There seems to be a newer variant
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 2, Informative
or the worm has a sleeping behaviour pattern. Please review the following message from the Securityfocus Incidents Archive (the message was sent 30 minutes ago)
Alright, you took the time and reengineered the whole thing. I agree that a) taking RSA as a basis and salting it from three independent sources makes it pretty secure. I also agree that it is almost as secure as typing it in yourself because writing a little keyboard sniffer is not that big of a problem (or, if you care for it, a memory sniffer that scans memory for 16 digit numbers that make sense with a LUN check). Now we are coming to your little pseudo educated flame here. I stated worms, not Trojans. There is a pretty big difference between the two, one needs to be executed, the other executes himself by making use of any "backdoors" that might be present. Like some jerk running a webserver on his default Windows 2k Server installation (I have Server, that is much cooler than your Workstation version, look I even have a webserver when I type in my computers name). Now, as CodeRedII has proven, somebody might put a little trojan on your system, execute it, and, by overwriting registry values and planting a little explorer.exe in your root drives, make it reappear everytime again. My point is, without strong protection, and, which is according to your analysis given in Gator, I can go and steal data. And, you state protection by policy, yes the consumer might be protected. But it might get very annoying if you go shopping with your Visa Check Card that somebody empties your account in the first place... On a sideline, you made some good points, reverse engineering the software (or maybe you work there being an AC) and I certainly appreciate that. BUT, you should watch your language because even if you made good points, you put yourself into a bad light by flaming off like you did. I also would like to see the analysis of your reengineering efforts, maybe you can post a link to them...
OK guys, before everybody cries out loud here, they invented it, they own it. If you want to have a look at the 81 Patents related to AC3 and Dolby go to www.uspto.gov and conduct a search for yourself. Remember, it is THEIR IP, you cannot go and steal it. PERIOD! I can only agree with the previous author, since it is in Dolby's best interest to drive adoption, to work with Dolby Labs.
As many of you might be aware, Gator also offers a so called form filler that fills your personal information into merchant forms (shipping address, credit card number and such). So once I decided to install this "thing" to try it out. Works fine. Then I wanted to look a little bit into security. They do not publish how they encrypt your sensitive data, they only claim that yourt information is encrypted and absolutely secure. Well, well, I emailed them. After 3 emails to their customer service I finally got the response that they do not publish how they do security and encryption (may I assume it is ROT-13 then!?) for SECURITY REASONS! Now I can only say, be afraid, be very afraid of the next worm...
Who ever is going to buy Be, let it be Palm, Sony, Compaq or even Microsoft, they are exactly what Be needs: a strong company in the back to continue to develop their technology. BUT, this only works if the "buyout" agreement specifically states that. The great people at Be should get the chance with enough capital in the backhand to continue to develop. But, we will see...
Well, I do not know for the other/.ers, but I will simply get both, the X-Box and the Cube. They are not that expensive (yeah, I have grown up and I have an income now) and I will then just pick the game I want, no matter what the platform is (PC, X-Box, Cube). This is about 199-299$, not about an entertainment center with loads of stuff in it. What's all the excitement about?
Not owning a PS2, a Linux distro sounds like an incentive to buy one. It could put the whole thing to a different level of usability, away from toy towards a system that I will mainly play with, but, if needed, can use it for other matters, too. I could even use it as a notebook for presentations... (I just want to see those faces if you put a PS2 on the desk and connect it to the projector/TV instead of one of the Dell/Toshiba/IBM/whatsoever corporate whore notebooks)
Finally a good resource that I can store in one place. And if I loose it it is gone forever. Hundreds of IBM CDs eventually turn up, a single one won't. But nevertheless, congratulations to put more than the minimal stuff on a distribution and I am sure it will be a success out there.
What is from your experience missing in the Linux development? What will it take to get it more deployed in "non-geek" areas and what will IBM do about that? Does IBM offer complete turnkey solutions that I can sell my boss on because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"?
whether Napster will also offer a more sophisticated directory service. The deal is about independent, alternative music. Music that most of the teenies do not know but might appreciate. So by signing a deal with them and make it worthwhile for a) the per download share and b) the promotion factor how will it work? The lame chatrooms and even more lame homepage are not going to do much good here. Id like to see something like "oh, you are looking for song a, here it is and btw you might like that band, too". Something in a better whats related style. And if the "other" (non-Napsterized) music labels see these labels eating on their piece of the cake they might want to buy into the whole Napster thing, too. And this would be good for everybody. And yes, I will pay for the service and so should you... Just my $.02
Sun is going to deliver a software package for free and it happens to be SO. Now Sun is going to make a lot of money delivering the hardware and the service. Maybe some training. People want to learn about the insides on how to successfully not crash a document over a certain size. It is just a business deal. A business deal in Suns favour. And it happens to be an open source product. But thats about it...
Well, first of all, _nobody_ drives anybody to purchase Caldera's flavour of Linux. People buy it because it comes with the best support, best installation, best choice of packages or w h a t e v e r. You want to have it free, go ahead and build your own. But now that you like Caldera you go and _pay_ them for the work they have been putting in it. And if they chose to change their license model to per-seat licenses it is there decision. You do not like it, you go away. All people go away, then either Caldera goes away or they will change their business model. The people at Caldera want to pay their bills, send their children to college, buy a house or just go out and drink themselves silly because they need to relax from all the hate-mail they are getting. Give them a break! Just my $.02
Well, I own a set of K2 Ski that do the same thing, using the energy building up to flash a little light on the Ski. It is supposed to be dampening the Ski, I see it as a toy (looks funny while night skiing). Nevertheless, there is a substantial amount of energy building up that could be used differently. I think it is a nice idea, but there are many problems to solve...
Please do not get me wrong, I do not want to "troll" around here, but I am wondering (maybe its me being too tired) what exactly is the point? I am not getting over excited by a game slow as a snail, but maybe he sees it just a a proof of concept. Thank you and go and build something that is of greater impact. I think Freenet has to stay around, as being posted earlier on Slashdot Zeroknowledge will stop supporting the Linux platform. Anything that protects consumer privacy has to keep around until the consumers (and not only Geeks,/.ers and alike) notice how important privacy is. And how dangerous censorship is. Just my $.02 (but these are mine, mine, mine)
I couldn't agree more with you. Over TIME they might become an alternative. But there seems to be a frightening attitude in the Linux community of saying "we are the best, the rest su***". For crying out loud, even M$ is better in some ways and not everything they do is crap. There is a reason for this, mostly it is _time_. And people. Do not assume that all Microsoft people are idiots. That would be a dangerous mistake...
I personally do not believe that RH stands a chance against companies like IBM or Oracle. If you have to solve complex problems e.g. in the financial world, service and, if necessary, consulting does more count than a cool product. Even if it might run a little faster or be a little cheaper. How does it work if a decision in a big company for a _new_ DB system (usually for a special purpose project) has to be made? The company will choose a problem of its liking and will invite the IBMs, Oracles, Microsofts and maybe Red Hats of this world to solve this problem with on a defined (in software only cases) or customized platform. The problem will represent the workflow that is to be improved with the purchase of the new product. Now IBM and alike will put a big amount of smart people on the project to solve it. They will optimize the system (with or without hardware) and one of those guys will do the best optimization. I doubt that RH will be able to do that. So is it all bad (in my opinion) that RH goes after the Database market? No, not at all! But please folks, stop dreaming that RH will eat away the piece of the big guys in the upperscale solution market. They will get their fair share of the market in the small to midsize corporate world (if it is a good product) but to come and play with the big fish it takes a little more... Just my $.02
Well, Deutsche Bank (and Bank Austria, Credit Suisse, Den Norske Bank, EuNET Finland, St. George Australia, Mark Twain US, and others) have been trying to establish eCash in the market. And really the truely anonymous eCash version was used. But the market didn't accept it. DB pushed lots of money in ads, cooperations,... to no avail. It is wind down as by the end of the month. What does that tell us? The market is not ready, I guess there will be a comeback when people realize what is happening.
Like this story in Wired that talks about Zeroknowledge licensing out Stefan Brands patents in toolkit form and eCash doing the same with the (way, way more important) Chaum's blind signature and other patents. This will give interested parties the opportunity to develop anonymous networks, with limited traceability (another Chaum patent) and with anonymous payment methodologies (utilizing the blind signature patent) or building other applications. And then somebody is talking about yet-another-scam payment system. Yawn! Good night!
Maybe I am just plain stupid here? But is it not about _shared_ libraries? Id rather put another abstraction layer in between, agree on standards for call interfaces and call it done. Require minimum version and do not kill the rest if you upgrade. But this requires stringent programming in a distributed environment. And agreements on standards. Welcome to comittee work hell (and is it so much better than DLL hell? Both are hot...).
Does anybody have numbers for things that really count? Things like how many of the real heavy traffic sites are run on Win2k vs. Linux vs. *BSD vs. HP vs. IBM? For many of the big companies stability counts more than free. Win2k is maybe not doing good here, but does _free_ Linux do good here (vs. e.g. HP or IBM) or are commercial Linux implementations through IBM (and that can be AIX or Linux or OS/390 for the real insane)? It shouldn't concern the community if more servers are running Linux or Windows or Amiga OS but it should more count what people are doing with it. And I would not bitch too much about Win2K, there _are_ big sites that are running on it. And you _can_ make it secure. And you _can_ make it performant. Not necessarily if the admin is a moron, but...
"If I want to get g++, I download it."
That probably is a _very_ stupid idea. If you work in large corporations (and we are talking Fortune 500 here) you get fun with configuration management. At a large bank I worked for before you just had to order an upgrade to your development system and you got it. No worry about licenses, they have a corporate license anyway. But it takes time. It takes time for a good reason, they manage thousands of machines all over the world. You do not want to have some weirdo downloading stuff and destabilizing the environment (g++ does not qualify for that but there are other things that might). Just my $.02
Seattle based Zendit is offering a new approach called one click encryption. It is supposed to work with every freemailer through their Surfboard. They offer two ways to sign up, one generating your own keys (complicated!) one where you have to trust them to destroy your private key after they generated it.
The current issue of PC Gamer has a nice story about the gaming scene in other countries. I don't know if it is available online, but you might want to go and get the issue. Germany for example is banning ultra-realistic violence games from being advertised and being sold to minors (under 18 that is). Game Developers often try to avoid this by changing the gfx to contain robots and oil instead of flesh and blood. But the Germans on the other hand side are not so prudent about Boobies. Well, I think this is a better way to go for it. The people who (at least by law) should be able to handle it (adults) can get the stuff and minors can have the fun but do not see reality like blood and guts. An American minor geek knows how a human looks from the inside but he doesn't know what tits look like. Just my $.02
Well, this is yet another stab at Micropayments in Germany. This marketplace has seen quite a lot of those. Card based and software based. First there was the Geldkarte, a stored value card based system for the real world which never found real acceptance despite the fact that there are millions of users out there. Why? The added value was not there (besides paying ticketless in Parking garages or in public transportation). The private banks committees are nevertheless still trying to push it into the Internet market. Doesnt help, the require a class 3 card reader (_with_ a crypto pinpad and a display), that costs money (hardware, support, rollout logistics etc.) and the user doesnt like it. Then there were eCash and CyberCash. eCash was developed by DigiCash and introduced by Deutsche Bank (worlds largest bank) in 1996, CyberCash was the "enemies" response by Dresdner Bank, Hypovereinsbank and others. eCash is a Cypherpunks wet dream. It is anonymous, you can send it to others, there are clients out there for all the real OSs (Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Sun, etc.) and it had large support in the hacker community. It is going to be shut down in a month. Why? Deutsche Bank says in their letter it didnt meet their market expectations. It was another value stored system, it required a complicated subscription mechanism (say loud and slow Anonymity and Bundesbank (federal bank)). Now Cybercash, developed by the now defunct Cybercash corporation (Verisign and FirstData just bought the assets). It should have been the consumers dream. Micropayment, Debit-Payment and CreditCard payment (not SET but C5) combined in one wallet. And the support of all the big banks in Germany but Deutsche Bank. So why did they fail? The software sucked (not all the beautiful OSs available that eCash had), was complicated and not marketed correct by the Banks. The consumer was not ready for a system like that. It is so convenient to enter your credit card number and shop online, isnt it? The consumer is protected when he shops online with his credit card. Protected by policies. The merchant has the risk. But, and here is the point of failure for all the systems described above, the Banks did _not_ give the merchant enough incentives to market the new systems (e.g. by giving rebates when you pay with eCash). And for the average consumer anonymity is nothing. At least nothing yet. So what does Deutsche Telekom do different? From what I read these cards will be bundled with phone card functionality. The consumer can phone on public phones and can spend money on the Internet. The phone card market (stored value, wasted money) is already prepared. Everybody has one over there. Now bundle it, get enough shops and there you go. The only problem (in my opinion) will be the "Kreditwesengesetz" of the federal bank (see here). This says that everybody who creates so called netmoney has to be a bank (Telekom is no bank) and has to comply with the rules. Now this is going to be a lot of fun...
Slashdot Mirror
or the worm has a sleeping behaviour pattern. Please review the following message from the Securityfocus Incidents Archive (the message was sent 30 minutes ago)
Alright, you took the time and reengineered the whole thing. I agree that a) taking RSA as a basis and salting it from three independent sources makes it pretty secure. I also agree that it is almost as secure as typing it in yourself because writing a little keyboard sniffer is not that big of a problem (or, if you care for it, a memory sniffer that scans memory for 16 digit numbers that make sense with a LUN check). Now we are coming to your little pseudo educated flame here. I stated worms, not Trojans. There is a pretty big difference between the two, one needs to be executed, the other executes himself by making use of any "backdoors" that might be present. Like some jerk running a webserver on his default Windows 2k Server installation (I have Server, that is much cooler than your Workstation version, look I even have a webserver when I type in my computers name). Now, as CodeRedII has proven, somebody might put a little trojan on your system, execute it, and, by overwriting registry values and planting a little explorer.exe in your root drives, make it reappear everytime again. My point is, without strong protection, and, which is according to your analysis given in Gator, I can go and steal data. And, you state protection by policy, yes the consumer might be protected. But it might get very annoying if you go shopping with your Visa Check Card that somebody empties your account in the first place ... ...
On a sideline, you made some good points, reverse engineering the software (or maybe you work there being an AC) and I certainly appreciate that. BUT, you should watch your language because even if you made good points, you put yourself into a bad light by flaming off like you did. I also would like to see the analysis of your reengineering efforts, maybe you can post a link to them
OK guys, before everybody cries out loud here, they invented it, they own it. If you want to have a look at the 81 Patents related to AC3 and Dolby go to www.uspto.gov and conduct a search for yourself. Remember, it is THEIR IP, you cannot go and steal it. PERIOD! I can only agree with the previous author, since it is in Dolby's best interest to drive adoption, to work with Dolby Labs.
As many of you might be aware, Gator also offers a so called form filler that fills your personal information into merchant forms (shipping address, credit card number and such). So once I decided to install this "thing" to try it out. Works fine. Then I wanted to look a little bit into security. They do not publish how they encrypt your sensitive data, they only claim that yourt information is encrypted and absolutely secure. Well, well, I emailed them. After 3 emails to their customer service I finally got the response that they do not publish how they do security and encryption (may I assume it is ROT-13 then!?) for SECURITY REASONS! Now I can only say, be afraid, be very afraid of the next worm ...
Who ever is going to buy Be, let it be Palm, Sony, Compaq or even Microsoft, they are exactly what Be needs: a strong company in the back to continue to develop their technology. BUT, this only works if the "buyout" agreement specifically states that. The great people at Be should get the chance with enough capital in the backhand to continue to develop. But, we will see ...
Well, I do not know for the other /.ers, but I will simply get both, the X-Box and the Cube. They are not that expensive (yeah, I have grown up and I have an income now) and I will then just pick the game I want, no matter what the platform is (PC, X-Box, Cube). This is about 199-299$, not about an entertainment center with loads of stuff in it. What's all the excitement about?
The correct link is http://www.attainwealth.com/harvest.htm
Not owning a PS2, a Linux distro sounds like an incentive to buy one. It could put the whole thing to a different level of usability, away from toy towards a system that I will mainly play with, but, if needed, can use it for other matters, too. I could even use it as a notebook for presentations ... (I just want to see those faces if you put a PS2 on the desk and connect it to the projector/TV instead of one of the Dell/Toshiba/IBM/whatsoever corporate whore notebooks)
Finally a good resource that I can store in one place. And if I loose it it is gone forever. Hundreds of IBM CDs eventually turn up, a single one won't. But nevertheless, congratulations to put more than the minimal stuff on a distribution and I am sure it will be a success out there.
What is from your experience missing in the Linux development? What will it take to get it more deployed in "non-geek" areas and what will IBM do about that? Does IBM offer complete turnkey solutions that I can sell my boss on because "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"?
whether Napster will also offer a more sophisticated directory service. The deal is about independent, alternative music. Music that most of the teenies do not know but might appreciate. So by signing a deal with them and make it worthwhile for a) the per download share and b) the promotion factor how will it work? The lame chatrooms and even more lame homepage are not going to do much good here. Id like to see something like "oh, you are looking for song a, here it is and btw you might like that band, too". Something in a better whats related style. And if the "other" (non-Napsterized) music labels see these labels eating on their piece of the cake they might want to buy into the whole Napster thing, too. And this would be good for everybody. And yes, I will pay for the service and so should you ...
Just my $.02
Sun is going to deliver a software package for free and it happens to be SO. Now Sun is going to make a lot of money delivering the hardware and the service. Maybe some training. People want to learn about the insides on how to successfully not crash a document over a certain size. It is just a business deal. A business deal in Suns favour. And it happens to be an open source product. But thats about it ...
Well, first of all, _nobody_ drives anybody to purchase Caldera's flavour of Linux. People buy it because it comes with the best support, best installation, best choice of packages or w h a t e v e r. You want to have it free, go ahead and build your own. But now that you like Caldera you go and _pay_ them for the work they have been putting in it. And if they chose to change their license model to per-seat licenses it is there decision. You do not like it, you go away. All people go away, then either Caldera goes away or they will change their business model. The people at Caldera want to pay their bills, send their children to college, buy a house or just go out and drink themselves silly because they need to relax from all the hate-mail they are getting. Give them a break!
Just my $.02
Well, I own a set of K2 Ski that do the same thing, using the energy building up to flash a little light on the Ski. It is supposed to be dampening the Ski, I see it as a toy (looks funny while night skiing). Nevertheless, there is a substantial amount of energy building up that could be used differently. I think it is a nice idea, but there are many problems to solve ...
Please do not get me wrong, I do not want to "troll" around here, but I am wondering (maybe its me being too tired) what exactly is the point? I am not getting over excited by a game slow as a snail, but maybe he sees it just a a proof of concept. Thank you and go and build something that is of greater impact. I think Freenet has to stay around, as being posted earlier on Slashdot Zeroknowledge will stop supporting the Linux platform. Anything that protects consumer privacy has to keep around until the consumers (and not only Geeks, /.ers and alike) notice how important privacy is. And how dangerous censorship is.
Just my $.02 (but these are mine, mine, mine)
I couldn't agree more with you. Over TIME they might become an alternative. But there seems to be a frightening attitude in the Linux community of saying "we are the best, the rest su***". For crying out loud, even M$ is better in some ways and not everything they do is crap. There is a reason for this, mostly it is _time_. And people. Do not assume that all Microsoft people are idiots. That would be a dangerous mistake ...
I personally do not believe that RH stands a chance against companies like IBM or Oracle. If you have to solve complex problems e.g. in the financial world, service and, if necessary, consulting does more count than a cool product. Even if it might run a little faster or be a little cheaper. How does it work if a decision in a big company for a _new_ DB system (usually for a special purpose project) has to be made? The company will choose a problem of its liking and will invite the IBMs, Oracles, Microsofts and maybe Red Hats of this world to solve this problem with on a defined (in software only cases) or customized platform. The problem will represent the workflow that is to be improved with the purchase of the new product. Now IBM and alike will put a big amount of smart people on the project to solve it. They will optimize the system (with or without hardware) and one of those guys will do the best optimization. I doubt that RH will be able to do that. So is it all bad (in my opinion) that RH goes after the Database market? No, not at all! But please folks, stop dreaming that RH will eat away the piece of the big guys in the upperscale solution market. They will get their fair share of the market in the small to midsize corporate world (if it is a good product) but to come and play with the big fish it takes a little more ...
Just my $.02
Well, Deutsche Bank (and Bank Austria, Credit Suisse, Den Norske Bank, EuNET Finland, St. George Australia, Mark Twain US, and others) have been trying to establish eCash in the market. And really the truely anonymous eCash version was used. But the market didn't accept it. DB pushed lots of money in ads, cooperations, ... to no avail. It is wind down as by the end of the month. What does that tell us? The market is not ready, I guess there will be a comeback when people realize what is happening.
Like this story in Wired that talks about Zeroknowledge licensing out Stefan Brands patents in toolkit form and eCash doing the same with the (way, way more important) Chaum's blind signature and other patents. This will give interested parties the opportunity to develop anonymous networks, with limited traceability (another Chaum patent) and with anonymous payment methodologies (utilizing the blind signature patent) or building other applications. And then somebody is talking about yet-another-scam payment system. Yawn! Good night!
Maybe I am just plain stupid here? But is it not about _shared_ libraries? Id rather put another abstraction layer in between, agree on standards for call interfaces and call it done. Require minimum version and do not kill the rest if you upgrade. But this requires stringent programming in a distributed environment. And agreements on standards. Welcome to comittee work hell (and is it so much better than DLL hell? Both are hot ...).
Does anybody have numbers for things that really count? Things like how many of the real heavy traffic sites are run on Win2k vs. Linux vs. *BSD vs. HP vs. IBM? For many of the big companies stability counts more than free. Win2k is maybe not doing good here, but does _free_ Linux do good here (vs. e.g. HP or IBM) or are commercial Linux implementations through IBM (and that can be AIX or Linux or OS/390 for the real insane)? It shouldn't concern the community if more servers are running Linux or Windows or Amiga OS but it should more count what people are doing with it. And I would not bitch too much about Win2K, there _are_ big sites that are running on it. And you _can_ make it secure. And you _can_ make it performant. Not necessarily if the admin is a moron, but ...
"If I want to get g++, I download it."
That probably is a _very_ stupid idea. If you work in large corporations (and we are talking Fortune 500 here) you get fun with configuration management. At a large bank I worked for before you just had to order an upgrade to your development system and you got it. No worry about licenses, they have a corporate license anyway. But it takes time. It takes time for a good reason, they manage thousands of machines all over the world. You do not want to have some weirdo downloading stuff and destabilizing the environment (g++ does not qualify for that but there are other things that might).
Just my $.02
Seattle based Zendit is offering a new approach called one click encryption. It is supposed to work with every freemailer through their Surfboard. They offer two ways to sign up, one generating your own keys (complicated!) one where you have to trust them to destroy your private key after they generated it.
The current issue of PC Gamer has a nice story about the gaming scene in other countries. I don't know if it is available online, but you might want to go and get the issue. Germany for example is banning ultra-realistic violence games from being advertised and being sold to minors (under 18 that is). Game Developers often try to avoid this by changing the gfx to contain robots and oil instead of flesh and blood. But the Germans on the other hand side are not so prudent about Boobies. Well, I think this is a better way to go for it. The people who (at least by law) should be able to handle it (adults) can get the stuff and minors can have the fun but do not see reality like blood and guts. An American minor geek knows how a human looks from the inside but he doesn't know what tits look like.
Just my $.02
Well, this is yet another stab at Micropayments in Germany. This marketplace has seen quite a lot of those. Card based and software based. First there was the Geldkarte, a stored value card based system for the real world which never found real acceptance despite the fact that there are millions of users out there. Why? The added value was not there (besides paying ticketless in Parking garages or in public transportation). The private banks committees are nevertheless still trying to push it into the Internet market. Doesnt help, the require a class 3 card reader (_with_ a crypto pinpad and a display), that costs money (hardware, support, rollout logistics etc.) and the user doesnt like it. Then there were eCash and CyberCash. eCash was developed by DigiCash and introduced by Deutsche Bank (worlds largest bank) in 1996, CyberCash was the "enemies" response by Dresdner Bank, Hypovereinsbank and others. ...
eCash is a Cypherpunks wet dream. It is anonymous, you can send it to others, there are clients out there for all the real OSs (Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Sun, etc.) and it had large support in the hacker community. It is going to be shut down in a month. Why? Deutsche Bank says in their letter it didnt meet their market expectations. It was another value stored system, it required a complicated subscription mechanism (say loud and slow Anonymity and Bundesbank (federal bank)).
Now Cybercash, developed by the now defunct Cybercash corporation (Verisign and FirstData just bought the assets). It should have been the consumers dream. Micropayment, Debit-Payment and CreditCard payment (not SET but C5) combined in one wallet. And the support of all the big banks in Germany but Deutsche Bank. So why did they fail? The software sucked (not all the beautiful OSs available that eCash had), was complicated and not marketed correct by the Banks. The consumer was not ready for a system like that. It is so convenient to enter your credit card number and shop online, isnt it? The consumer is protected when he shops online with his credit card. Protected by policies. The merchant has the risk. But, and here is the point of failure for all the systems described above, the Banks did _not_ give the merchant enough incentives to market the new systems (e.g. by giving rebates when you pay with eCash). And for the average consumer anonymity is nothing. At least nothing yet.
So what does Deutsche Telekom do different? From what I read these cards will be bundled with phone card functionality. The consumer can phone on public phones and can spend money on the Internet. The phone card market (stored value, wasted money) is already prepared. Everybody has one over there. Now bundle it, get enough shops and there you go. The only problem (in my opinion) will be the "Kreditwesengesetz" of the federal bank (see here). This says that everybody who creates so called netmoney has to be a bank (Telekom is no bank) and has to comply with the rules. Now this is going to be a lot of fun