes about Hitler and Nazis is that they were brutal, evil, and demanding, which in fact they were, not that they were silly, ridiculous, and goofy. If German sounds funny to English speakers, it's in spite of WWII associations, not because of them.
I've thought about this question a lot, and I think the answer comes from the history of English as a creole (or nearly so), consisting of a Germanic substrate being gradually displaced by a Romance prestige dialect, as the nobility all spoke dialects of Old French after the Norman Conquest. Moreover, even after that period, French was the language of diplomacy, while Latin was the language of academia and, until Henry VIII, the Church. Newton published Principia Mathematica in Latin, as was the well-established practice, and for generations studying at Harvard required learning Latin (and Greek) first. English's propensity for accepting loanwords rather than calquing them as is usual in Chinese and German has given us a large vocabulary of Latin words for use in formal contexts. New German loanwords, bu contrast, have largely come in through Yiddish, a language of desperately poor immigrants: schmuck, for example.
So it's common to have synonym pairs in which the Germanic term is informal or vulgar, while the Romance term is a formal term, sometimes an inkhorn word. Sour:acid, stuff:material, fuck:copulate, piss:urinate, cunt:vagina, cock:penis, prick:penis, shit:defecate, want:desire, fart:flatulence, balls:testicles, turd:excrement, everyday:quotidian, men:personnel, manly:virile, worldly:mundane, motherly:maternal, house:residence, big:grand, night:nocturnal, twilight:crepuscular, ass:posterior, better:ameliorate, schmuck:prepuce, water:aquatic, water:irrigate, king:monarch, armpit:axilla, cow:bovine, dog:canine, spit:saliva, rot:decay, whore:prostitute, tit:mammary, young:immature, worm:larva, enough:sufficient, grow:develop, sick:infirm, eye:ocular, think:cogitate, reckon:calculate, and so on. Pairs in the other direction are so rare I can't think of one, though I'm sure some must exist. There are cases in this list where a formal Germanic word exists, such as "breast" and "buttocks", but I can't think of a more informal Latinate synonym in those cases.
"Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits," which got Carlin arrested in Milwaukee, is Germanic from beginning to end, even "suck". So is Lenny Bruce's list, even though "ass" and "balls" have cognates in Romance languages.
All the most taboo words in English except "nigger" are Germanic, and the taboo on "nigger" is recent enough that it's shaped by quite different history—but note that English speakers, to convert the Spanish negro "naygro" into a deprecating term, assimilated it to a more typically Germanic phonetic structure, ending it in a syllabic coda that is common in German and prohibited in French, Spanish, and Italian.
(To be fair, "twat" is another possible exception; nobody knows where it comes from. Although a Latin origin is improbable—literacy in Classical Rome was sufficiently broad that we know the word "landīca"—there could easily be some unattested Occitan or Sicilian word from which we get "twat", even if it sounds Germanic phonologically.)
And there's an established idiomatic way to dismiss something by reduplicating a word, the second time replacing the onset of its first syllable with the characteristically Germanic onset cluster "schm-" as a form of ridicule: "Police, schmolice!"
As a result, to Anglophone ears, German (both phonetically and in its recognizable vocables) sounds like an over-the-top vulgar version of English with words that sound a lot like "schmuckrotfart". 'What do you mean, the word for "oxygen" is "sour stuff"?'
So I suspect that German sounding silly and foolish is particular to English speakers.
This is a fantastic explanation.
Unfortunately I can't edit it further (perhaps due to having said "fuck", "Hitler", and "nigger" in a single comment) but I need to add that "crap" turns out to come from Latin by way of Old French.
Also, this page is fantastic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Yid...
(The above second comment is also edit-locked, but at least at the moment this one isn't, so evidently it wasn't "landīca" that triggered the logic, despite being by far the most offensive term in the whole comment.)
My wife, a native speaker of Spanish who doesn't speak German, reports that to her ears German sounds angry rather than silly.
Wait 'til you see Dutch.
We hebben een probleem.
We hebben een serieus* probleem.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-hebben-een-serieus-problee...
A nacktschneckelich Crimespree like this is no Laughingmatter.
There ver zwei Slugs, valking down der Straße, und von vas assaulted
slugs worry about getting a-salted
Two ape babies with sign language education invented "waterbird" on their own when they saw a duck. English speakers should have more compound words.
Wait till you see Swiss-German
English vs. German vs. Swiss-German Nut vs. Nuss vs. Nüssli Mess vs. Durcheinander vs. Chrüsimüsi Rascal vs. Lausbub vs. Glünggi Chicken vs. Huhn vs. Güggeli
T-Shirt > T-Shirt > Libli (Leibchen in German)
It mostly sounds authoritative, unemotional, and sadistic.
You’ve been watching too many WW2 films.
I've been having actual WW2 Nazis occupy my country and kill family back in the day. Not everybody gets their history from movies.
But I'm talking about their regular everyday speaking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4
I've had Germans kill family too, but the video above is a non-native German speaker making fun of German words. I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language to hear spoken, but that video isn't evidence.
No, but it's a funny reminder of how it's perceived. It's not supposed to be evidence, nor I linked it as if it was some scientific proof settling the matter.
Basically captures that part you said "I agree that German isn't the most pleasant language".
For me, Dutch is even worse. Turkish I also dislike, for some reason, I think because of the throaty "l" sounds.
Sorry, Dutch and Turkish friends.
Dutch is kind of like fake-english sounding to me, but not as harsh as German.
Turkish does have some harshness.
Whaaat, every second sound in Dutch is a throaty "ch", as that's the sound their "r" makes! It's there all the time.
You... you don't actually think we talk like that, do you?
I don't have to think how Germans speak there's no shortage of Germans passing around these parts.
That's how it sounds in everyone's ears, in countries with more melodic languages like Spanish or French.
(It's not even the pronunciation overplayed in the video for comedic effect, many words are already threatening sounding by themselves, just the letters on page invoke either threat or bureaucracy).
Imagine not speaking English and reading "ding dong ditch".
Or, for that matter, speaking English fluently and not being from whatever part of the US it is that that idiom is specific to.
Imagine learning English in a country without that idiom, and reading it. Not to mention "knock down ginger"!
My wife and I grew up about 10 miles apart. She knew those phrases, I didn't. Why? She lived in a town, I lived in the country. Playing that game where I grew up would have been pretty unproductive. Walk a mile>Open gate>dog barks as you walk up drive>farmer comes out and recognises you>says Hello x...
Yeah, knock down ginger was the one I went "wtf?" on, for sure.
"Please to not be ditching your ding dong in front of peoples houses"
We think German sounds too direct, and it makes us laugh. If it were serious and important, it would be in French.
[deleted]
...at a certain point I think you just have to assume that the doorbell is malfunctioning, no?
We've had that happen. It was annoying as hell. We didn't call the police, though. (Pretty funny that it was a slug and not a dying piece of electronics, I must say.)
[deleted]
How dare it? It should be promptly arrested, pour decourager les autres
I love getting downvotes on an obvious joke post
Why is HN so uptight about literally everything?
No ones reads anymore, even the article ends with,
"In a statement, a police spokesperson in Schwabach, Bavaria, said the animal had “been brought down to size, taught about its territory boundaries and placed on a nearby stretch of grass”."
I envy people with such quiet, peaceful lives that they consider this a newsworthy problem.
Not sure what the problem is.
I imagine that they, quite reasonably, expected that the prankster was some slimy character. And it looks like they were correct.
As someone from the UK, this really threw me for a second!
I wonder if the residents are millionaires #iykyk
Does it talk?
He's probably pining for the fjords...
Only in Morse code.
No. It is pushing up the daisies, singing to the choir invisible.
[flagged]