Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

element.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 278 posts

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#201

Post by joeschmopoe »

sandos wrote: post #194
foepys wrote: post #38

Germany was quite advanced when it came to technology but then the drive to make more of it somehow stopped. It has always been incredibly sad to me that the German ID card (Personalausweis) has an RFID chip inside with trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more and just never had been used. Like at all except for getting cigarettes at vending machines. 12 years after the first RFID Personalausw…

Its fascinating what EU can accomplish, but in my mind drivers licenses and "national IDs" (that are usable when travelling in EU) should be merged and unified over the union. Imagine how much simpler things would be! And this tech used in Germany sounds like a very nice base for it. I mean I would also make them passports but I think that is impossible.

Lots of people don't have a license but do move around and across EU borders a lot.

The IDs are actually heavily unified nowadays https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_t...

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#202

Post by offlinenative »

cies wrote: post #110

I'm happy to see this. I came out embarrassingly that Germany was spied on by the "ally" US. They already did not trust MS Exchange, probably for good reasons. So they either trust the Swiss (Signal), the Russians (Telegram, prolly not), the ..., or they roll their own, or they use open source. I'm stoked to see they seem (yes: seem) to be doing the latter. Why do I emphasize "seem". Well there have been several Germ…

No post body was provided.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#203

Post by Aeolun »

numpad0 wrote: post #167
woah wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes a lot of sense with German culture IMO. There's a culture of doing your job very well, but not much of a culture of thinking outside of the box or shaking things up. Some Herr Doktor probably followed all the best practices to implement "trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more" in the ID, doing their job really well. But actually changing the processes to use those features is not anyon…

I think modern political criticisms might be too dismissive of inefficient bureaucratic developments, or we might be taking criticisms too seriously. They might be slow, complicated, budgeted terribly, unbelievably incompetent by standards of typical for-profit mega corporation, but a lot of those projects work at first try and works for decades, in the end. SLS capsule came back in one piece on first try. That Germa…

I can believe they work for decades, but mostly because nobody believes they’ll do any better the next time.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#204

Post by Krasnol »

woah wrote: post #77
foepys wrote: post #38

Germany was quite advanced when it came to technology but then the drive to make more of it somehow stopped. It has always been incredibly sad to me that the German ID card (Personalausweis) has an RFID chip inside with trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more and just never had been used. Like at all except for getting cigarettes at vending machines. 12 years after the first RFID Personalausw…

Makes a lot of sense with German culture IMO. There's a culture of doing your job very well, but not much of a culture of thinking outside of the box or shaking things up. Some Herr Doktor probably followed all the best practices to implement "trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more" in the ID, doing their job really well. But actually changing the processes to use those features is not anyon…

It goes also with a different aspect of German culture.

They rolled that out together with finger printing.

People value their privacy here and this was overstepping too many boundaries.

Those features have also never been explained to the average Michel here. Even IT interested people are not aware or understand the good things about it.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#206

Post by tchalla »

jlelse wrote: post #42
foepys wrote: post #38

Germany was quite advanced when it came to technology but then the drive to make more of it somehow stopped. It has always been incredibly sad to me that the German ID card (Personalausweis) has an RFID chip inside with trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more and just never had been used. Like at all except for getting cigarettes at vending machines. 12 years after the first RFID Personalausw…

You can use the "Online-Personalausweis" for quite some things actually. For example to authenticate at banks, so you don't have to do Video-Ident. Or to do taxes etc. I wrote a post about it earlier this year: https://b.jlel.se/s/59c

One of the links seems to be broken

> Das Gesetz hat sogar eine eigene Website mit einem Dashboard,

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#207

Post by Krasnol »

mhd wrote: post #8

As mentioned in the article, the German health services already adopted Matrix for their "TI-Messenger", which is supposed to make secure communication between health care professionals easier. Or, well, possible at all. Right now this is a morass of "don't mention anything private" emails, letters and faxes. I'm surprised that ticker tape isn't involved somehow. But don't worry, if German health services doing somet…

Meanwhile the E-Arztbrief which was supposed to replace FAX is a complete mess. The directory for mail addresses have not been strictly regulated. It's pretty much useless everywhere where big index databases of medical professionals already exist since find the proper mail address is a pain.

A friend working at a big radiology attempted to manage that since there are issues with FAX systems since ISDN technology has been boxed and the E-Arztbrief would have been a good solution. But when he started out comparing their database, he found awful problems. For example there are whole names in the surname field or names of a Doctor's office. You can't properly search and even if you do, you are never sure you got the right one.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#208

Post by bee_rider »

sandos wrote: post #194
foepys wrote: post #38

Germany was quite advanced when it came to technology but then the drive to make more of it somehow stopped. It has always been incredibly sad to me that the German ID card (Personalausweis) has an RFID chip inside with trust zones, certificates, authorization features, and much more and just never had been used. Like at all except for getting cigarettes at vending machines. 12 years after the first RFID Personalausw…

Its fascinating what EU can accomplish, but in my mind drivers licenses and "national IDs" (that are usable when travelling in EU) should be merged and unified over the union. Imagine how much simpler things would be! And this tech used in Germany sounds like a very nice base for it. I mean I would also make them passports but I think that is impossible.

I would imagine that different countries might had slightly different traffic laws or acceptable risk levels, so might want to have their own licensing schemes. Maybe the could have a unified form-factor that gets stamped by the individual countries though.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#209

Post by usrusr »

ysleepy wrote: post #119
socialdemocrat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is always puzzling to me with how Germany has many cultural similarities with us Nordics and is an advanced science nation, yet is always so much slower in adopting new technologies. In Norway we have used electronic receipts since 2013. That is like a decade. But I suspect it is a difference in attitude. I think in Scandinavia we are generally far more enthusiastic about new things.

Germany has a different history with surveillance and authoritarian state control. Not only did the nazis use the resident register to find undesirables, but also the soviet union used any and all avenues to spy and control people. Privacy and scepticism of making the sate a mandatory middleman is deeply entrenched for historic reasons. Specifically this cryptographically tight identification, electronic-only payment…

That's the main reason but not the only one, federalism is the other (unless you consider that also a consequence of certain 20th century events, which in part it absolutely is and in others it absolutely isn't). The ID is clearly federal, but almost everything you might want to implement on top of it is not. The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy.

Re: BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

#210

Post by Vespasian »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #205

Did the German language ever have a 'proper' German word for messenger? I seem to recall a computer message was a "nachricht", but I have forgotten so much...

Nachricht ist still the correct term and the verb would be "schreiben" (to write)

In a sentence: Ich schreibe dir später auf WhatsApp (I will text you on WhatsApp later)

Post reply on HN