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BundesMessenger, a secure messenger for Germany’s public administration

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

#241

Post by PYTHONDJANGO »

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…

Unfortunately still many people working in tec jobs do not understand that putting an ID on an official governmental document that you need to carry is effectively the same like a tattoo with a number on your arm.

Despite Germans have made bad experiences with that, the idea survived the 3rd Reich.

The idea that as a human being you need "governmental documents" to identify is an authoritarian core value that is fundamentally against individual freedom.

Jews were forced to always carry their "Kennkarte" with them.

Please do not tell me about positive use cases that are based on the naive idea that "the government is the good guys".

When electronic IDs are not rolled back everywhere then democracy and individual freedom will be lost for a very long time.

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

#242

Post by jillesvangurp »

MoSattler wrote: post #7

I really like the idea. But I am skeptic - digitalisation of Germany's public services and offices in the past hasn't exactly been a success story.

Things can change. Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer. Generally, people seem to like to give that honor to Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse does not get a lot of love. Not that it matters either way; but this is a country that co-created modern computing. Pre and post-war Germany featured a lot of rapid change and technical innovation.

I'm based in Germany and I share the sentiment that things have been a bit backwards here in terms of a widespread reluctance to let go of paper based administration. This was awkward 14 years ago when I moved here and at this point it's just beyond pathetic. But things are changing. Germans are well aware that people outside of Germany are noticing how far behind they are and are shaking their heads at those silly naive German paper fetishists. So, there's a lot of domestic pressure to actually start fixing this. The covid crisis in the last few years forced a lot of Germans to do things with their phone that until then were completely unheard off in this country. Like paying for stuff or proving that they didn't have covid. That used to be a thing where paper and rubber stamps were the only acceptable solution.

So, I look at this as something that can change quite rapidly after not having changed much at all for decades. The will and money are there and Germans are starting to remember that they can actually get some stuff done when they put their mind to it. We're also seeing this with the current energy crisis. That crisis has unlocked budgets all over the public sector. And "digitalization" (as it is referred to here) is part of those budgets. Germans love efficiency and people have been pointing out that they haven't been very efficient. Which is embarrassing and annoying. So, they are fixing it now. There are now countless of bureaucrats tasked with actually showing some results for the inflated budgets they've been given. We're talking hundreds of billions of euros here. It's not all going to be spend wisely but some of it will yield results.

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

#243

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

usrusr wrote: post #209
ysleepy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy.

Size of a country has nothing to do with this. Neighbouring Austria is tiny and is also federalized, with each state having several degrees of autonomy and potentially causing various bureocratic nightmares depending on what you want to do.

Same with Switzerland and its cantons.

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

#244

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #242
MoSattler wrote: post #7

I really like the idea. But I am skeptic - digitalisation of Germany's public services and offices in the past hasn't exactly been a success story.

Things can change. Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer. Generally, people seem to like to give that honor to Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse does not get a lot of love. Not that it matters either way; but this is a country that co-created modern computing. Pre and post-war Germany featured a lot of rapid change and technical innov…

>Easy to forget that Alan Turing and a certain German called Konrad Zuse both get credit for having invented the modern computer.

Nobody forgot that, just that past successes are in no way indication of future successes.

Otherwise SV would have been in Germany/UK instead of California. But that hasn't happened.

Same how in the late '80s to early '90s everyone was saying that Japan's tech sector and economy would completely overtake the US's and yet that hasn't happened but the reverse happened. From then on US tech sector steamrolled everything. Will that last? Maybe, maybe not.

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

#245

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

miroljub wrote: post #34
mousetree wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can but they'll likely only starting preparing the Rezept when you arrive, and you'll still need to wait 30 minutes. At least that's how my Hausarzt works

You should change your Hausarzt. They can be so careless only because enough people tolerate such behaviour. I just send an email what I need, they reply to me the same day or tomorrow that it's ready to be picked up. I got there, and get it in 2 min.

>You should change your Hausarzt. They can be so careless only because enough people tolerate such behaviour.

LoL ok, just that GPs have no shortage of patients, but the other way around so since they're on such high demand and in low supply they can get away with many things. The market is in their favor by far.

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

#246

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

lgreiv wrote: post #196
kioleanu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn’t but it’s on the right track. I am working as a developer in one of the federal agencies and have direct contact with the efforts. It helps a lot that public agencies can now offer a so called IT Zulage of a few hundred euros to 1000 per months that brings salaries on par with the private sector. In my team, this worked wonders and we managed to get some really good people. On the other hand, the task is eno…

I actually like the idea of becoming a public servant and bringing innovation to places that really matter for basically everyone around me, but salaries are not even in the same ballpark even with IT-Zulage.

It's not the IT salaries that are the problem, it's that many places working on government IT projects in Germany range from slow, backwards and incompetent to outright toxic. These are not environments that attract the best people but usually clueless YES men.

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

#247

Post by kergonath »

Aeolun wrote: post #240
bmn__ wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You present the conclusion only. Please share the train of thoughts that made you arrive at it, because it is not obvious.

It’s not cool that content would be restricted to people that can prove they are older than 16. It requires very little imagination to see how this could be extended to restrict content to people that have a yellow star on their clothes.

This does not follow, in the same way that the existence of the police does not imply a slide towards a police state. The slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy.

Besides, at least around here they already ask for an ID if you look young enough, for some movies. This is not enabled by new technologies.

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

#248

Post by usrusr »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #243
usrusr wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The Nordics are small enough to country-wide standards easy. Size of a country has nothing to do with this. Neighbouring Austria is tiny and is also federalized, with each state having several degrees of autonomy and potentially causing various bureocratic nightmares depending on what you want to do. Same with Switzerland and its cantons.

True, but I'd expect that those smaller units still have it much easier to pragmatically standardize procedure even when those are formally below federal than in larger units.

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

#249

Post by lgreiv »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #246
lgreiv wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like the idea of becoming a public servant and bringing innovation to places that really matter for basically everyone around me, but salaries are not even in the same ballpark even with IT-Zulage.

It's not the IT salaries that are the problem, it's that many places working on government IT projects in Germany range from slow, backwards and incompetent to outright toxic. These are not environments that attract the best people but usually clueless YES men.

Yes, that’s what I heard, too. I’d probably give it a try, though, as I know similar structures from my work in FinTech, where we integrated with quite „conservative“ banks as well. I kind of have a knack with finding the right knob on such people to get to the desired goal.

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

#250

Post by nforgerit »

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...

Bundesnachrichtendienst unfortunately was already taken by some weird guys
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