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Schluss For Germany's Oldest Online Service

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the in-den-sauren-apfel-beissen-m�ssen dept.

Rolo Tomasi writes: "Germany's first online service, BTX (Bildschirmtext) is shutting down. BTX had a history of major security flaws, which made the Chaos Computer Club famous." Non-speakers might want to try a translation.

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Still In Use by bamberg29 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Germans still used this up to now for the so called 'Classic' applications such as home banking. T-Online (large German ISP) was the one that kept this system up until now mostly for the homebanking applications, but they have now migrated it to regular TCP/IP protocols.

    So now they can finally get rid of it.

  2. Micropayment by Lars+T. · · Score: 3, Interesting
    BTX allowed micropayment, in a way that a page you loaded could cost money, from between DM 0.01 to 9.99 (the system would ask you before you loaded it of course).

    When the CCC found an exploit in the system, they informed (the then still state owned monopolistic mail/phone company) Deutsche Bundespost. The DBP said there was nothing wrong, so the CCC used the exploit to get the computer from a bank to call up their page again and again, untill the bank owed the more than DM 10,000. They gave it back the next day, and BTX got a very bad press.

    --

    Lars T.

    To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

  3. minitel still works ! by dario_moreno · · Score: 2, Interesting


    the equivalent in France, Minitel, still works,
    although for the first time it is reported
    that online purchases on the Web overtook
    those on Minitel this Xmas. (talking 10^9 $ here).

    Talk about a business model : reliable content
    due to synchronous, non packet data transmission,
    billed on the minute with a large number of
    phony pRon sites. I think that in 20 years
    more than 10 billion $ net profit were taken
    by France Telecom and all the content providers.
    about 10 million terminals were given for free
    to telephone line suscribers ; I think
    that it was the initial leverage that BTX
    neglected to apply.

    The system still rocks to find a phone #,
    book train tickets or check a bank account balance : the system boots in less than 10 s and
    connects to the site in about the same duration.

    The bandwidth admittely sucks, as well as the
    graphics (about the same half graphics characters as IBM 850), but to get something done quickly
    and reliably, it still is unbeatable.

    --
    Google passes Turing test : see my journal