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Germany Scores First: Ends Verizon Contract Over NSA Concerns
schwit1 (797399) writes with word that, after revelations that Verizon assisted the NSA in its massive surveillance program, Germany is cutting ties with Verizon as their infrastructure provider. From the article: The Interior Ministry says it will let its current contract for Internet services with the New York-based company expire in 2015. The announcement comes after reports this week that Verizon and British company Colt provide Internet services to the German parliament and other official entities. ... Ministry spokesman Tobias Plate said Thursday that Germany wants to ensure it has full control over highly sensitive government communications networks.
New York and New Jersey.
Verizon has been fucking them for years...hard!
Never thought I'd feel bad for people from Jersey...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Nobody wants anything communications-related from the U.S.A. anymore.
Snowden is truly a hero.
This rocks.
I wonder if Verizon's lobbying budget is big enough to bring about any changes... maybe AT&T will help out on this one to keep the same from happening to them in other countries?
...never forgiven them for blighting us with that abortion they called a "reality show".
As for TFA, I'm kind of surprised that Germany's Interior Ministry hadn't been with Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile all this time.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
For their corporate lobbyists to actually get some movement on Capital Hill and attempt to undo this.
I guess it depends on where you are from, where I hail from nut up and ball(s) up are synonymous.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Well, the rest of the world can't do much. It's pretty much up to you guys in the US to fix it.
So make with the fixing already.
The way to evade beta, for now, is to use the URL http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 before you open any other Slashdot page. It's a cookies thing.
This public service announcement was brought to you by Beta Sucks (tm).
lol. keep up the reasoned, well-balanced discussion ppl. :D
Requiem for the American Dream
There's an illusion that the USA is unique in this. It isn't, it's just that there aren't any other whistleblowers.
If you contract with Deutsche Telecom, you'll be subjected to German intelligence interception certainly.
Realistically---you'll be subjected to German, British, Chinese, French, Russian, American and Israeli intelligence interception to some degree or another.
Germany should've learned their lesson, when a telegram sent to their Ambassador in Mexico was intercepted by the British — and shared with the US-government.
Had we not obtained that piece of intelligence, the history of the world could've been quite different...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
You don't understand. It could be impossible for him to disable it. The footer link and the nobeta=1 QS parameter sometimes just don't work at all for me, I guess because Slashdot Beta is just that fucking broken. But other times they do work just fine. It's a crapshoot, really. Even legends like Bjarne Stroustrup or Sir Tim Berners-Lee could get stymied by the same bug, and they'd have no choice but to make similar complaints, too. The real fix is just to totally get rid of the dung heap that's called the Slashdot Beta. That'll fix the problem completely, and properly.
VZ stock hardly changed today.
in the title.
Requiem for the American Dream
For a second I thought Slashdot was starting to get into sports reporting.
I wonder how many people are disabling the footer with no script or something? And I would guess that the do not track stuff built into browsers as a work around for websites ignoring the do not track marker might be the problem with the nobeta=1 QS parameter.
Of course those are guesses but if you haven't looked into it, perhaps it might lead you somewhere productive. I disabled cookies altogether a while back and found most all of my web pages loaded differently and on some, I had to log in every time I clicked a link or it forgot I was already logged in. Now I just clear my browser cookies every so often and when opening new sites.
Go ask the IRA about their "nutting squad" . . . or . . . maybe it's a better idea not to . . .
My first thought was, "Whose nut, youse guys?"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Mr. President! We must not allow...a mineshaft gap!
That's basically what this whole "We'll control it all ourselves. Mineminemineminemine!" idiocy is.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If they shared nothing but the name, that would be one thing, but they actually share the same management as far as I know.
A $2 whore is still a $2 whore even if she moves to another country.
Will be somewhat off-topic but still (somewhat) related.
De-americanization has officially began when Russia signed gas deal with China bypassing dollar. This process started long ago but with this deal it's now official. Things seem to speed up since then. Germany Verizon thing is just another domino piece falling. Regardless of what Americans think of it, I see it as a good thing. Aside from taking (most of the) world of american hegemony, ending of US imperial project can benefit Americans themselves - granted that their (incompetent and incredibly corrupt) government manages to transition from imperial power to ordinary (but better managed) country in orderly way (that is, without inciting WW3).
Message to fellow Americans: you're still one of the most progressive folks in the world (yet NOT the most ones), it's just your fucked up government that sucks, causes mayhem (Ukraine being the last manifestation of this) and blocks your potential. It's time to abandon your imperial/global hegemony policies - you can prosper pretty damn well in a multipolar world (much better than most of the rest). It all depends on you. BUT there are few things to do. You need to bring your fucked-up out-of-control government back in control, forget about american exceptionalism and learn to live in (competitive) multipolar world (ie. do not solve all problem using military or inciting civil wars).
You don't understand. It could be impossible for him to disable it.
It's easily disabled. There was a time when only techies read /.; now techies are the exception rather than the rule.
Sad times.
If it can be shown that the company is working against the countries interests (company treason?), such as in this case, ban them from all sales in that country. That really would get the attention deserved.
Damn straight.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
the low tech solution? login. I only see slashdot classic. the conversation view is better, it is easier to follow long threads. The best part? Slashdot classic allows you to login once and keeps you logged in. Mobile and Beta slashdot log me out of the system after every post, If I can login at all.
One would think Slashdot would have tested user logins without someone like 1password or apple keychain providing login every time.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Please correct me if i'm wrong.
This story has close to none coverage in Germany.
It's been dug up by a blogger (1) and reblogged by netzpolitik.org (2), who then started to ask questions.
There are some articles gathering up by now, but the big media seems to shush things.
The leading tv-stations (ARD & ZDF) that are publicly funded have no real content regarding this story.
This being said: ZDF does list a story in which the government looks as if it has addressed this problem entirely by itself. Some reuters-bot-written junk. (3)
But this was not the case, the government clearly had no intention to reveal it's ties to Verizon. If it wasn't for the blogger, they wouldn't have had to.
Now they're trying to downplay the story and to make the provided services look like a fallback routine or - even better - like an unused source.
The Fed. Ministry of Interior posted yesterday that it had contacted Verizon in 2010, ...they forgot to tell us when this would happen, but now it seems like they are ready for the big transition m(
telling them they would slowly withdraw from the contract, since the Verizon services were being replaced gradually by a new infrastructure for the Government. (4)
After the internet died last summer, this is a bad joke.
Anyhow:
also yesterday the big coalition has managed to finalize their decision regarding a hearing of E. Snowden.
They hold a majority within the exclusivly formed task force regarding the NSA affair.
They have decided mutually that a hearing can not take place on German soil - given the 'fact' that an extradition treaty with the US is in effect. (5)
1: Daniel Luecking http://medienkonsument.de/
2: https://netzpolitik.org/2014/arbeitserleichterung-fuer-die-nsa-deutscher-bundestag-bezieht-internet-von-us-anbieter-verizon/
3: http://www.heute.de/bund-baut-kommunikationsnetz-neu-ohne-us-partner-verizon-33792814.html
4: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/DE/2014/06/bund-wechselt-netzbetreiber.html
5: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nsa-affaere-grosse-koalition-verhindert-befragung-von-snowden-a-977742.html
umptions that the other way is better are silly.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It only ever happens to me on mobile, so no no-script there. What happens is you can see the link to use classic, and then it disappears behind some other div. To top it off, the stupid fucking website is "responsive," so it squishes itself down into a useless wad of mobile-site and fuck you if you'd rather it stayed a normal full page. So far as I know there's no way to disable CSS Media Queries without browser plugins so the design weenies have finally managed to get us good and stuck in their sweaty ass-crack of "modern web design."
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
Is it the same Germany whose BND secret service collaborated with NSA to spy on internet backbone links?
So, first other countries start dropping the dollar as the international reserve currency. Now they’re going to stop buying our products and services. Our economy is going to hell in a handbasket.
I feel your pain there. I use dolphin which I think is a Safari clone or based on the same engine or something like that. Anyways, I had to set it to pretend to be a desktop browser to get Slashdot to appear correctly. I don't know if it was beta or what, I didn't stick around long enough to pay attention before switching it out. But there are stupid pages where ads don't size properly and crap like that so I guess if I happen to get the same beta issues on mine, I might have to stop browsing slashdot from it. 90% of my time here is from the phone.
problem with the short sighted spying and lets spend crazy money on the military misses that economic might is certainly more important. You cannot pay for stupid expensive spying and military programs or twist the arms of other countries if you are not economically strong. Not only is the spying program Constitutionally wrong it is weakening the US in real and lasting ways.
First, what kind of numbnut country outsources their state communications services? Come on man.
Then who are they going to get as a replacement? Some other company that has no doubt already been suborned by a secret agency?
Russians have gas/oil and need money.
EU has the money and wants gas/oil.
They exchange them.
Putin has the power to upset everybody a great deal, to the point where he might not survive such a disruption. EU doesn't have the power to upset it's people by pushing Putin into such a situation- they still have democracy... Either way, they are not going to change their economic situation for long.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Have I missed something here? Are the German authorities really sending sensitive information over the internet unencrypted? It's just not that hard to set up VPNs
This sort of thing is starting to hurt, right in the pocket book where it counts. That is exactly the right response to companies stabbing their consumers in the back.
No it isn't. From mobile it is no longer possible to disable, it just redirects nobeta links to beta, and there is no login to beta, so no way of logging in and enforcing your settings. Yeah it is THAT broken.
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
A $2 whore is still a $2 whore even if she moves to another country.
No, then she's a 26 Peso whore.
The NSA has not only undermined our trust in the government (well... that's assuming there was any to begin with), but it's also wreaking huge devastation on our economy. How many US-based companies have lost huge amounts of foreign business due to these revelations?
It's NOT Snowden's fault for revealing these actions. It's the US Government's fault for having their fingers in every conceivable cookie jar in the world, and forcing US-based companies to assist them with it (willingly, unwillingly, and even unknowingly).
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
I log in. I still get the beta pages (about 2 out of 5 articles) even though I've specified classic view. You can see in the comments how I'm dealing with it. There are alternatives.
That is all.
No balls in America. The land of the free is no longer applicable and the home of the brave is a joke.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire