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Germany, Seeking Independence From US, Pushes Cyber Security Research (reuters.com)
Germany announced a new agency earlier this week to fund research on cyber security and to end its reliance on digital technologies from the United States, China and other countries. From a report: Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told reporters that Germany needed new tools to become a top player in cyber security and shore up European security and independence. "It is our joint goal for Germany to take a leading role in cyber security on an international level," Seehofer told a news conference with Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen. "We have to acknowledge we're lagging behind, and when one is lagging, one needs completely new approaches."
So cringy.
Germany outlawed the ownership of "hacking tools" (202c StGB, "Acts preparatory to data espionage and phishing") , and all of a sudden, Internet security research in Germany is lagging.
I'm serious: the Israeli security forces, both physical and cybersecurity, are extremely effective for the same reason that penguins survive cold: Darwin forces their evolution. Now, Germany relying on Jewish security forces would be a wonderful irony.
will be spent on GDPR compliance. The remaining budget will be spent on foreign consultants, because using "hacking tools" is a crime in Germany, so no one knows how to use them.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
... after Obama wiretapped the German leader's 'phone.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
All German federal activities in the Internet so far have been uninformed, counter-productive, very late and generally of negative utility. This one will be the same.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Stupidity is the name of the game in Germany when the government collides with the Internet.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Given the raise of insular behaviour among the big countries recently, and considering that the same trends have been reacted to already in the HPC area, with the idea of an European HPC chips, the independence in all things economically and militarily necessary is increasingly prudent. If the big countries are gunning for a conflict among themselves, EU area might not want to be left in an increasingly impossible situation as the trading stops and missiles start flying.
There is still a long way to an emergency socialization of the strategic companies and technologies, and the mass employment to build, say, a Europe wide quantum information network.
Europeans can hee and haw all they want about how things are different and oh so better in their countries. At the end of the day when America says jump, European politicians always ask how high.
Besides, that welfare state won't look so good when Germany has to start paying for its own self defense instead of relying on foreign powers.
Have you never heard of SAP? Have you never heard of the CryEngine? Groups like the Chaos Computer Club?
Anyway, if they want cyber security for Europe they do have some larger players that could do some contract work.
AVAST and Avira are German companies. ESET is Slovakian company. Bitdefender is Romanian. F-Secure is Finnish. AVG is a Czech company. Of course since a government agency is responsible for this, it will most likely still not work as well as it could.
Germany doesn't have the intellectual base in computing? It's like you've been raised on American "news" channels, son.
It's always fun to see an American bragging about "American innovation". Have you ever looked at research papers from the large American universities? You may notice that overwhelmingly, the authors are foreign guest researchers. Do you know just how much of America's technology sector is carried by first generation immigrants, both naturalized citizens and H1B visa holders?
The reality is that your country's tech sector and "innovation" is the work of foreigners, and among them Germany is well represented, and when it comes to "intellectual base in computing", no country is farther behind for its socioeconomic size and population than America.
Your popular culture and educational institutes is literally shitting out nothing but ignorant twats. You USED to be a smart people, but now you're dumbed down by TV, gossip and eating, and foreigners have to carry you.
It's not the yanks they're worried about. It's the Russia, and Russia's proxies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It is not OR/OR it is AND/AND.
The US has hacked Germany (and other allies) before. It is like fucking your best mates wife. There are things you should not do, even if it is legal. And if you do, you must not be upset if suddenly he does not trust you anymore and does not want to be your best mate anymore.
So why SHOULD Germany trust the USofA? The USofA does not trust its allies (and I am not even asking that they should.), so what is good for the goose is good for the other black pot.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The German economy was lagging behind in the 30s and history shows how well the "completely new approach" worked.
Hmmmm, I wonder what earlier event could have been responsible for that. And the "completely new approach" wasn't new at all and is basically the exact one Trump is using to great effect right now.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
We are talking about Germans taking "completely new approaches" do recover about whatever they are lagging behind
Someone needs to tell those Merkeled Krauts that testicles are harder to replace than that...
As that is not happening, it is also not a problem. There are just some Nazis (yes, AfD has now openly collaborated with Nazis) that what to panic the population to profit from it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Worked fine until the US and communism fucked it up like usual.
So the solution will be death camps in silicon valley?
That's how you think history works?
And she is an actual scientist (PhD in Physics). How pathetic is that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well, this is different from normal distrust. If you think allies aren't spying on you, you're naive. But that's different from not *trusting* your allies.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Face it, the US cyber intelligence community (an oxymoron) is in total disarray. Its weapons have been exposed and re-weaponized for organized crime, it can't keep a cybersecurity "czar" in office, and it has a half-dozen competing agencies snooping and sniffing and still are unable to be of much use when an actual disaster happens.
Were I a German policy maker, I'd say: cut the meager tether and spend the money to protect myself and EU interests. I'm not sure the US is going to do that much longer, and in many areas, has already stopped cold.
And I'm sincerely hoping that the missiles don't fly.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Germany has privacy protections for its citizens. Just like all the other 'eyes', they need other nations to spy on their people for them (and of course vice versa).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
In reality, it's a mess. As stated, were I them, I'd cover my own butt. The US hasn't exactly built a mound of trust recently. They attack as much as they're attacked. I see router walls forming in the not distant future. Do you have a data passport? Ok. The mail was sent, the website accessed, the Salesforce query done.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Mr. President, there's this guy on Slashdot who has exposed our weakness in cyber. He knows a lot, we don't know how he got the information...although he could be talking out of his ass.
Mr. P.: Hey, don't knock talking out of your ass. I'm very smart, you know.
There's nothing wrong with hacking your friends and allies for information. It keep everyone honest...the alternative is going on jingoistic crusades against imagined hobgoblins....err...now if we could only keep those nasty hobgoblins off Fox.
More to the point, the Democrats have been demonizing the science and technology since the 1960's. Starting with Reagan, the Republicans saw they were being outflanked and decided they could be even dumber. Now both sides are racing towards a new Dark Ages.
In a further statement, the minister said "we will be importing vast numbers of people with completely different worldviews to work on this security initiative. What could possibly go wrong?"
Great! The Germans secure their own physical boarders as well. The 2017 US expenditures increased to $43B on Germany alon3:
https://tradingeconomics.com/g...
If they want independence from the US, they can flip the entire bill for their country. I'm sure we can find some roads, bridges or schools that need some investment here in the US with that 43 billion dollar windfall.
It's so pathetic when German politicians of the same kind that just scrapped well deployed Linux installations for government use in exchange for the US-Trojan "Windows" speak of "cyber security". No government is really free while it still depends on proprietary software controlled by software from a country far away.
Why any country with the capability to develop its own system would rely on other countries to do it for them has always been a mystery to me. It makes the 'security' part of the term meaningless.
You lump many conservative arguments into your reply, too many to disambiguate within the confines of /.
The reshuffling is both random, and pushing nations towards covering their own butts. Allies? Nope. Common cause? Nope. Humanitarian needs? Nope. The US can't even prevent post-disaster holocausts on their own soil.
Were it I, I wouldn't trust my data on foreign soil, but then, I don't even trust my next-door neighbor with my data. A government? The US or Germany? No.
I don't blame Germany, even if their own surveillance mechanisms have access to it. But encrypt on the wire, and in place. Anyone with sufficient interest knows who I am; slashdot is not immune from the NSA, and a myriad of intelligence services that kiss but don't tell... except each other.
What good is the sovereignty of a nation? Not so much these days. NAFTA changes will be bent and broken and reformed. History as a guide, the businesses fund the campaign contributions that make public policy, and when the contributions change their shape, so will the government.
Somewhere in the middle are methods to help starving countries, refugees, and the other trash of corporate welfare. The attempt to sequester data is Pyrrhic at best, and Quixote-ish when it's revealed that it was all for the votes and little else.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Exactly the same approach?
You have a failed understanding of history and current affairs.
You're perfect. Have any of the major news organizations asked you to apply to work for them?
The original European settlers were settlers, not immigrants. They did not inject themselves into an established country as immigrants. They bootstrapped the whole thing themselves, with encouragement from enlightened Europeans, especially the French.
Welcome to Slashdot. Don't let it worry you much. The denizens of Slashdot are in no way shape or form typical Americans.
You don't want to gamble with your life like that. I was trained by NSA at the University. Yet in the field they passed crazy crap laws and I didn't want any parts of that so I bailed out. Administration doesn't matter by the way. Both sides do dumb things in this area.
A lot of times in most countries encryption falls under the same laws that regulate arms. As in it would be like you selling say a box of grenades, rockets or guns to some other country. Gets crazy. I remember back in the 1980s they fined digital a bunch of money because one of their Vax 11/785 machines ended up in east Germany somehow. They vetted the buyer, did all due diligence, didn't matter.
Your intelligence agencies are prevented by charter from snooping on domestic servers, not that it really stops them.
But the 80 year old end run is '3 eyes' (now 15 eyes, or so). They spy on each other's citizens, abracadabra, nobody has constitutional privacy protections.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It was quite important, as former East Germany tried to clone the VAX architecture. By 1988/89, they had a VAX compatible 32 bit processor and one 1 Mbit RAM chip ready to create VAX clones (and there was much propaganda about how East Germany managed to close the gap to the U.S.).
Really? I thought it was all about nuclear simulations. Seems like they could have used other easily available stuff instead. Like 88000, 68000 that SUN sold back in those days. I remember selling a whole bunch of machines to a guy in Northern Virginia that had a case of transputers, network cards, etc.
I just couldn't imagine after digital did everything they could to make sure it was being sold to the right people were screwed in the end.
Yes, there was the Robotron K 18xx series of mini computers from East Germany with the U80700 processor family of MicroVAX 78032 clones. The K 1840 was clone of the VAX 11/780, the K 1845 was supposed to be a VAX 11/785 replacement (but never came out of the prototype state), and the K 1820 was a MicroVAX II clone.