Slashdot Mirror
German Gov't, Free Software, and Secure E-mail
friday2k writes "There is a nice Article on Newsforge describing how the German Government moves ahead on looking into Free Software solutions for government agencies. And you need a standard, secure, email client for this." Basically, they are funding some good secure e-mail - but making sure that it works with stuff like Kmail.
Germany... Last bastion for open communcation? Give it twenty years... The U.S. govt. is doing it's best to shove the genie back into the bottle... Shouldn't this be a sign to them?
You don't need to be a streetlawyer to predict Adequacy.org's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Adequacy faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Adequacy.org because Adequacy is dying. Things are looking very bad for Adequacy. As many of us are already aware, Adequacy continues to lose site traffic.
Let's try to keep the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot leader Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda states that there are about 5000 semi-regular posters to Slashdot.org. How many users of Geekizoid are there? The ratio of Slashdot to Geekizoid posts is roughly in ratio of 100 to 1. Therefore there are about 5000/100 = 50 occasional Geekizoid posters. The ratio of Adequacy posters to Geekizoid posters is about 5 to 1. Therefore there are 50 * 5 = 250 occasional posters to Adequacy.org. This is approximately equal to the number of editors listed on Adequacy's website added to the eleven non-editors who read the site.
Traffic to Adequacy continues to diminish. In July 2001, Adequacy received approximately 160,000 pageviews. In August, Adequacy received only 80,000 pageviews. The number of pageviews in September (as of September 11) is 60,000, a
paltry 37% of its July traffic. At current rates, the amount of Adequacy traffic will hit 0 by the end of the year.
According to Netcraft, Adequacy's situation is grim. Due to the troubles of Speakeasy DSL, DoS attacks and so on, Adequacy was forced out of business and was taken over by JAT Computer Consulting which hosts another troubled website. Now JAT Computer Consulting is also dying, its corpse being turned over to another charnal house.
All major surveys show that Adequacy has steadily declined in readership. Adequacy is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Adequacy is to survive at all it will be among right-wing maniacs, Libertarians, and trolls. Adequacy continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Adequacy.org
is dead.
I would applaud this but would only suggest that open source developers not gravitate too closely to the governments of the world for cues and support in development of new security software.
They will order code they can understand and code they can master, and will want multiple accesses to encryption (such as back-doors) that truly render it useless in an intelligence capacity.
Give the government strong crypto controled by a single trusted admin. Distributing information and accesses simply opens the door to moles. The US government has seen several, such as Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames.
If an agent is communicating with a handler far away via encrypted email, not even the handler's supervisors should be able to override the encryption. Especially them.
Goat sex free since 2001
By doing this, they are saving their taxpayers a bundle (easily billions) by not spending so much on licensing fees from Sun or Microsoft. That money saved can go to greater things like making better schools, etc.
The article starts out saying that Congress wants to outlaw Open source via the SSSCA.
Perhaps congress should visit our German buddies and see how a switch to OSS can benefit the American public. A little bit of seeing what's happening abroad could go a long way.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
I would advocate that governments only use open source projects...
the fact that the DoJ was supposedly at war with M$, while at the same time handing over some of M$'s largest contracts seems insane...
I would almost call it a chuch/state issue...
Hi,
Living in this country that "supports open source" I am rather sceptically about the whole issue.
The German parliament was also "looking into alternatives for Windows especially Linux", they said. And a few weeks later it was announced that they had made a new deal with Microsoft who gave them some better conditions than originally offered. Linux was no longer an option after that. What do we learn from that: Linux makes a good argument when you want a good deal from Microsoft.
twm
The problem is of course that standardization in software is a good thing - but too much is a bad thing. I don't know that anyone has figured out where the golden mean is between the two poles. We obviously need some sort of standard software to run our computers, and we need some sort of quality assurance. Open Source certainly is a candidate to develop a standard (think RFC) - but in its present form the quality of software offered is uneven. (Some is extraordinary, some is crap.)
Perhaps the real way to develop a vendor agnosticism would be to actively support and have people on the goverment payroll contribute to the open-source development model. That way the goverment is actively looking out for its own interest, but in a way which supports communal development.
Which of course sounds good, but I have no idea what it would look like... or how it would play out.
In illa quae ultra sunt
One of the tactics of the black hats seems to be to dig around for information from places, and perhaps in ways, which might not be quite so easy for them to get access to, when the white hats learn to use encryption as well as "they" do.
For example, consider mining an airline booking site to see which flights have special prices. This type of information retrieval might become better protected, because such information could lead to speculation about the human-density on the flight.
Consider also, that Europe, as Us, is devastated by every new MS worm that comes around. But if they'd only use SSL server encryption more widely, they'd be unbothered by such simple virusen. Managers will buy more servers, because SSL takes more horsies, (as every other form of encryption), users will share information in a more sensible way, the economy will rebound, etc., etc.. :)
I contend that the most interesting authorities built out of X.509, in any case objCA, sslCA, and objsign (from openssl docs and Netscape definitions), should continue to be widely encouraged. emailCA, perhaps is for the more mature organization, but an organizations email can sometimes be the biggest "hole" of all. It should be closed-up, in any good business activity, anywhere, eventually.
The point is, everyones already got this stuff. The playing field is even, and we have to fight dishonesty with the same tools as are being used to hide it.
Not to worry unless someone tells you to put your certificate on your head or your hand (right). Right?
It seems to me the free software movement has stalled in the USA. Witness the harsh laws, government and corporate comingling, etc.
I've often thought the only way for open source to succeed is for "other-than-USA" countries to embrace it...the USA just has too many influence peddlers and special interests involved in government to make the proper decisions...not to mention a population of dullards who know little of law and less of history. Harsh, but I beleive it true.
It's really looking like it will be the forward-thinking countries outside the USA who are going to turn the tide against "zero choice" monopoly software.
Even though I might have to watch, rather than participate, I'd really enjoy seeing Germany (and hopefully others!) give Bill Gates and his illegal corporation a "boot to the head".
I hope the Germans decide to do this...it's very impressive to see people standing up and demanding freedom, liberty, and choice from their government.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Living in this country that "supports open source" I am rather sceptically about the whole issue.
Well, you should know then that the German federal government has already sponsored the development of one widely-used Open Source project: GnuPG.
Details are available in English und auf Deutsch.
This is for real. The German government has realised that it has no confidence that its internal communications are secure and it cannot have that confidence if the communications infrastructure is run by Microsoft software - because they have no way of telling if there are or are not US government-controlled backdoors in Microsoft software. They also cannot be sure that the encryption systems built-in to Microsoft OSes and applications do not have unintentional subtle flaws that make them much easier to crack.
With all the (understandable) paranoia over the Echelon system, it is easy to see why they want a solid encryption solution that is entirely under their control.
It has nothing to do with price or better license conditions from Microsoft. It is about having an encryption system that is widely-used, rock-solid and verifiably free from backdoors.
Even if Microsoft offered the German government a source license, how can they be sure that the released version of Windows and the source code that they are offered are equivalent? Quite apart from anything else, there are significant chunks of Windows that Microsoft do not own the rights to, and thus cannot provide under a source license.
So, let me repeat again: this is not about Linux vs Windows. It is about having a solid, secure, verifiable communications channel that the German government can have confidence in - confidence that they cannot have with Microsoft software.