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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 ..."
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]
i think germania realized that in order to prevent anything resembling what happened with Hitler and the Nazis, the citizens must be free to think as they want, must be able to go on with their lives with the privacy and freedom that all humans deserve.
Ironically, you are free to think anything you want -- except if it has to do with Nazism. The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Understandable given the history, but German is hardly the home of free thinkers.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
First, they aren't "moving to OSS for all government". The Bundestag will use Linux as servers (including authentication etc.), while the clients will get WinXP. Other federal institutions do pretty much what they want to.
Second, the german government does most certainly not care so much about civil rights as you may think. Especially after 9/11 (and yes, I know the WTC wasn't exactly a german institution, but most germans seem to have forgot) there was quite a great backslash in civil rights, especially regarding privacy.
For example, a few days after, the minister of inner affairs (?) Otto Schily proposed that police should have the right to know about any of your banking transactions. Also, they started the "Rasterfahndung", meaning that they would get all information about "suspect" persons - mostly muslimic students - from all kinds of sources, including their universities, power suppliers, post offices etc. Of course, some people noticed that this was unconstitutional, but well, who cares...
Another incident was some guy proposing to force ISPs to block certain sites, which some ISPs promply did (including some universities), althoug the guy proposing it did not have any authority to force it.
Even before, there's a long record of not-so-privacy-respecting incidents. One of the funnier ones was a law that tried to force ISPs to keep every piece of data their customers sent and recieved for IIRC 7 years, while of course guaranteeing confidentality when passing over this data to the police. Of course, the ISPs protested, if only because of the costs of keeping such an amount of data.
It's hard to compare the situation between two countries, scince most people just know one of them good enough, but germany if definitely not a civil rights paradise.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Oh, and scince you seem to worry, there are still more than enough nazis aroung here, thank you. They still manage to kill a foreigner or to destroy a jewish cemetary once month or so. Of course, the good times of the early nineties are over, where nazis sieged a house inhabited mostly by vietnamese guest-workers for three days in Rostock, having fun with molotow-cocktails, applauded by their Volksgenossen, protected by the police, and supported by the free press.
It's not as if nazis weren't still a real problem in germany, you know.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
For what it's worth, when I visited some relatives in Germany about 8 years ago (?), my uncle mentioned a couple of laws that I found absolutely astounding. First, it was illegal to leave your car (and house? Can't remember) unlocked for any period of time. If you are making multiple trips, you are required to lock the car between each trip. That's just the law (don't know if it was local or what).
I live in Germany and I must say that these laws are something like US sex laws, laws that maybe really exist but nobody cares about them.
I've been to Europe a couple of times in a number of countries. There is no question that Europe is a great place to visit, but there's no way I would ever live there. They have absolutely no concept of freedom.
People get much more freedom in most european countries. Look at the Human Freedom Index by the UN. Other Source here.
Not to mention that it has by far the best highway system in the world.
Never heard about the German Autobahn ? The german highway system where you can drive your car without a speed limit ?
Jan
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.
> First, they aren't "moving to OSS for all government". The Bundestag will use Linux as servers (including authentication etc.), while the clients will get WinXP. Other federal institutions do pretty much what they want to.
The initiative of the BSI suggested to replace Workstations OS as well with Open Source, though. At least one source seduced to mix this up.
The backlash in civil rights was hard by letter of the law but comparably low by execution. Thereby enabling far more gov-fscking-you than they actually do and lowering the outcry about those laws.
> Another incident was some guy proposing to force ISPs to block certain sites, which some ISPs promply did (including some universities), althoug the guy proposing it did not have any authority to force it.
That is wrong. It was not related to 9/11. The guy proposing it had the right to do it and the right to enforce it by one law, but not by another. As soon as that contradiction is resolved, we will be clear (of whatever is wiped away with it, freedom or censoship). That EU stuff takes some time to ooze through to nations laws.
But doubtless that Juergen Buessow IS a sick prick of rarely known magnitude.
I know both systems better than a fair amount of their respective inhabitants concerning civil rights. Remember, though, them are the ones who have the right to vote. Civil rights are better in rare spots in the US, but overall money buys you anything there.
Germany is not a paradise rights wise sometimes, cause it is moving towards the U$A.
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.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.