Berlin court using clay tablets and wooden sticks hit by clay shortage. Considers switching to a highly advanced smoke signal tech with a pigeon courier infrastructure for redundancy.
Für einige sei die Arbeit von Jahrzehnten dahin – nämlich für jene, die in dem vorgeschriebenen, nun aber gesperrten Verzeichnis gespeichert haben. Wer sich nicht an die Vorschrift hielt und seine Voten, Urteile und Textbausteine auch lokal auf dem Dienstrechner speicherte, hat die Daten nun noch.
Which Google puts as
"For some, the work of decades is gone - namely for those who have stored in the prescribed, but now locked directory. Those who did not abide by the rule and also stored their votes, judgments and text modules locally on the service computer still have the data."
Well let me rant a bit. I have been living in Germany 9 years. My gut feeling is that here if technology is not about diesel engines then it is considered more of a problem than a resource. Something to be worried about in a world that is getting more and more competitive and automated. One example? People still prefer to pay in cash here, many stores don't accept cards. You might be tempted to think if it works... it's ok. But this attitude impacts all things tech. Programmers salaries are low, data analytics jobs very hard to find, BI is still done in SAP/Oracle, etc.. So if you want to make a good salary in Germany you need to go into the more traditional stuff like finance or engineering management, which is what eventually will hurt the country as the talent either is not well used or just flat out leaves the country.
Culture plays a role, too. Digitally sophisticated Scandinavians may be comfortable buying groceries on their smartphones but a deep-rooted aversion to being tracked—a scar left by the Stasi—lies behind German distrust. A recent survey by PWC revealed that two in five Germans don’t use mobile payments because of concerns about data security (and nearly nine in ten worry about it). When the German finance ministry recently proposed capping cash payments at €5,000, as in some other countries, Bild, a daily newspaper, organised a reader protest.
Isn't Berlin quite different to other parts of Germany? When I was in Munich last year they seemed to have a more progressive view.
On another note, as a German, I think the acceptability of mobile payments is slowly but surely increasing. In my town, all of the shops and restaurants I use take NFC payments and I pay with Apple Pay multiple times a day.
An exception are typical money laundering and tax evasion businesses such as many Vietnamese restaurants.
But yeah, I agree. For an engineering country, Germany is a bit more "conservative" when it comes to IT. The slow internet is another good example of this. I also just bought a Fitbit and I am still thinking twice if I should try out Fitbit Pay in the wild...
I know many public and/or regulated services use Windows because of regulatory constraints. Is that the case here too? I do not want to be that guy, but if not, for what the courts use this and if it's not regulatory, a chromebook or linux distro booting straight into OpenOffice would work well. You cannot say 'people don't know how to operate it' as for this kind of work it is trivial (as is proven by this being replaced by a typewriter). It would even work on the same machine aka no hardware cost.
Linux has been tried for years in Munich's administration and due its poor usability for non-technical users and quasi non-existent technical support for open source programs it has been quickly abandoned.
Yep, I am aware of that particular case. However, this is not the same issue; a Linux/Chromebook booting into a text processor is better / easier than a typewriter. In Munich they tried to migrate everything and wanted to have the users use the full desktop and especially reading / writing office files that needed to go elsewhere.
Here we are comparing to a typewriter and a fax. That is a massively different case. One computer can handle both the type writer and the fax; the save button of Libre Office can be made (trivially) to just mail (or fax) a PDF etc. You get all the benefits of your typewriter/fax and none of the misery that Munich had.
Also the Munich thing was way too early; 2004 was too early. It would be easier now; at the time it was too ambitious. When 2014 came along, no-one was really invested in the idea anymore; more frustrated I would say.
However much of a Linux fan I am; I know that some things don't work. If I would be on a council to do those kind of things, I would be looking at a mix of tables, chromebooks, linux machines and windows machines depending on job description and demands. Windows would definitely be the least used of all of those because it simply is not needed for most tasks most people are doing during a work day.
I find using Win95 on a network, as well as their entire attitude towards and neglect of theirs tools (for which IT is one) to be embarrassing, but I honestly find nothing wrong with going back to a typewriter (or an offline computer).
Why deal with the implications of an online system when you can just... not do that? An online system is a liability.
It doesn't say in this article, but I read about this a while ago and in that article it said some judges or clerks had gone to typewriters. Wrong title for this article I suppose, but not incorrect.
So how do you write fire-and-forget systems? Typewriters can't become hopelessly insecure by leaving the typewriter sit on a shelf for a year. On the other hand, you can't leave a Linux box unattended for more than a couple months before it's hopelessly insecure. Is the solution unikernels, or what? I think we'll have to find ways to make software that stands the passage of time a bit more.
I feel like it's really hard to build software that survives on its own for even a tiny bit of time. Are we in an era that will leave no usable artifact behind?
Typewriters can become insecure if you leave them alone -- someone could modify it to send all keypresses via wireless transmission, and probably even power from those presses.
A typewriter is no more or less secure than a keyboard.
A computer is far more than a typewriter, you need to compare the security of the documents and the entire system. A non-networked computer in a locked vault with encrypted files and a password is more secure from incorrect access than a pile of documents in a locked vault, although once incorrect access is gained, the scale of the damage can be far higher with a computer (it's easy to read one or two documents, but to try to smuggle 5000 documents out physically is hard. To sumggle them out from a computer is far easier.
As the common poster in the 90s went - To Err is Human, to Really Foul Things Up requires a Computer.
