Germany Builds Encrypted, Identity-Confirmed Email 188
jfruhlinger writes "Looking to solve the problems of spam, phishing, and unconfirmed email identities, Germany is betting very, very big. The country will pass a law this month creating 'De-mail,' a service in which all messages will be encrypted and digitally signed so they cannot be intercepted or modified in transit. Businesses and individuals wanting to send or receive De-mail messages will have to prove their real-world identity and associate that with a new De-mail address from a government-approved service provider. The service will be enabled by a new law that the government expects will be in force by the end of this month. It will allow service providers to charge for sending messages if they wish. The service is voluntary, but will it give the government too much control?"
Re:No end-to-end encryption though (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup. Sounds like a bad joke right? A new messaging standard, incompatible with everything else, that doesn't even do end-to-end encryption! It's pathetic. It purports to solve problems that are already pretty much solved -- spam, reliable delivery -- while not solving all the difficult ones and introducing new dangers for the customers, like missing a "registered email". Oh, and you'll be charged per mail! The worst outcome would be if people ended up using it, but at this point I'm guessing it'll be a huge dud; some government entities will support it, as will a few corporations, but that's it.
Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Your post^Whuge government engineering proposal advocates a
( ) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:No end-to-end encryption though (Score:3, Insightful)
As a native German, I can confirm this. Encryption is only used for Client Server communication.
There are further flaws in the concept. For example, our government lately decided that de-mail addresses do not have to be visually distinguishable from other mail addresses (i.e. de-mail addresses do not share a common tld, nor do the tlds have to contain something like "de-mail"). Instead, they came up with the idea that email client vendors could implement a mechanism for telling users whether an email address is a de-mail address..
Re:Email should cost one penny per message (Score:5, Insightful)
1 penny where?
If the sender's e-mail server is charging the penny, how does the recipient's server verify that the penny has actually been collected? If it means only accepting e-mail from servers at known ISP's you're going to break most business e-mail servers. Also, it's essentially just a white list, so why not just implement a white list and forget about the money.
If the recipient's e-mail server is charging the penny, how do you verify who sent the e-mail so you know who to charge? Also, even if you do get rid of spam, you just created a new replacement fraud. The spammers infect a million computers and get them each to send one e-mail to random addresses at the spammer's e-mail server. Viola, the spammer gets to collect $10,000.00 How many people are going to notice their e-mail bill is off by a couple of pennies that month?
This is setting aside that the financial system isn't really prepared to handle billions of one penny transactions every day. You can aggregate, I suppose, but who verifies all the e-mail servers are doing their bookkeeping properly?