Schluss For Germany's Oldest Online Service

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.

Comments

Still In Use

[bamberg29]

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.

Micropayment

[Lars T.]

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.