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Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of apartments turns out to be a slug
- egiboy 1y agoDoes it talk?
- hulitu 1y agoNo. It is pushing up the daisies, singing to the choir invisible.
- pdonis 1y agoHe's probably pining for the fjords...
- marcosdumay 1y agoOnly in Morse code.
- andy99 1y ago"I thought it might be the kids from the abandoned house over the road,” Lisa, 30, a shop sales assistant told the tabloid Bild. More concerning that there's an apparent house of feral children across the road.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- IncRnd 1y agoThere should be those sorts of houses everywhere, or the feral children would roam in street gangs, steal pies from window sills, and ring doorbells.
- sterlind 1y agothe way the world economy's going I could see Oliver Twist becoming relevant again.
- robertlagrant 1y agoPlease sir - can I have some more...screen time?
- skeezyboy 1y agono 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
- robertlagrant 1y ago> This time is no different, hysterical parents How do you know this?
- skeezyboy 1y agobecause it it were so toxic to health the parents themselves would stop using them
- robertlagrant 1y agoThis 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.
- 1y ago
- pineaux 1y agoActually, 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.
- Larrikin 1y agoDrunk 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.
- inglor_cz 1y agoYou 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.
- potato3732842 1y ago> 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.
- harrall 1y agoKids hanging around in abandoned houses to smoke or do dumb shit is like a staple of childhoods.
- tempodox 1y agoIm the world of tabloids that’s a profitable allegation.
- Pesthuf 1y agoWho 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.
- tracker1 1y agoFor some reason, I'm thinking of the Foot Clan hideout from the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJev_Sw-j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJev_Sw-j8
- mystraline 1y ago[flagged]
- alex1138 1y agoHow dare it? It should be promptly arrested, pour decourager les autres
- alex1138 1y agoI love getting downvotes on an obvious joke post Why is HN so uptight about literally everything?
- miyuru 1y agoNo 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”."
- koolba 1y ago> 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?
- pessimizer 1y agoWe think German sounds too direct, and it makes us laugh. If it were serious and important, it would be in French.
- coldtea 1y agoIt mostly sounds authoritative, unemotional, and sadistic.
- robin_reala 1y agoYou’ve been watching too many WW2 films.
- coldtea 1y agoI'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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghRKZRcxeI4
- dpassens 1y agoYou... you don't actually think we talk like that, do you?
- coldtea 1y agoI 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).
- jaredhallen 1y agoSlugs aren't known for quick getaways. Did no one check the doorbell before calling the police?
- gus_massa 1y agoThey move a few inches per minute, so it's easy to ignore the irrelevant slug that is nearby but not over the button.
- pengaru 1y agoIME they tend to leave a lasting conspicuous shiny trail....
- gitaarik 1y agoYou 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
- szszrk 1y agoThat 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...
- jimnotgym 1y agoSlugs could probably have beaten the police response time in my country.
- phyzome 1y ago...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.)
- wewewedxfgdf 1y agoI 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.
- coldtea 1y agoSounds like a broken doorbell button design.
- albert_e 1y agoWe 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.
- beerandt 1y agoStill miss the keyboard on my HTC Tilt2
- thayne 1y agoIndeed. Especially as I get older and my accuracy on a virtual touchscreen keyboard gets worse.
- franga2000 1y agoThey didn't even decide that we want them, from what I've heard, capacitive "buttons" are simply cheaper as they require not additional parts.
- neuronic 1y agoYes, 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...
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 1y agoThere’s an alternate universe where programmers are fixing slugs because it wasn’t a bug that died in a mainframe transistor
- hcs 1y agoI need to deslug my computer, it's getting sluggish.
- rob74 1y agoI think that was a relay back then (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/First_Computer_Bug%2C_1945.jpg 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...
- sellmesoap 1y agoYou 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
- jve 1y agoMeh, a month ago slug destroyed a robot lawnmower: https://imgur.com/a/k6guVxi https://imgur.com/a/k6guVxi
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- firefoxd 1y agoIf the slug violates the terms of release, there is a DIY Perks solution for that: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAA9nCqNfR4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oAA9nCqNfR4
- adityaathalye 1y agoSadly 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.
- lexicality 1y ago> 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?
- stavros 1y agoIt sounds like they called the police first before going down to check.
- stonemetal12 1y agoIf 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.
- lexicality 1y agoMaybe Bavarian cops double as the town ghostbusters?
- eli_gottlieb 1y agoI envy people with such quiet, peaceful lives that they consider this a newsworthy problem.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- noufalibrahim 1y agoNot 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.
- rsynnott 1y agoOkay, 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_.
- Zobat 1y agoI 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.
- stavros 1y agoHey, we can't just go around accepting credit cards without ID from anyone who just happens to look like the king!
- usrusr 1y agoIt'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.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoOMG I've been telling a joke about a slug that rings a bell. This used to be so unreal
- throw310822 1y agoA joke about a slug? That rings a bell.
- gitaarik 1y agoTo me it doesn't, tell the joke!
- looperhacks 1y agoA 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
- Dilettante_ 1y ago>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.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoAlmost 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"
- dingdongditchme 1y agoI 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.
- eptcyka 1y agoI 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.
- pflenker 1y agoThe 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.
- curiousgal 1y agoAs someone from the UK, this really threw me for a second!
- Poomba 1y agoI wonder if the residents are millionaires #iykyk
- petercooper 1y agoOver 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.
- rcyeh 1y agoSince slugs are cold-blooded, I wonder if it was captured by the (presumably backlit) doorbell touch panel because of the panel's warmth.
- elwood_b 1y agoIt WAS playing ding-dong-ditch, but it couldn't get away fast enough
- 9x39 1y agoI 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.
- FireSquid2006 1y agoTo think that previously upon hearing "system so insecure it could be penetrated by a fly" I would have thought it a ridiculous hyperbole
- porridgeraisin 1y agoHilarious
- stronglikedan 1y agoI 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.