BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

German engineers typically point at politicians to blame for projects being late. But they share the blame. Over-engineering and lack of push-back against feature creep seem to be standard. Often times, the feature creep is homemade, by the engineers themselves. Other countries get things done simpler and thus faster. Be a bit pragmatic and boom, it's live and works. In Germany you first need to create a bunch of Arbeitsgruppen in a new Bundesamt fur Warmeluft and protocols and certificates and meetings and Pflichtenheft and by the time this thing has grown to 1000 pages you realize that your team is much too small and you need to hire more people and it just keeps growing.

Meanwhile, other countries have offered a web portal for years with a digital version of the Patsientenakte and all prescriptions in one place. Works. Not in Germany though.

> On the other hand, the task is enormous, we were discussing last week that if we had double the man power, we would still have the same workload, because we push back on a lot of things. We have about 70 projects that we wrote and maintain and a backlog of another 12 waiting to be started.

I rest my case.

For banking a fairly well known identification provider is "Postident", a service offered by Deutsche Post.

They offer plenty of ways to actually authenticate. The classic one is that you receive a voucher, go to a post shop, the employee there checks your ID and prints you a verification code (iirc). They also added video calls for identification and from my experience, it seems as if they are aware of the potential security implications. They ask you a bunch of questions and require you to do different things (for example hold your ID card right in front of your face, cover one side of your face, etc) presumably to counter this attack vector.

The smoothest way is to use the ID card integration. With that, assuming your ID is already set up for the online authentication, the whole kyc process for a new bank account is done within two minutes. Unfortunately it seems like some banks still disable this option, at least I did recently open an account and did not have this option for use with postident.

I think messaging is an area where Europe could have an impact.

The basic problem with messaging and voice/video comm applications is that clients are not interoperable. It is easy to think that: we've had CUSeeMe, IRC, ICU, AOL Instant Messenger, Tivejo, MSN Messenger, I think more than 10 kinds of Google Chat, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Zoom, Paltalk, Yahoo Messenger, Signal, Telegram, Go2Meeting, Discord, WhatsApp, WeChat, etc.

The average person would be hard pressed to tell the difference between these applications, a cynic would say "Facebook Messenger is no different from AOL Instance|MSN|Yahoo messenger except it is integrated with Facebook". The average person doesn't question that chat programs don't interoperate but because they don't we see a pattern of "try out the new shiny, it's just as good as the old cruddy was back in the day", the new application rides high for a while, then it rots and it is it the new old cruddy before long. The one constant is that you may need to install 10 chat applications to talk to everybody you talk to.

As it is, two-sided markets let applications coast and generally rot without losing market share until things get catastrophically bad. If chat applications interoperated there would be a robust market for better applications and better servers and you'd see developers of old apps to have a reason to keep them working over time and more chances for new apps to get established.