Distances from Bonn

I came up with the strange idea of sorting European capitals by how far they are from the town I live in (Bonn, Germany) and found that half a dozen of foreign capitals are nearer than the capital of Germany.

City	Country	Distance in km
Luxembourg City	Luxembourg	142
City of Brussels	Belgium	195
Amsterdam	Netherlands	234
Paris	France	400
Bern	Switzerland	425
Vaduz	Liechtenstein	437
Berlin	Germany	478
London	United Kingdom	510
Prague	Czech Republic	527
Copenhagen	Denmark	659
Vienna	Austria	726
Ljubljana	Slovenia	755
Bratislava	Slovakia	779
Monaco	Monaco	779
City of San Marino	San Marino	857
Zagreb	Croatia	857
Budapest	Hungary	942
Dublin	Republic of Ireland	957
Warsaw	Poland	976
Oslo	Norway	1047
Rome	Italy	1065
Vatican City	Vatican City	1065
Sarajevo	Bosnia and Herzegovina	1143
Stockholm	Sweden	1181
Belgrade	Serbia	1195
Vilnius	Lithuania	1300
Riga	Latvia	1308
Podgorica	Montenegro	1347
Madrid	Spain	1421
Minsk	Belarus	1430
Tirana	Albania	1432
Ankara	Turkey	1447
Skopje	Macedonia	1463
Tallinn	Estonia	1474
Sofia	Bulgaria	1522
Helsinki	Finland	1530
Bucharest	Romania	1583
Chişinău	Moldova	1639
Kiev	Ukraine	1648
Valletta	Malta	1745
Lisbon	Portugal	1845
Athens	Greece	1931
Moscow	Russia	2086
Reykjavík	Iceland	2257
Tbilisi	Georgia	3034
Yerevan	Armenia	3106
Baku	Azerbaijan	3469

If you find this idea interesting what about composing a similar table for the location you live in?

ProxTube

ProxTube unblocks youtube videos. It is useful because in some countries like Germany YouTube videos are blocked for rather questionable reasons. Please do not abuse it for accessing videos of which you know that they are violating your local penal code.

Two questionable reasons for why videos are blocked in Germany:

1. The copyright holder possibly (in contrast to actually) does not allow the content to be  online.
2. The video contains symbols of unconstitutional organizations.

The latter is very annoying. In general, German laws outlaw the use of symbols of unconstitutional organization but not if they serve to further civil enlightenment, to avert unconstitutional aims, to promote art or science, research or teaching, reporting about current historical events or similar purposes.

However, I repeatedly had to circumvent youtube's blocking to watch videos that use original footage from the NS era to illustrate the terrible crimes committed by Nazi Germany. They were blocked due to the ubiquitous swastikas, not due to their message that simply put was: We must never let this happen again.

Sebastian Nerz at BBC HardTalk

Zeinab Badawi speaks to Sebastian Nerz, leader of the Pirate Party Germany.

BBC HardTalk mit Sebastian Nerz (Teil 1)

BBC HardTalk mit Sebastian Nerz (Teil 2)

YouTube meets German history, fails miserably

Believe it or not: YouTube recommended SS (Nazi) March songs because I have been listening to the national anthem of the strongly antifascist German Democratic Republic. Now this clearly is an epic fail.

Are you kidding, YouTube?

If you wonder about the brown area in the thumbnail: After consulting the German penal code I covered the SS logo that originally was present because it would have been legally too risky for me to leave them unaltered.

Censorship in Germany

I am quite pissed at the moment. You may recall that I recently wrote the blog entry »Video advertising German military« in which I embedded a youtube video that was put online by bundesregierung, the official youtube channel of the German government.

For several reasons I am currently adding text links pointing to the already posted videos and in this process noticed that the video has been made unavailable by making it private. Here is a backup copy someone made:

Die Bundeswehr online

I do not have an issue with people making videos private but I do have an issue with governments removing information for the only reason that it possibly sheds a negative light on them. Let’s see what wikipedia has to say about political censorship:

Political censorship exists when a government attempts to conceal, distort, or falsify information that its citizens receive by suppressing or crowding out political news that the public might receive through news outlets.

I’d call the youtube channel such an outlet and while the video is an advertisement for the Bundeswehr, it also transports information, namely that the government does not want the Bundeswehr to be the very last resort when having to defend the actual German territory (the purpose for which it was set up) but to take an active role wherever and whenever it is deemed necessary.

Regardless what I personally think about the message (I grew up when the GDR still existed and the shared hope at that time was that the Bundeswehr would never have go to war) it is unacceptable to first put the video online and then a) make it unavailable and b) do so by not altogether taking it offline but simply marking it private.

I am not pissed because they removed the video but because they only pretended to do so while in fact they left it online and only made sure it is not available for the masses. Here is what I wrote to them:

message to bundesregierung (youtube)

Translation: For what purpose has the Bundeswehr video with the ID neNdW5Qx5IM been later [after being put online] made private? Or has it been assumed that this event would go unnoticed?