European Antitrust Suit And German Electronic Health Backbone Attract Public Interest During Festive Season
jj
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Wednesday 11 January 2006
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Christmas time lacks of news - normally: Papers do have few pages only and TV stations broadcast cinema evergreens. But this general rule does not seem to adapt to FSF Europe.
European Antitrust suit against Microsoft
As we are the most relevant supporters of European Commission in the antitrust suit against Microsoft the IT news services IDG and ZD Net asked us to comment the threat to impose a fine of 2 Million EUR on MS if they would not comply with the ruling by the end of January. See the results in international media: IT World Canada , ZD Net Australia and ZD Net UK .
Electronic Health Backbone: Germany plans to fail with its most important IT project by failing to plan privacy
123.000 medical practioners, 65.000 dentists, 2200 hospitals, 21.000 pharmacies and 270 health insurances shall exchange data of every health insured person in Germany via an electronic backbone. IT specialist Thomas Maus has tested the system and comes to the conclusion that no privacy can be assured by this concept. That means in final consequence that anybody of serveral hundred thousands employees in German medical system could be able to deal with up 80 millions data records - 150 Euro each. The risk to loose public trust is high - especially as the Germans tend to be cynical about any system which might affect their privacy: Some of them even refuse a credit card for that reason. This is why the developers tried to muzzle Thomas by threatening to sue him for damages. But they haven't been able to verify mistakes in his analysis. From an internal document of the developers we know about thoughts to sue him then for reverse engineering, copyright or patent infringements.
In a press release we have pointed out our concerns and said that this would be a sign of absurdity in the so called "intellectual property" discussion. See our German media attention: Ratgeberbox.de, NetTribune.de, OpenPR, NGO Online, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, PRO Linux, testticker.de, PC Direkt and Handelsblatt, virtuelles Datenschutzbüro
