Germany, Seeking Independence From US, Pushes Cyber Security Research (reuters.com) 160
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."
"Cyber security" (Score:1)
So cringy.
Re:"Cyber security" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Seehofer. Germany's version of a deep-south republican senator.
To be honest, we're happy he can talk in a way that conveys what he means. When I think of the infamous "Transrapid" speech of his predecessor... Even as a German native speaker you were left wondering what the fuck he was talking about.
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To be fair, this basically just makes the stupid easier to see.
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You didn't hear about "Bavaria One", I get it? Same party, different goofball.
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Well, Bavaria is basically the insane asylum of Germany (to quote Otto), so nothing surprises me there. I only follow German politics casually these days, although I used to live there.
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I'll take happy, drunk Bavarians over goose stepping Prussians with sticks up their asses.
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Unfortunately, the Bavarians have both. While technically there is no historic overlap between Bavaria and Prussia, the mind-set is quite present there.
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Are those the ones that get pissed off and start swearing because the bus was 30 seconds late?
All they're missing is a toothbrush moustache.
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Public transportation worldwide plans in 1 minute intervals or worse. The only exception I know is Zurich, were it is 30 seconds.
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Or with the words of another comedian "The CSU wants to kick everyone out that can't speak proper German? Fuck, where are all the Bavarians gonna go? And what about the CSU, there's asylum for war refugees but what country grants asylum to people fleeing from intelligence?"
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No hatred for cultures that belong into Petri dishes because they make you nauseated is right. No matter the color the culture might have.
Re: "When one is lagging, one needs new approaches (Score:2)
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...
Re: "When one is lagging, one needs new approaches (Score:1)
So the solution will be death camps in silicon valley?
That's how you think history works?
Re:"When one is lagging, one needs new approaches" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:"When one is lagging, one needs new approaches" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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).
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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.
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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 ow
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Re: "When one is lagging, one needs new approaches (Score:1)
Worked fine until the US and communism fucked it up like usual.
Maybe Germany should start with its legislation. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Stupidity is the name of the game in Germany when the government collides with the Internet.
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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.
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And she is an actual scientist (PhD in Physics). How pathetic is that.
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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 dig
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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.
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They could hire the Israelis (Score:1)
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.
Re:They could hire the Israelis (Score:5, Informative)
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Well... what would rather come to my mind is that "in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king"...
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Similar to Germany's problems with Russia. Differences over how much Germany has to pay for the gas.
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It's not the yanks they're worried about. It's the Russia, and Russia's proxies.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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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.
70% of the budget (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, that GDPR bullshit really cut into our bottom line.
---signed, foreign security company.
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70% of the budget will be spent on GDPR compliance.
No it won't. It's pretty easy to be compliant. Basically ask yourself:
Are you being an asshat with your users' data?
If the answer is "hell no" you're in the clear. If it's "yes but" then you are not compliant.
The essence is actually easy. Don't keep stuff you don't need to keep. And delete stuff when users tell you to delete it. Everything else follows from that easily (e.g. requests for data). 99.9% of the complaints are from people who can't be arsed to a
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You can claim that all you want, but the reality is very different. My company left the EU over this laws passage. We're not doing anything malicious with our data on our customers. However there are serious costs to compliance. Not every business has a staff of lawyers available to review the law even if compliance were simple. Which I'd argue it's not for a small business. The reality is this wasn't the only terrible law in the EU and a lot of small businesses aren't compliant now. People like you say "ju
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Having a sloppy code base falls under "yes but".
It just means you were an asshat with user data for years and it's coming back to bite. . Users deserve to have their data treated with a modicum of respect and always did regardless of the law.
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In this case at a guess, 100% of the budget will be spent on figuring out what they need to do, what the problems are and what possible solutions could be.
That they are looking for solutions no other government controls would point to FOSS and so you can expect a major resurgence of FOSS in the EU. The EU absolutely does no trust US government security letters no US corporations, any more. I reckon they have figured out the US corporations they were paying, were back dooring everything they were buying.
Thi
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Most of the western EU countries are already 90% of the way to GDPR compliance with their existing Data Protection legislation.
GDPR will cost large corporations money for failing to comply, again they should be mostly compliant anyway thanks to existing legislation. GDPR just harmonises it all and gives powers back to individuals.
Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, and Germany apologized long and deeply for the chancellor boring the CIA out of their mind, could we already let it rest?
Then again, why did they have to wiretap her, to know this all you really had to do is to listen to one of her speeches...
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)
... after Obama wiretapped the German leader's 'phone [telegraph.co.uk].
Well, let's not forget that Merkel and co are not overwhelmed by Trump either and see him as a threat to global peace.
That's two presidents in a row that Germany has had legitimate grievances with, and they came from either side of the political spectrum. It is perfectly understandable why Germany might not see the US as a very reliable ally.
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Yeah, flooding Europe with Muslims and Africans it a great peace-project whereas the US not waging war everywhere all the time is a huge problem ..
Are you trying to make an actual point- or just looking for an excuse for a racist diatribe? I don't see any relevance to your comment to the discussion?
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Do you rip your "allies" off in trade? Germany is a security free-rider that exploits American generosity to run a massive trade surplus. For a country flush with cash and a large budget surplus, it should be able to spend 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense. NATO is a *mutual* defense alliance, do you refuse to carry your share of the burden? To have a military alliance, you must have a military. Germany doesn't really have one. Moreover Germany has a horribly hypocritical stance towards Russi
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The Sunni/Shia war is about 1300 years old. It's _not_ a terrible outcome.
'Divide your enemy and set them to war with each other.' You can't claim it doesn't work.
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All it took to destabilize the mideast was killing the dictator that was keeping a lid on the 1300 year old war. At this point, they will be at war with each other until their oil is worth less than the extraction cost. Yeah!
No amount of government spending would have done anything, it's almost all wasted on rent seekers.
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The Sunnis and Shia went straight to war in Iraq.
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We do know who's funding it, duh.
Saddam was keeping the Shia from mouthing off in Iraq. Now they are back at it.
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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.
Re:You an North Korea (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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.
Will be pathetic (Score:2)
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.
Silly Vassel State (Score:2)
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.
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Just wait until sovereign nations 'realize' that national debt to China can be defaulted on, just like any other. Agreements to arbitrate in Chinese courts hold no weight.
The Chinese government will have kittens.
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Not a lot of Americans know much about the Road and Belt initiative, which is kind of frightening.
Also (Score:2)
Complete Independence (Score:2)
https://tradingeconomics.com/g... [tradingeconomics.com]
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.
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When the US spends $43B on it's military in Germany, the bulk amount of that money goes to US suppliers of said military, plus wages to the US soldiers. Some of that money makes it's way into the German economy, but a bunch of it stays with US companies and citizens.
Using Windows, they cannot be independent (Score:2)
Cybersecurity (Score:1)
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Welcome to Slashdot. Don't let it worry you much. The denizens of Slashdot are in no way shape or form typical Americans.