Slashdot Mirror

heise (german) reported this, too, but they had some more details about the numbers:

basically what wikipedia says is, that if someone just removes a typo and then never edits anything again, you shouldn't count him as leaving editor... wikipedia's own statistic counts people who stop contributing after making at least 5 changes.

So can you tell me more about this? http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5263/1.html I actually remember back in the day there was (in either 98 or NT) a straight up registry key that said NSA. I never did see anything suspicious, but ever since then I've sorta half thought it was true half thought it was just a conspiracy theory that there was a backdoor of some sorts in every system. I do know that while holding same level TSSI clearance, some SIGINT guys kept most quite about their work, even when I needed info for ops, they'd just say, "give us a MAC address" And never even asked for IP... Wouldn't tell me what software they were using or what their capabilities were.

heise.de reported the same thing yesterday, pointing out that Yahoo lost more marketshare, than bing won (and google won marketshare, too). So given Microsofts collaboration with yahoo, this should rather read "Google takes marketshare from Microsoft+Yahoo!"...

The german magazine c't made 2000 an test with several people, they found out that the pereson that had the worst hearing was best at differenciating between CD and mp3. That person's hearing had suffered from an explosion and he as only able to hear frequences up to 8kHz on one ear and had a Tinitus on the other ear. He could hear more of the effects from the filters that are applied to mp3 streams. Further (german) info see http://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Kreuzverhoertest-287592.html

The problem here seems to be badly maintained blacklists. After seeing way too many false positives on various blacklists out there, the only lists I would use are ones that expire their entries in a matter of days or hours. The good ones that I use are uatraps (greytrapping generated, 24 hour expiry) and nixspam (IIRC max 4 days after last seen spam activity). Then of course I maintain my own greytrap list (see the traplist homepage and the traplist ethics pagefor details).

The point is, you need to expire entries aggressively. Keeping entries around because somebody received a spam from somewhere in that general direction four years ago is just silly. And don't get me started on blacklisting domains. If there is one thing we know with almost total certainty, it is that spammers never use From: or Reply-to: addresses that have anything vaguely to do with the real senders.

Other countries have had such legislation for a while now. For example, Switzerland: http://www.heise.de/netze/meldung/Breitbandzugang-fuer-alle-Schweizer-162094.html . I'm sure there are more.

To make sure that you can use your computer for online banking without any data being read/written from/onto your harddrive, you might check out "Bankix" from Germany-based "Heise Online" (of H-online.com fame). They modified an Ubuntu-Live CD to keep the system from accessing the hard-disk using a modified kernel. Heres the original description (in German, of course). Follow this link, if you prefer a robot-translated English version.

I heard that it was 13% of the male first time voters.

Sorry for the misinformation, you are right. Here's the source: telepolis (German)

> Not true. Apple passed RIM in terms of ma

WRONG.

Apple is still #5 listed here under "others": http://www.heise.de/resale/Preisradar-Nur-smarte-Handys-verkaufen-sich-noch-bestens--/news/meldung/144345

WRONG, the 16GB iPhone 3GS is listed at #5. In Germany. For smart-phones sold without a contract.

> Not true. Apple passed RIM in terms of ma

WRONG.

Apple is still #5 listed here under "others": http://www.heise.de/resale/Preisradar-Nur-smarte-Handys-verkaufen-sich-noch-bestens--/news/meldung/144345

see this http://www.heise.de/security/Luecke-in-Windows-Vista-und-7-ermoeglicht-Neustart-aus-der-Ferne--/news/meldung/144986 (german) heise tested the avaliable expoit and found vista affected but not windows 7

My favorite computer magazine once tested an ordinary USB flash drive and it still worked after 16 million write cycles on the same file. Since they are using Intel SATA-SSD at SDSC I'm assuming that those drives are SLC, which last ~10x longer than (cheaper) multi-cell drives.

But even if drives start to fail they'll just replace them like they do with any other supercomputer setup, so it's more a cost factor than a problem.

'What we really want to do is raise awareness, so that the other parties say 'bloody hell, they've got seven million votes this time out', or one million votes, or enough votes to make them care and seriously think about these issues.'"

In Germany, a recent poll showed a 2% support rate for the pirate party (Piratenpartei).

And lo and behold! Suddenly, politicians of other parties are discovering their love for the pirates' topics...

(links in German, and I'm too much a of a lazy ass to translate)

Asteroids played by robots. Contest: http://www.heise.de/ct/projekte/machmit/asteroids/ Results: http://www.heise.de/ct/creativ/08/02/ergebnisse/ (push on the play buttons to see the videos)

Asteroids played by robots. Contest: http://www.heise.de/ct/projekte/machmit/asteroids/ Results: http://www.heise.de/ct/creativ/08/02/ergebnisse/ (push on the play buttons to see the videos)

Yes you can. Unlike Skype, you're not bound to a central service provider with a dictating price model. You can choose one of the numerous SIP (or IAX, i don't know if Ekiga even supports it) service providers. Many of those that I've looked at are local providers, but with decent rates for long distance too. A lot of them are offering pre-paid plans, so it's easy and cheap to try, and you can later upgrade to a flatrate model if you so wish.

Or, you could even set up a gateway service yourself, if you want to afford the hardware and/or tinker with open software. Or why not a full-blown telephony server like Asterisk while you're at it?

True to the free software ideas, you have all the choice you want, the burden is just to review it all and to find something to fit your needs.

Currently, it's all rather open from a security viewpoint as well - but the technology is still young, and hey, it's probably not less secure than skype :)

The GPL was successfully tested in Germany [German language link]

It's in german..., but you'll understand it anyway....

all government and schools in extramadura in spain
This started in 2006/2007 so of course the study in 2005 didn't notice it.
schools in gran canaria
I couldn't find details of this on the web, but are you sure it was up and running in 2005?
french police (still migrating)
This was announced in 2008.
munich
I believe the migration started in 2006.

I know we all hate the Gartner Group and all that, but seriously, was it such a gross error to say there were no widespread public (that is, govermnent or municipal) Linux deployments in Europe in 2005 or earlier?

heise.de has reported that Laserdrome-like games will be banned, too, if they really get this thing through.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Gotcha-Koalition-plant-Paintball-Verbot--/meldung/137455 (german article)

I disagree, the German court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) has continuously protected the rights and freedoms of the German citizens. Examples include rulings against free access of police on provider logs (German) and rulings against electronic voting(German).

At the moment this is whole thing is just a media stunt, if a law really gets passed I am optimistic it will get shot down by the court.

I disagree, the German court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) has continuously protected the rights and freedoms of the German citizens. Examples include rulings against free access of police on provider logs (German) and rulings against electronic voting(German).

At the moment this is whole thing is just a media stunt, if a law really gets passed I am optimistic it will get shot down by the court.

It's a shame 4chan wasn't around when bin Laden's phone number was published in court documents

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Bundeskabinett-beschliesst-Gesetzesentwurf-zu-Kinderporno-Sperren--/meldung/136556

Der Rechtsstaat verlangt laut der SPD-Politikerin aber auch, dass die über die Stopp-Seite ausfindig gemachten StraftÃter verfolgt und anklagt werden. Der Entwurf sehe daher vor, dass es für die Strafverfolger mÃglich sei, "in Echtzeit" direkt beim Provider auf die IP-Adressen der "Nutzer" des virtuellen Warnschilds zuzugreifen. Eine Strafbarkeit liege schon in dem Moment vor, wenn nicht nachgewiesen werden kÃnne, dass es sich um ein Versehen oder eine automatische Weiterleitung gehandelt habe. Generell mache sich strafbar, wer es unternehme, sich kinderpornografische Bilder und Schriften zu beschaffen. Die Strafandrohung liege dabei bei zwei Jahren.

The federal minister of justice says that _criminals_ which were found via the stop page will be pursued and indicted. The draft makes it possible for the police to see the IPs of those accessing the stop page in real-time. Punishability is already given in the moment, when the accessing person can not prove that it was an accident or an automatic redirection. Liable to prosecution is whoever who tries to access cp, penalty is 2 years.

There have been rumors about the final draft of the contract (which of course is secret) between the ISPs and the BKA: It appears that there will be not just DNS blocking but rather Deep Paket Inspection in combination with IP blocking. One more thing: Here you can find an image of the actual stop sign: http://www.heise.de/bilder/136327/0/1. It truthfully says that the access is not logged by the BKA (Fact is that it will be logged by the ISPs and that data will be shared with the BKA).

Vor diesem Hintergrund machte jüngst die Kinderschutzorganisation Carechild ein aufschlussreiches Experiment. Sie verwendete dazu 20 Adressen aus der im Netz aufgetauchten dÃnischen Sperrliste. 17 der Seiten waren in den USA gehostet, jeweils eine in den Niederlanden, Südkorea und England. Carechild schrieb an die Abuse-Mail-Adressen der Hostingprovider und bat um Entfernung der Inhalte. Das Ergebnis: acht US-amerikanische Provider haben die Domains innerhalb der ersten drei Stunden nach Versand der Mitteilung abgeschaltet. Innerhalb eines Tages waren 16 Adressen nicht mehr erreichbar, bei drei Websites teilte der jeweilige Provider laut Carechild glaubhaft mit, dass die Inhalte nach augenscheinlicher Prüfung keine Gesetze verletzen oder der Betreiber für die abgebildeten Personen entsprechende Altersnachweise vorlegen konnte.

Short sumary: The child proteciton organization Carechild did an interesting experiment: They used 20 of the entries from the Danish blocklist. 17 of those URLs were in the US, one each in Netherlands, South Korea, and UK. They contacted the hosters via the abuse-mail adresses and asked them to close down those child porn sites. Eight of the US hosters closed the sites within three hours of contact, 16 of the sites were closed within one day. Three sites were reported (truthfully) by hosters (after checking) to not contain child porn and not against any laws.

My question now is: If Childcare can do it, why not the mighty BKA (FBI of Germany)? I thought closing down might be more effective than trying to block them, which won't work anyway...

*sigh* - politicians really drive me crazy...

Even worse [link target in German]: According to the linked page,

Der Entwurf sehe daher vor, dass es für die Strafverfolger mÃglich sei, "in Echtzeit" direkt beim Provider auf die IP-Adressen der "Nutzer" des virtuellen Warnschilds zuzugreifen. Eine Strafbarkeit liege schon in dem Moment vor, wenn nicht nachgewiesen werden kÃnne, dass es sich um ein Versehen oder eine automatische Weiterleitung gehandelt habe.

Translation (emphasis by me):

The draft therefore allows that it's possible for criminal prosecutors to access "in real time" directly at the provider the IP addresses of the "users" of the virtual warning sign. Criminal liability already exists a when it cannot be proven that it was a mistake or an automatic redirection."

That is, if you happen to access a blocked page (for whatever reason) you have to prove that you were in error. This may be quite hard.

As a concrete example how you might get problems: There was once an Open Source project to implement a free OS (AllianceOS). At one time I decided to check what happened with that project, and therefore typed the URL of their home page (which I remembered). To my great surprise what opened was not the home page of the project, but a porn site. Googling around taught me that the domain had expired and then taken by some porn provider. Now imagine it had been a blocked child porn site: I would have had a very hard time to prove that I reached the site in error. After all I explicitly typed in the URL!

Sources:

This article (in german) sums up most of the counter-arguments in an excellent way. It also includes a link to this interview with someone who was abused as a child and opposes the new law very strongly.

Choice quote from the interview:

Because the government only wants to fight the pictures of child abuse, not the child abuse itself.

Computer magazine c't has tested a pre-release version of Windows 7 Starter Edition. In their tests, the limitation was merely enforced by app-starting components of the operating system, e.g. Explorer and the Start menu. They used an alternative menu program (which is commonly used for portable USB stick application management) and could start as many applications as they tried.

Heise.de reports that the provider of wikileaks.de had cancelled the contract in December 2008 with effect to the 31st March 2009, so when the domain wasn't transferred to a new provider on 9th April 2009 its status was changed by the provider to "In Transit" and so is inaccessible. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Wikileaks-de-Denic-wehrt-sich-gegen-Sperr-Vorwurf--/meldung/136096 Seems the guys at wikileaks.de haven't read their mail, maybe they thought it was spam.

I remember reading about a robot called TriKiTrain at a college in Austria a while ago.

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Tischfussball-Roboter-aus-Oberoesterreich--/meldung/135390

Of course, it's in German. I didn't find any english articles on it, but google translator might help.

Police in Europe (at least in Germany and here in Austria) are allowed to raid your house when they believe there is imminent danger to the security of the state or other citizens ("Gefahr im Verzug"). They don't need a judge's permission/order for this. If they don't find anything, they can just file a simple 2 page report and be done with it.

This was used in the case of wikileaks.de - the police didn't read his rights to Mr. Reppe and when he insisted the police add a witness name to the report, they didn't do so.

Actually, they did have the permission of a judge, at least according to this: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Hausdurchsuchung-bei-Inhaber-der-Domain-wikileaks-de-Update--/meldung/135147
Although you are right that police can enter the domain without judges under certain circumstances, evidence might be forfeit if they did it for the wrong reasons. It is not as easy as you depict it, even if it would apply to our case here (which it does not).
I too think that the German police has too much power (especially warrants like these are a bit fishy at times, not to mention copyrights, demonstration rights, etc), but we are still a democratic state with a halfway decent judicial system.

And here's your first clue. Diebold is in the business of making ATMs.

Heise security has a story that there's malware around specifically targetting Diebold ATMs running Windows...
http://www.heise.de/security/Windows-Trojaner-auf-Diebold-Bankautomat--/news/meldung/134794 (in German)
http://www.sophos.com/security/blog/2009/03/3577.html (blog entry the article refers to)

e.g. heise.de, a German publisher for IT magazines, which also offers the best informed German language IT news and a very good online magazine on society and culture, hosts all ads themselves. Blocking heise.de would mean also blocking one of the best sources for Germans on the net. Adblock (with a German blocklist), on the other hand, conveniently blocks all the ads and doesn't touch anything else. Impossible with a hosts file.

Citation needed? Here it is: Federal Patent Court declares FAT patent of Microsoft null and void

These same two patents were also invalidated in the U.S. for a while, but they were subsequently upheld after an appeal.

Here's a slightly blurry screenshot of the wallpaper: http://www.heise.de/bilder/134489/0/1

Probably the first OS X virus in the wild is from 2006:
* http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Virus-fuer-Mac-OS-X-aufgetaucht--/meldung/69677 (german, sorry)
* http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2006/02/macosxleap.htm

Then there was some malware released in 2007 and 2008:
* http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/archives/2007/10/mac_os_x_malware_targets_porn_surfers.html
* http://www.tuaw.com/2008/11/21/new-mac-os-x-malware-osx_lamzev-a/

And then there was something early this year where I can't find the link right now.

Fail, dumbass.

Bush/Cheney and the GOP are the only ones to install taps on the communication networks inside the United States.

ECHELON is a foreign intelligence gathering system. It was not built in the United States. They can't intercept communications inside the United States even if they want to. The dishes aren't built in the right place to intercept communications signals inside the US.

"Inside Echelon

Duncan Campbell 25.07.2000
The history, structure und function of the global surveillance system known as Echelon

Since 1998, much has been written and spoken about the so-called Echelon system of international communications surveillance. Most of what has been written has been denied or ignored by US and European authorities. But much of what has been written has also been exaggerated or wrong. Amongst a sea of denials, obfuscations and errors, confusion has reigned. This review by Duncan Campbell, author of the European Parliament's 1999 "Interception Capabilities 2000" report[1] , is intended to help clear up the confusion, to say what Echelon is (and isn't), where it came from and what it does. Echelon, or systems like it, will be with us a long time to come.

Echelon is a system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept and process international communications passing via communications satellites. It is one part of a global surveillance systems that is now over 50 years old. Other parts of the same system intercept messages from the Internet, from undersea cables, from radio transmissions, from secret equipment installed inside embassies, or use orbiting satellites to monitor signals anywhere on the earth's surface. The system includes stations run by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, in addition to those operated by the United States. Although some Australian and British stations do the same job as America's Echelon sites, they are not necessarily called "Echelon" stations. But they all form part of the same integrated global network using the same equipment and methods to extract information and intelligence illicitly from millions of messages every day, all over the world.

The first reports about Echelon in Europe[2] credited it with the capacity to intercept "within Europe, all e-mail, telephone, and fax communications". This has proven to be erroneous; neither Echelon nor the signals intelligence ("sigint") system of which it is part can do this. Nor is equipment available with the capacity to process and recognise the content of every speech message or telephone call. But the American and British-run network can, with sister stations, access and process most of the worlds satellite communications, automatically analysing and relaying it to customers who may be continents away.

The world's most secret electronic surveillance system has its main origin in the conflicts of the Second World War. In a deeper sense, it results from the invention of radio and the fundamental nature of telecommunications. The creation of radio permitted governments and other communicators to pass messages to receivers over transcontinental distances. But there was a penalty - anyone else could listen in. Previously, written messages were physically secure (unless the courier carrying them was ambushed, or a spy compromised communications). The invention of radio thus created a new importance for cryptography, the art and science of making secret codes. It also led to the business of signals intelligence, now an industrial scale activity. Although the largest surveillance network is run by the US NSA, it is far from alone. Russia, China, France and other nations operate worldwide networks. Dozens of advanced nations use sigint as a key source of intelligence. Even smaller European nations such as Denmark, the Netherlands or Switzerland have recently constructed small, Echelon-like stations to obtain and process intelligence by eavesdropping on civil satellite communications...."

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6929/1.html

That's how the free market works

if you seriously think, that the OS market was free, then you obviously don't know about Windows Refunds.
If you speak german, read this article where VOBIS (german pc vendor) describes exactly how Microsoft blackmailed them to make them stop selling any OS except windows and not tell anybody about this.
also read how microsoft tried to kill linux by silently funding SCO's lawsuit against major linux distros.
If you actually think, the OS Market was anywhere near "free" in the last 24 years, then you have no freakin clue about what you're talking and should just STFU!

Sounds like decision-making will become less questionable by the openness OSS introduces at several levels: source, formats and price (not necessarily zero, but leaving little room for overspending to factor in kickbacks), to name a few.
In a perfect world, politicians would now start campaigning and competing to advocate and introduce whatever affordable and sufficiently functional software keeps existing hardware usable even longer, minimizes public spending and allows for the biggest tax cut.;-)

It would have been terrible for future generations' access to public records if further decades of material had to be stored in proprietary, DRM-encumbered crypto bottles on closed-source systems which can't be kept alive without the consent of their corporate overlords, and if these could get schools to indoctrinate kids to obey them.

Now all they have to make clear (to prevent monopolies from being built by other means) is that there should be no such thing as software patents...

We could also add the news media, for reporting this story, thus telling people how to get the stuff.

You might succeed in Germany, where heise was sued successfully for putting a link to Slysoft's website in a story about Slysoft...

Need something for that cough perhaps?

"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."

"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all#

Navy Discovers Cold Fusion (again):
http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2292

"Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat."

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312

"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design."

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_team_confirms_ucla_tabletop_fusion_10017.html

Science in Neglect
Nobel Laureate Speaks Out For Cold Fusion:

http://newenergytimes.com/news/2005/2005Lietz-ScienceInNeglectJosephson.htm

"The foreword by Dr. Frank Gordon in a [extern] summary report of February 2002 is so far the strongest statement of the Navy about their research:

We do not know if Cold Fusion will be the answer to future energy needs, but we do know the existence of Cold Fusion phenomenon through repeated observations by scientists throughout the world. It is time that this phenomenon be investigated so that we can reap whatever benefits accrue from additional scientific understanding. It is time for government funding organizations to invest in this research. "

http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/18/18580/1.html

"First, a dozen techniques have been found to produce anomalous energy and benign nuclear products in certain solids. These are listed in the table (p. 76). Most of these methods have been duplicated at independent laboratories, and several can be made to work by anyone who would take the time to learn how. "

http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/summ01/cold_fusion/cold_fusion.html

Edmund Storms* discusses the methods used to generate low energy nuclear reactions (LENR).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltZhii3g2HY

* Retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory after thirty-four years of service. His work there involved basic research i

http://euro-police.noblogs.org/post/2009/02/08/bislang-geheime-datenbank-erfasst-in-gro-britannien-alle-ein-und-ausreisen

http://derstandard.at/PDA/?id=1233586959776

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Bislang-geheime-Datenbank-erfasst-in-Grossbritannien-alle-Ein-und-Ausreisen--/meldung/127093

The Bundeswehr is reportedly assembling a "Cyberwar-Unit", which additionally to protecting the armed forces' IT infrastructure from attacks, is also supposed to scout and manipulate other computers or "adversarial networks". According to information available to the news magazine "Der Spiegel" the troupe consists of several dozen alumni of the universities of the Bundeswehr in computer-sciences and are stationed in Rheinbach near Bonn.

The "Hackers-in-Uniform", as the Hamburg-based news magazine ["Der Spiegel"] called them, are currently in training and the troupe will be reportedly fully operational the next year. The strictly classified unit is subordinate to the Kommando Strategische Aufklaerung (Strategical Reconnaissance Command) under command of brigadier Friedrich Wilhelm Kriesel

The Bundeswehr has issued no statement to the report. According to the Grundgesetz [German constitution], the German self-defence forces are prohibited from assuming interior tasks. There are, however, plans to abolish this ban.

While experts are arguing world-wide, whether the term cyber-war is actually correct, as there are no casualties, there seem to be a consensus, that the defence of such threats is one of the task of the armed forces of a country.
Regardless, whether in retrospect the cyber-attack on Estland is counted as a war, or not, every nation, which has a substantial IT-infrastructure, is taking the potential threat of cyber-attacks seriously.

All links are leading to German pages. No guarantees on the accuracy of the translation, especially the military terms.

The Bundeswehr is reportedly assembling a "Cyberwar-Unit", which additionally to protecting the armed forces' IT infrastructure from attacks, is also supposed to scout and manipulate other computers or "adversarial networks". According to information available to the news magazine "Der Spiegel" the troupe consists of several dozen alumni of the universities of the Bundeswehr in computer-sciences and are stationed in Rheinbach near Bonn.

The "Hackers-in-Uniform", as the Hamburg-based news magazine ["Der Spiegel"] called them, are currently in training and the troupe will be reportedly fully operational the next year. The strictly classified unit is subordinate to the Kommando Strategische Aufklaerung (Strategical Reconnaissance Command) under command of brigadier Friedrich Wilhelm Kriesel

The Bundeswehr has issued no statement to the report. According to the Grundgesetz [German constitution], the German self-defence forces are prohibited from assuming interior tasks. There are, however, plans to abolish this ban.

While experts are arguing world-wide, whether the term cyber-war is actually correct, as there are no casualties, there seem to be a consensus, that the defence of such threats is one of the task of the armed forces of a country.
Regardless, whether in retrospect the cyber-attack on Estland is counted as a war, or not, every nation, which has a substantial IT-infrastructure, is taking the potential threat of cyber-attacks seriously.

All links are leading to German pages. No guarantees on the accuracy of the translation, especially the military terms.

The Bundeswehr is reportedly assembling a "Cyberwar-Unit", which additionally to protecting the armed forces' IT infrastructure from attacks, is also supposed to scout and manipulate other computers or "adversarial networks". According to information available to the news magazine "Der Spiegel" the troupe consists of several dozen alumni of the universities of the Bundeswehr in computer-sciences and are stationed in Rheinbach near Bonn.

The "Hackers-in-Uniform", as the Hamburg-based news magazine ["Der Spiegel"] called them, are currently in training and the troupe will be reportedly fully operational the next year. The strictly classified unit is subordinate to the Kommando Strategische Aufklaerung (Strategical Reconnaissance Command) under command of brigadier Friedrich Wilhelm Kriesel

The Bundeswehr has issued no statement to the report. According to the Grundgesetz [German constitution], the German self-defence forces are prohibited from assuming interior tasks. There are, however, plans to abolish this ban.

While experts are arguing world-wide, whether the term cyber-war is actually correct, as there are no casualties, there seem to be a consensus, that the defence of such threats is one of the task of the armed forces of a country.
Regardless, whether in retrospect the cyber-attack on Estland is counted as a war, or not, every nation, which has a substantial IT-infrastructure, is taking the potential threat of cyber-attacks seriously.

All links are leading to German pages. No guarantees on the accuracy of the translation, especially the military terms.

One thing that I'm certain would be a part of future "wishes and plans" to censor (if not already part of the proposed filter) would be Nazi paraphernalia.

This is already being done [German], at least in the state NRW. They starting blocking in 2002, and a court determined it's legal in 2005.

To provide some perspective for US readers, here's a NY Times article on how unique the First Amendment is.

they do... but tapping into that for that small fish is a bit overpowered.

Espescially if that kind of scam is SO common, that there are loads of Detailed Howtos available. Including sample letters . As already said: http://www.heise.de/ct/07/20/098/ Read it, print it, sign it, send it. Done.

Plus, the summary is rather misleading. whats stated there, is perfectly legal. (Start subscription site for open source downloads) as long as you're honest and upfront with the subscription fees.

The actual scamming part is putting a huge "for free" or "register free" button there and if you scroll down 15m there is in 4pt grey-on-white "free for the first 4 seconds then you pay x"

THAT is the only thing in question here. and (at least the summary) doesnt say anything about that.

definitly. thats part of the scam.

http://www.heise.de/ct/07/20/098/

Read it. Print it. Sign it. Send it. Thats cheaper and will work too.

These schemes usually work a little bit differently.
The invoice isn't for the software itself but rather a subscription fee for the website.

But still, I would suggest to just ignore the invoice and everything following it until she get's some mail from court.

Those schemes rely on people guillable (sp?) enough to not only agree to such involuntary subscriptions but also to pay up due to fear of more trouble.

But actually, it's the company that doesn't dare to bring the situation to court, because then they would most probably be told tu shut up and sack their subscription system.
Consumer protection luckily does actually exist in Germany and the EU.

More reading matter (German):
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Abofallen-Betreiber-werden-dreister--/meldung/116244
http://www.computerbetrug.de/nachrichten/newsdetails/amtsgericht-wiesbaden-widerspricht-mahnungen-von-katja-guenther-080915/