In Germany it isn’t enough to say ‘no’ during intercourse: a person must actively resist, and that resistance be overcome, for the person to legally claim to have been raped. As a result of this Germanic understanding of rape a woman who alleges she was raped was found by a judge to have falsely accused her attackers and, as a result, led to renewed calls in the country to update its sexual assault and abuse laws.
Tag: Germany
The BND also wants to spend €4.5 million to crack and monitor HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) encrypted Internet traffic. By 2020 some of that money may be spent the black market to buy zero day exploits, unpublicized vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers. That program, called “Nitidezza”, should also provide better protection for government networks, German weekly Der Spiegel said in a separate report on BND’s budget requests.
Moreover, a plan to monitor Internet exchanges outside Germany is also in the works. Next year, the agency wants to spend €4.5 million on a program called “Swop” to provide additional hidden access to a non-German exchange, the newspaper report said.
Because the solution to the ‘cybersecurity problem’ is to undermine the capacity for secure communications rather than working to strengthen what we have…
Ars Technica has reported that a German court has found a victim of a phishing attack liable for successfully being phished. The finding is, at least in part, based on the bank’s position that they had previously warned customers about phishing attacks.
The court’s placement of liability is significant for a variety of reasons. Of course it’s important that the individual was victimized. The liability placement also defers expenses (likely through insurance) that the bank would have to assume were they at least partially liable for the customers’ actions. This said, we can understand (and perhaps disagree…) that, from a liberal position, individual citizens are responsible for their actions.
What is most significant are the consequences of placing liability on the individual. Specifically, it reduces the incentive that banks have to exercise their influence to address phishing. I’m not suggesting that the banks could hope to eliminate phishing by waving a gold-plated wand, but they are financially in a position to influence change and act on a global scale. Individuals – save for the ultra-rich – lack this degree of influence and power. While banks will be motivated to protect customers – and, more importantly, their customers’ money – if banks were found even partially liable for successful phishing attacks they would be significantly more motivated to remedy these attacks.
Surveillance technologies are a double-edged sword, one that often lack a hilt guard.
According to the report, a top German security official installed a trojan on his own daughter’s computer to monitor her Internet usage. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing—well, at least until one of the daughter’s friends found the installed spyware. The friend then went after the dad’s personal computer as a payback and managed to get in, where he found a cache of security-related e-mails from work. The e-mails, in turn, provided the information necessary for hackers to infiltrate Germany’s federal police.
That was bad, but it got worse. The hackers got into the servers for the “Patras” program, which logs location data on suspected criminals through cell phone and car GPS systems. Concerned about security breaches, the government eventually had to take the entire set of Patras servers offline.
Excited Pixels 