Germany has declared Bitcoin as a ‘unit of account’, which makes the virtual currency a kind of ‘private money’ and the process of Bitcoin mining has been deemed ‘private money creation.’
In the wake of the Snowden leaks, the US has been trying to patch up its relationship with its long running ally Germany.
The German government said it was furious when it discovered US spooks were spying on its government.
Now it seems that the US has verbally committed to enter into a no-spying agreement with Germany. But this will just block government and industrial espionage, so presumably citizens are fair game. According to IT World, the verbal commitment was given in talks with the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND).
L33tdawg: Kind of easier said than done ...
The fallout from the recent revelations that the United States conducts large scale electronic surveillance continues, with German federal minister of the interior, Hans-Peter Friedrich, saying people who fear being spied upon should not use US websites such as Google and Facebook.
Speaking to the Die Welt, Friedrich said: "If you worry about your communications being intercepted in any way, don't use services that go through American servers."
Today, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that it got a look at slides detailing the systematic bugging of European Union offices in the US. The news from the paper cited top-secret documents “that Spiegel has in part seen,” which were dated from 2010 and were recently obtained by Edward Snowden. The paper did not publish any of the documents it claims to have reviewed.
As part of an ongoing German patent struggle, Motorola on Thursday won a ruling from the country's Federal Patent Court, which said found all claims of Apple's "slide to unlock" user interface property invalid, though the decision can be appealed.
The German Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) has formed a new unit to defend federal bodies and national industry from online espionage. But it finds it difficult to fill all 130 new positions.
BND chief Gerhard Schindler has briefed a small number of MPs about the plan last week and has received an approval, reports the magazine Der Spiegel.
Despite causing a minor political scandal in Germany last year, the government-created “state trojan” program appears to be going strong.
A group of German researchers has taken a step closer to achieving quantum key distribution with satellites, receiving quantum keys transmitted by a moving airplane.
The experiment is described in this paper (PDF) presented to the QCrypt conference in Singapore last week.
Led by Sebastian Nauerth at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the researchers achieved a stable connection over 20 Km for ten minutes, and in that time achieved a key rate of 145 bits/s. While that’s far too slow for a data channel, this only refers to the rate at which the keys are transmitted.
A February order by a German Federal Constitutional Court determined that it is legal in Germany for telecommunications companies to demand formal identification from customers setting up prepaid SIM cards, but a regional Pirate Party politician appealed that ruling earlier this week.
Citizenlab has released a detailed analysis of the activities of a trojan in which the experts conclude that the malware is most likely closely related to FinFisher, a commercial spyware tool developed by a company called Gamma International. The trojan targeted political activists in Bahrain and included sender names such as that of an Al Jazeera correspondent and subject lines like "Torture reports on Rabil Najaab".
