Re: German Draft Digital Signature Law

[um@c2.net (Ulf M�ller)]

Some more crypto-related news from Germany:

In Germany, online banking is a very popular application of the phone
company's online service T-Online.  Now Bank 24, a subsidary of Deutsche
Bank, is beginning to offer online banking on the Internet
(http://www.bank24.de).

They use SSL to transfer Java applets that securely encrypts the
financial data.  Export SSL is secure enough to guarantee that the
applets are authentic.  So much about exporting crypto hooks...


As journalist Detlev Borchers reports, the German tax consultants'
association Datev (http://www.datev.de) distributes a software toolkit
that allows their clients to transfer confidential data to the consultants
via AOL.  CompuServe or T-Online.  The toolkit uses PGP to encrypt the data.
At a press conference, the Datev spokesman was very surprised to learn
about political problems with encryption software -- because as he said,
the German tax authorities also use PGP (however, in a variant where the
patented IDEA algorithm has been replaced).


Last, but not least: Addison Wesley Germany has now published a German
edition of Applied Cryptography.  The book does contain source code.  I
wonder how they got the "munitions" from the US to the German printer?