May 10, 2011

Beware of Zeeland’s kissing cyclist

Filed under: Bicycles,Weird by Orangemaster @ 4:33 pm

A whopping 41 women have reported being unwantedly kissed by a male cyclist in the Southern province of Zeeland, something that has been going on since 2009. The cops aren’t sure it’s the same guy and the women’s reports tend to differ. Call the alarm number (it’s 112 here) and snap a pic with your phone is the cops’ equivalent of ‘take two aspirins and call me in the morning’, as they can’t seem to catch him. The man asks cycling women for directions, kisses them and asks them where they live and I imagine has other propositions as well.

(Link: blikopnieuws)

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February 28, 2011

Copyright vigilantes Brein seize servers illegally

Filed under: Online,Technology by Branko Collin @ 8:46 am

Dutch MPAA representatives Brein have broken the law by removing computer equipment worth hundreds of thousands of euro without a court order, law professor Ton Jongbloed told Tweakers.net last Tuesday. Brein seized 8 servers from hosting provider Al Transa last January.

The Brein foundation claims that the servers contained the warez site SWAN, although its not clear how it reasons that this makes it OK to break the law. Owner Craig Salmond says he will report the foundation to the police for theft, unless Brein gives back his hardware and offers a formal apology. His lawyer added that computervredebreuk, illegal hacking of a computer would also be a possible charge. Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet sees a charge of fraud as more likely to lead to a conviction, whereas the lawyers of IT en Recht are putting their money on a charge of vigilantism.

According to Webwereld, Brein gained the ability to log in to Salmond’s servers before they took the computers. Engelfriet thinks a charge of theft is unlikely to stick, as the maintainer of the 8 computers, another provider called Worldstream, voluntarily handed the machines over to Brein.

On a totally unrelated note, in December 2010 a judge decided to keep a 16-year-old script kiddie another two weeks in jail (by now he has been released) after he allegedly had hacked websites of MasterCard and Visa in retaliation for their treatment of Wikileaks front man Julian Assange. Call it a hunch, but I have severe doubts that we will ever hear of Brein manager Tim Kuik receiving a similar treatment at the hands of his good buddies at the Justice department. I doubt he will even ever spend a second in jail, at least not for copyright related matters. He just doesn’t fit the profile, never mind that the wealthy Brein foundation is in a much better position to make the prosecutor look silly than a gormless teenage high school student is.

(Photo by Malene Thyssen, some rights reserved)

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May 31, 2010

More people in prison on suspicion than after conviction

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 8:28 am

Law professor Yvo Buruma has sounded the alarm about the number of innocent people being detained pre-trial in the Netherlands.

According to Buruma the numbers of acquittals in the country has risen from 4.5% to 7% in the past five years. More people are in gaol awaiting trial than people who have already been convicted.

In a blog entry last week Buruma claims this is a worrisome development because robbing somebody of their freedom is an exceptional power that the state should only exercise under exceptional circumstances, and because a person should be considered innocent until proven otherwise. Although he does not outright say it, it would almost seem that the justice department is keeping people imprisoned for the wrong reasons.

The criminal law professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen determines four categories of aquittal:

  1. It is unclear what happened,
  2. It is unclear what part the suspect played,
  3. There was no intent, and
  4. The judge fails to see the crime in the accused’s actions.

An example of the latter is the 14-year-old who jokingly told Prime Minister Balkenende on the social networking site Hyves that he was going to die and was acquitted earlier this month.

It is perhaps interesting to note that the falsely imprisoned typically only receive 80 euro a day in damages, regardless of actual income lost.

Link: Sargasso.

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April 17, 2010

Man stages distress to win damsel back

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 1:01 pm

A 18-year-old man from The Hague staged a robbery two weeks ago in order to impress his ex-girlfriend with his heroic intervention and win her back that way.

A friend in a white ski mask pulled a knife on the 17-year-old girl on the Grote Markt and demanded her purse, only to see his ‘robbery’ thwarted by the ex-boyfriend who ‘happened’ to be on the scene. After studying security camera footage (the girl reported the attempted robbery to the police), the police concluded the ‘robber’ and the ex-boyfriend were in cahoots.

Both conspirators were arrested.

According to De Volkskrant, the ploy did not have the desired effect.

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April 4, 2010

Man captured twice on same day for stealing bicycle

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 12:15 pm

A particularly dumb thief from The Hague was caught twice on the same day last Tuesday for stealing police bait bikes.

When the 35-year-old was released after the first arrest, he walked along the spot in the Wagenaarstraat in The Hague where his first crime had taken place, and, presumably to his great joy, discovered another bicycle just ready for the taking. This bike again turned out to be a bait bicycle.

Telegraaf doesn’t say if they also released the man after his second arrest.

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February 21, 2010

Man gets bike thrown at head from seventh floor

Filed under: Architecture,Aviation,Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 2:41 pm

A man from Nieuwegein near Utrecht had to be taken to the hospital last Monday after being hit in the head by a bicycle thrown from an apartment building, Telegraaf reports.

A fight on the seventh floor which the 18-year-old victim had nothing to do with resulted in a bicycle being thrown off the balcony. The victim was about to enter a car for a driving lesson when the bike partially hit him and the car.

The victim has filed charges for attempted manslaughter. The suspect turned himself in on Wednesday and was arrested, according to the Utrecht police.

(Photo by Mike Porcenaluk, some rights reserved)

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September 30, 2009

All spam outlawed starting tomorrow

Filed under: Online by Branko Collin @ 8:14 am

Tomorrow the prohibition on business spam mails (Dutch) will come into effect.

Sending e-mail spam to consumers has been illegal in the Netherlands since 2004. Back then I wrote elsewhere that this would be enough to deter Dutch spammers because separating out business addresses from home addresses would be too costly. It seems I was wrong though. Since the general spam prohibition was passed into law, I have been deluged with the stuff on my business account. (It takes half a year for a law to come into effect after it has passed both houses of parliament, in case you were wondering.)

The maximum fine for sending spam in the Netherlands is 450,000 euro.

(Photo of spam on a barbecue by Kyle Nishioka, some rights reserved. Cropped by me. Link tip: every retard who has been sending me a reminder the past week that I need to explicitly sign up for their trash if I were to go batshit insane and suddenly decide to want to keep receiving their mails after October 1.)

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May 12, 2009

Car thief forgets 10,000 euro

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 12:34 pm

Last Wednesday a car thief in The Hague was in the possession of 10,000 euro without even knowing it, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The man, a known offender, was addressed on the Broekslootkade by two passing cops who just wanted to have a chat. In response he bolted, leaving behind a purse which he had, as it later turned out, stolen from a car a day earlier together with a navigation system. The purse contained 10,000 euro in cash, unknown to the 36-year old thief.

(Photo of the arrest of a Rotterdam bicycle thief by Flickr user Hellobo, some rights reserved. The police officers are the ones wearing dark trousers.)

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April 27, 2009

Anatomy of an ATM skimmer

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 8:39 am

Last December, Paul Wiegmans from Alkmaar discovered an ATM skimming device (Dutch) attached to an NS ticket vending machine (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, i.e. Dutch railways). Being a hacker, he pulled the device loose and photographed it extensively before turning it in to the police. Marvel at the diminutive size of these things!

The Nederlandse Bank estimates that skimming at train stations and banks results in ten million euro in damages per year, reports Algemeen Dagblad (Dutch). The NS told the same daily that approximately two skimming accidents occur per day at its train stations. That’s a rather small amount compared to the number of ATM transactions taking place per day there—200,000.

Update: Meanwhile, Salima Douhou and Jan Magnus of the University of Tilburg claim that skimming would become almost impossible if banks incorporated code that would verify the way people type their PIN codes, reports De Telegraaf (Dutch). Apparently, nobody does that quite the same way, making your punch as distinct as your signature. The article unfortunately doesn’t mention what the percentage of false positives is with this method, and calls the method “almost unhackable”, which in this reality means the same as positively hackable.

(Photo: Paul Wiegmans.)

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January 20, 2009

Squatters driven out by thugs, police puts them back in

Filed under: Architecture,General by Branko Collin @ 3:29 pm

Last Sunday a group of thugs who were sharing a building complex in the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam with a group of squatters drove out the latter with the use of force, wounding three of the squatters. At the end of the fight, the police installed the squatters back in the building, and arrested 14 members of both groups. One of the squatters was taken to a hospital with a double fractured jaw.

The squatters told Parool (Dutch) that the thugs spoke Russian with each other and partly consisted of builders that were staying nearby. Quote thinks (Dutch) that the owner of the Vinkzicht buildings, Cornelis Komen, may have paid the thugs to drive off the squatters. Komen denies the allegations.

The buildings have had no designated use since 1972 until Komen bought the six buildings in 1999 for 1.6 million euro each, with the plan to wreck them and build a hotel in their stead. That plan came under heavy fire from the neighbourhood, which managed to convince city hall to declare the gables monuments.

The top floors of the buildings are rented out in so-called anti-squat constructions where a tenant gets a short-term lease typically at a low price. Sometimes, you can score magnificently large housing this way for a price way below the going rate of the average shoebox an Amsterdam resident calls their castle, though I hear that with the housing shortage in the city even the anti-squat rates have gone up.

Squatting is mainly legal in the Netherlands (albeit often frowned upon) because of a constitutional right to domestic peace. The police may not invade your home, even if your means to acquire the home may have been less than legal. The house owner must then go to court and prove they have a pressing need with their property to get the squatters evicted. Neighbours tend to prefer squatters over slowly decaying houses.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard of thugs being used to evict people. The university grapevine in Nijmegen had stories of students being evicted this way, but I cannot remember a single proven one.

This is one of those stories that spawns two new questions for every answer you find, so I’d rather field any actual questions our readers have.

Totally off-topic: many congratulations to Orangemaster for getting her Dutch driver’s license! Wootalicious!

Link: Radio Netherlands, the only medium I could find so far that thinks the fight was between two groups of squatters.

(Photo of the Kinkerstraat by Wikimedia user Ilonamay, some rights reserved)

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