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Encryption For All Sponsored by German Govt.
fiffilinus writes: "The German Ministry of Economics uses the CeBIT computer fair as a forum to propagate its GnuPP (Gnu Privacy Project -- I know, it is *not* GPG, but GPG is part of the package) encryption package to the public, giving away CD-roms with the package. The CeBIT press release can be found here. The download for those who can't make it to CeBIT is here. The package is available in English too, but the page itself has to be put through the fish, as usual. Finally a government that moves in the right direction ..."
...sponsorship is not the same thing as ownership.
How to Download YouTube Videos
The government could have put a BACK DOOR into this package rendering all your cryptographically-delivered pr0n viewable by the evil empire!
======== In the future, everything will be artificial. ========
Until MS start watching them closely.
He said the government was moving in the right direction, not solving all the world's problems. Remember, the longest journey begins with a single step.
All governments have their + and -. Germany seems to be into "common sense", open source and linux. Just few weeks ago there was an article on /. about Germany's government converting all government boxes to Linux. ..... too bad US government has all old people in there not willing to change their thinking to keep up with technology.....
We all know that the prupose of personal cryptography is to hide sensitive information from a ccorrupt government. This has always been the case, and this is why the government keeps trying to prevent it from becming common.
So why would the government of Germany want their citizens to talk without knowing what they arte talking about? In itself it doesn't make sense.
The only possible anser is that they have developed a high speed decryption computer, and can read everything. They feel people will feel safer sending emails, and give away more.
Don;t let them get away with it. Change your encryption algorithm. PGP is broken!
Why is it that we need to go to Germany to get software to protect our freedom of speech?
What is wrong with this picture?
comment directly in my journal
Somehow, I doubt the government's good intentions. If they are supplying encryption, free to everyone, it must be for some reason. I would conjecture either because it has a backdoor that the government already knows about. Or, the strength of the encryption is within their grasp to crack and therefore, this free program will inhibit further encryption growth and research. Who would want to spend money on something, if it's already free? This doesn't sound like a pure philanthropic endeavor.
The fish is a bit weird on the translations. Anyone got a link for a better translation engine?
Isn't Brazil another goverment that has been known to enbrace open source? However embracing open source, and pushing open source warez to your population is another. This sets a new presedence in that regard.
I think here in the USA, the goverment would rather do the oposite. Like the key escro stuff a few years ago, and now the DMCA.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
At the CeBIT the Federal German Ministry of Economics distributes for free the mail encryption program GnuPP 1.1 complete with manual. The mail roboter Adele shall provide a lead-in to the issue by practising the krypto mail communication together with the user.
The Federal German Ministry of Economics is supporting the open source project GnuPP (GNU Privacy Project) since the year 2000. With that the Ministry wants to provide the development of a cryptography infrastructure that does not depend on manufacturers, that is safe and corresponds to international standards. It would not be recommended to use standard software in security sensitive areas and the Ministry explicitly warns to do so in its press release. Only the open source principle allows the user to look at the complete programming of a software, and that means security to the greatest extent.
Apart from the software the package of the Ministry contains a two-piece manual that is completely new written and designed. With the help of this manual even laypersons shall be able to clear the first hurdle of e-mail encryption. And something else is new: "Adele" (adele@gnupp.org), an exercise roboter for practising the procedure of encryption and decryption as often as the entry-level user will need it. Adele reacts to sent-in public keys and encrypted e-mails, sends its own public key, and answers to encrypted and decrypted incoming e-mails. In this way a dialog between correspondence partners is formed so that entry-level users can practise transactions of e-mail encryption "like in real life" and may gain confidence in the safety of this procedure.
At the CeBIT one can get the GnuPP package (manual with CD-ROM) for free at the stands of the Federal German Ministry of Economics. During the entire fair the Ministry also provides presentations and advisory service for free.
For background informations and details on the fair please surf tecCHANNEL.DE and read our big CeBIT Special (German only, please bear with us). Moreover we have compiled for you all CeBIT news in category-specific news channels. (jlu/bmu)
Federal German Ministry of Economics: pavilion11, stand D25
Pavillon D / 11, stands 76 and 5
Wherez all the trollz?
Jesus, at least I got a link in dailyrotten.com today. The one about the U of I election being won by two comic strip characters.
[[Ay fukkand lyke ane furious Fornicatour]]
Their primary motive is to let German individuals and corporations protect themselves from Echelon and similar projects.
...
Which makes me think - no wonder France and Germany have their own Linux distributions and the U.K. doesn't! A grain of security concerns, a grain of national pride, and perhaps a grain of software nationalism, etc...
Get the funny part of the press release (I think they kind of screwed up the translation):
---------
...is safe and corresponds to international standards. It would not be recommended (sic!) to use standard software in security sensitive areas and the Ministry explicitly warns to do so in its press release.
---------
And of course they can't push MS products at CeBIT, it wouldn't help them in any way. But they had to do something and Linux has always made a good means for low-cost self promotion
all this crypto stuff is not only to hide things. since we all know how easy it is to alter an email header, cryptography allows you to authenticate yourself by signing your emails 'n stuff. more cryptographic authentication 'in the wild' could encourage more the sceptic fellow men to use emails. maybe that's a part of the motiv. on the other hand, industrial espionage is still en vogue.
With a few thousands illegal patents delivered by europe software patent factory, it would be fun to count how many patents this government sponsored software infringes :). Hopefully
some German politicians clearly said no to patents. After France, there's hope to get a software patents free Europe if Germany officials say no too.
First they decided to get rid of Windows in the government and are moving to OSS for all government IT installations if I remember correctly. Now they're promoting hard encryption for all their citezens. This seems like a government that truly cares about the rights of its citzens, especially where privacy and technology are concerned.
/. Enlighten us, please...
What is the catch? What makes Germany less or more desireable for people who are concerned about their rights as they relate to technology, privacy, or otherwise?
I know there are some english speaking Germans reading
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I just hope the German goverment is realeasing a bug-free product. What all the people that are going to vote next time say if they realise that their goverment sponsored a security tool that missed to be secure itself?
The Ministry for Security and Information Technology has another CD on their CeBIT stand - and for free (I guess "as in beer") order. I don't know if that's the same CD, but this one is about security in Internet/eMail, too.
Here's the link from the BSI: http://www.bsi.de/presse/aktuell/sich_cd.htm.
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
While I agree that cryptography CAN be used to hide sensitive information from a corrupt government that is by far not the only use: Encryption of sensitive business information that is sent through email, financial documents you don't want someone who steals your laptop to have access to, or personal notes that you don't want others who may use your workstation to see, that is just to enumerate a few. While the press release says that the German government does not recommend their software in "security sensitive areas" but since the product is open source one could imagine that this is only the first step in createing a heir to the PGP throne, which may be in need as NAI trys to dump that section. Government conspiracies are nothing new but it seems unlikely that they would create a new program(when one exists), make it open source, and expect people to flock to it like seagulls to food.
You may recall (if not google can help you find out), that the German govt was a tad upset over the Echelon flap and the British RIPA law. The degree of regulatory control the German gubmint already has over everday life in Germany is pretty darn impressive. Perhaps someone from Germany could weigh in with an opinion?
I'm sure if the gubmint wants to crack down on their radical right (aka neo-nazis) or outlawed religious organizations (aka COS) they won't find the nature of the encryption employed by those organizations a major problem in prosecuting the lawbreakers.
I'm not saying they don't have their own bunch of control freaks in their gubmint over there, but they also have a certain amount of recent history in favor of encryption - simply to prevent other governments from spying on their citizens (especially their corporate citizens) Face it, they recognize they have a lot to lose from "corporate espionage" if it makes German corps less competitive.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
That is less naive than you are foolishly cynical. But being cynical is chic I suppose, reguardless of how asinine the position you have to adopt is.
Nitpick.
In germany, the "banned" games are really just put on an "index". These games aren't banned per se -- they can still be bought and sold. They just cannot be advertised or promoted in any way shape or form -- this includes being on visible shelf in a store.
It's not like you can't get them, it's just that it's harder.
Although most younger Germans are very friendly to Americans, many of the older folks are downright hostile. If you start speaking to them in English, they walk away.
Maybe those folks didn't speak English? It is Germany, you know. :)
To tell you the truth, I didn't encounter any of that when I was there. The people seemed really friendly. Of course, I have blond-haired blue-eyed German genes in me, but my attitude still screams "American!" from a mile away. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Bah, this is as old and stale as a Jay Leno monologue. Get some new material.
If someone walked up to you and started speaking in a language you didn't understand, what would you do? If you shrugged your shoulders and walked away would that make you a "bigot"?
Europe has changed in 8 years. I don't know whether these laws in Germany have changed or not, though I suspect the EU mandated they be removed since they were in effect protectionist.
That being said, sometimes a bit of regulation is a good thing. If the gov't makes rules to force businesses to prove their product work and deliver what the commercial says, is that an infringement of liberty? Right now, you can buy a $5 blender at kmart that will work - once. The stronger consumer rights in (parts of?) Europe mandates warranties that keep such scams off the market. Things cost a bit more, but they appear to be working better and for longer than the stash I bought when I lived in the States.
Basically, more liberty for the consumer, less for the business. I believe that businesses that abuse their liberties should have those taken away, just like what happens when the citizens behave irresponsibly.
Stop the brainwash
Ha ha. Your expletives merely serve to illustrate that you should up your prozac dose.
What's your suggestion? No governments?
Apart from the obvious fact that more that just governments out there want to look at your data, without them well, there'd be no government, at least until someone next door marched in.
None of this makes the German move one in the wrong direction whether or not governments are the primary source of concern. They probably shouldn't be, but we all need our bogey men I suppose.
Now I've seen it all!
Appended to the end of comments I post? 120 chars?!
While Germany does not have a First Amendment, it does have an "Artikel 5 Absatz 1 Grundgesetz". Here is my attempt to translate it to English:
Everyone has the right to freely state and distribute his opinion in spoken, written or imaged form and to obtain information from publicly available sources without limit. The freedom of the press and the freedom of reporting on radio and TV are granted. There is no censonship.
Heh, "cool thing" like teaching of evolution in schools or offering of evolutionary literature in libraries in certain Southern US states has become, I could imagine. Or showing tits in telly anywhere in the land of the "free".
______________
OTTERS RULE.
...because it is in Germanys interest to strengthen the privacy of it's citizens and businesses.
With the whole Echelon thing going on (and the EU has officially expressed it's concern about this. For example it is very concerned that the US government "leaks" sensitive info to corps in order to give them a competitive edge.)
So in this case it seems that the european governments has a common interest with the tin foil hat community.
There is really no reason to be paranoid, and it will probably boost encryption and security concerns in european corporations, when governments actually endorse it.
Do not underestimate the power of this! It is clearly a Good Thing (tm)
And if strong encryption is standard in Europa, the US will follow sooner or later...
I work for a government agency in a small european country, and I for one welcomes this. It will make my daily evangelization a lot easier.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
This article made me laugh as I thought of the fact that one of the main reasons the allies in WW II were able to decript and read Enigma traffic was that the Nazis were convinced that it was unbreakable. Germany is learning a lesson from history and going with a reviewable protocol and implementation, it would seem. Then again, human factors played an important role in breaking Enigma, and I would figure similar poor use of even modern cryptography could lead folks of an intellect similar to those who broke enigma to break selected PGP, GnuPP traffic.
That also makes me wanna quote Vizzini from the Princess Bride: "Inconceivable". I wonder if the German high command ever had that thought.
Man Encryption -> Nazis -> Princess Bride. I didn't get enough sleep.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
From the translation:
The GPA - Source texts can download you here.
The "you" was actually a link! There I was thinking I was a sentient being, when all I am is gpa-0.5.0.tar.gz. Oh well. Can someone out there untar me?
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
What if I want to buy a Blender that only needs to work once, and all I have is $5? In America I have that choice, but you are saying in Europe I do not?
That's not my definition of consumer freedom.
Have you considered that it is very impolite, when abroad, to start a conversation in English, without trying the local language first? Even ifyou can only manage 'Hello, do you speak English Please?'
If English wasn't my first language, I'd be inclined to ignore someone who started talking to me in English, or even reply 'Sprechen Du Deutsch?'
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
If there 200 known corruption affair and the spiegels speak of it, then our justice system and journalistic system are working good. Think of this too : the average german is as corrupt as the average austrlian as the average US-american. It is in the nature of Man to exploit cituation of power. Now how many affair of corruption is there investigated at the moment in USA ?
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
> Everyone has the right to freely state and distribute his opinion in spoken, written or imaged form and to obtain information from publicly available sources without limit. The freedom of the press and the freedom of reporting on radio and TV are granted. There is no censorship.
However, this right seems to be overridden by other laws.
For example, it is illegal to deny the extermination of the Jews occurred in Germany. So surely there is censorship?
While this example is perhaps understandable, it does seem slightly odd to need to legislate against the demonstrably false opinion of a small group of ignorant and bigoted people.
that the German government still listens too much to the US government and the MPAA mafia. They didn't do much against the back-to-the-stone-age "Cybercrime Convention", for example. Also, the European Patent Office is in Germany. And on no other country citizens pay as much "taxes for the poor artists" on CD-Rs, CD-R media, tapes, scanners etc. And soon on computers, too.
Also, the taxes are quite high (not as high as Scandinavia, though).
Do you have to be told that France and Germany, unlike G.B. do not speak English when the distributions were started? As far as I know, they still don't speak English...
that happened once, and as far as i know the guy (only males can be drafted) didn't have to do it, and everybody was making fun of the situation.
there are thousands of children with german mothers and american fathers, and _of course_ they are free to live with their parents, wherever that may be. i personally knew a girl like that, moved to the us when her dad was transferred. no problem.
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making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Because it does happen only if the parents are drug addicts or whatever...
that is because the first -- and thus most important -- article reads "the dignity of humans is untouchable" (well, my translation :) ) and so it overrides the no censorship part.
for example, stating that there was no holocaust is considered touching the dignity of those who were murdered in concentration camps.
good thing.
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making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
some people are not able to kill themselves. euthanasia usually is applied if someone who is going to die anyway preferres to die with dignity instead of slowly perishing through months of pain.
my sister's a nurse. they actually get asked by some patiants to "let them die", but it's illegal here, so they have to watch them suffer as the patiants often can't do it themselves.
but hey, if god lets them die slowly and painfully, they proberbly deserved it, right?
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making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
> Have you considered that it is very impolite, when abroad, to start a conversation in English, without trying the local language first?
German IS FUCKING HARD, I have to admit. I can wipe away 99.9% of native speakers by just arguing anything I want in Germany. But I do know only little about that language. And I only spoke to the first guard of the first door. but behind him there were more guards so mighty that even that guard was not even able to even look at them....
> Sprechen Du Deutsch?
Funny enough, that is wrong.
Just dont care, go ahead to young people in Germany and speak English. They will understand that better than any broken and accent prone German you try, except if they know b4 you are learning.
Here's a great quote from William S. Burroughs (I believe):
Josh
Is there any reason we are to trust the german govt. any more than we do the NSA? I'm not sure I trust either. Not that I want to support uncooperation but I say lets keep our guard up.
Germany DID NOT ban the Nazi party for no reason. Actually, the gov'ment is checking wheter (sic) they should be banned or not.
The NPD - an existing right-extremist German party, which you are obviously referring to, because the German government is currently trying to have it banned - is not the same thing as the NSDAP, which was the Nazi party during the Third Reich.
The NSDAP, on the other hand, has been forbidden. See the Verbotsgesetz.
Somewhere around the latter half of the third trimester, usually. Most babies can be born prematurely during that time and still have a somewhat reasonable chance of good health and survival if given the proper care. Aborting any time after 24 weeks of pregnancy is very chancy and only done if the woman's health is otherwise in a greater risk from the abortion not being performed than from performing it.
I'd say self-sustaining for a baby would be the ability to remain alive when breathing air, and metabolizing nutrients orally or (in extreme cases as is sometimes necessary with humans of the more adult variety) intraveinously, and is provided warmth and care. Extremely premature babies, especially those born before being 24 weeks old, don't often stand a chance of survival outside of the womb, even with specialised medical assistence. Those born after, often do, though it must be admitted that in their adult lives they are often plagued with myriad health problems.
Whether or not you think morality should depend on technology is immaterial. Historically, morality does depend on technology more specifically, the knowledge attained as a byproduct of scientific and technological advancement. Perhaps to a smaller or greater degree, but that's a fact.
If you dig through the literature, you can find all kinds of stories of people being harrassed, persecuted, and even murdered for things such as catching a disease which no one understood at the time and believed was the result of being in league with the devil or some such nonsense. These days, we know what causes a vast majority of these diseases thanks to advances in medical science, and it has, thus far, had nothing to do with being in league with Satan.
We consider sexual licentiousness a much less morally wrong or questionable thing (indeed, some even encourage it!) throughout most of the western world in large part due to the advent of birth control, a technology which allowed women to have more control of their reproductive systems.
If you think really hard about it, I'll bet you can find even more examples. A good starting point might be James Burke's Connections television programmes that play on The Discovery Channel from time to time.
That's an overgeneralization and therefore patently false. I have known plenty of atheists and agnostics who use specious and otherwise ill-founded arguments when discussing certain topics. Likewise, I have known highly religious people who use solid and defendable facts in their arguments that don't always wholly utilize dogma, even if they make reference to it.
Don't think that just because you aren't a religious person that you're less fallible in arguments of morality than someone who is. Anyone who has really seriously considered their position on an argument doesn't speak of 'Truth'; they speak of facts. So far, you're as full of hogwash as anyone else who has posted in this thread.
Your username, unfortunately, does not suit you.
And boy, oh boy is this way off topic...
Hi Anonymous Coward,
>Do you have to be told that France and Germany,
>unlike G.B. do not speak English when the
> distributions were started?
Yes, but I also understand that if I wanted, say, Chinese laguage on my desktop, it would be cheaper to localize PO files and contribute to, say, KDE L18N, than to create and maintain my own home-grown Linux distribution.
If the German and French market can support a home grown distribution (support in the profit sense), the U.K. market should be capable of it too, but we see no U.K. Linux distributions. It can't be explained soley by localization problems.
And think about the open sores penis. Ouch!