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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Im the world of tabloids that’s a profitable allegation.
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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
Etymology of "bug" goes back far more than that.
I need to deslug my computer, it's getting sluggish.
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.
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?
Still miss the keyboard on my HTC Tilt2
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 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?
They move a few inches per minute, so it's easy to ignore the irrelevant slug that is nearby but not over the button.
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
Slugs could probably have beaten the police response time in my country.
Sounds like a broken doorbell button design.
It WAS playing ding-dong-ditch, but it couldn't get away fast enough
Since slugs are cold-blooded, I wonder if it was captured by the (presumably backlit) doorbell touch panel because of the panel's warmth.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
A nacktschneckelich Crimespree like this is no Laughingmatter.
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
We think German sounds too direct, and it makes us laugh. If it were serious and important, it would be in French.
It mostly sounds authoritative, unemotional, and sadistic.
Imagine not speaking English and reading "ding dong ditch".
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.
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.
...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.)
As someone from the UK, this really threw me for a second!
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?
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.
I wonder if the residents are millionaires #iykyk
