The next bit of insanity has to do with the German Datenschutz nutters. This is a small but virulent group of people who have blown up privacy issues to the point where most of Germany is still afraid to use the internet.
It started with this:
A bunch of schools in Karlsruhe were attacked by ransomware and their servers had to be taken offline.
Now the first question that comes to mind is of course: Why does a school have servers? Don’t all schools run in the cloud these days?
Well, in Germany they don’t. There are lots of agencies and levels of decision makers all of whom are too busy covering their own ass and none of them will say: “Schools can use cloud solutions.” People and organizations being as risk averse as they are in Germany, nobody will use cloud solutions without such a declaration.1
So what do they do instead? They have to get servers and people to install and maintain barely useable non-cloud collaborative software tools. Nobody in their right mind would use these tools and kids in private schools of course don’t either, but this dysfunctional ideology is foisted upon kids who have no other choice.
These tools are not usable in any way, barely work even in the best of circumstances, are tremendously costly in maintenance and then break like in the news above. If you ever get to see from the inside how a normal organization manages their IT (i.e. poorly), from that point on you will beg, plead and scream to have everything put in the cloud.
That’s where somebody like the poster above from KRITIS comes in. That’s an organization representing people who get off on pushing around physical servers and whose founding member sells an alternative private collaboration suite, exactly like the ones that they recommend people use.
I agree with their core point that critical infrastructure should be protected better and in just doing that they’ll generate more than enough work for all the security consultants in their network. Just stop scaring normal people because you benefit from the widespread climate of fear and hands off the kids.
- Probably for the best because if they do, they will be sued by a random wanker (such is the German legal system). [↩]