Michael S. Dunsavage wrote: > I'm confused. Can someone sum this up for me? I'm from USA.
Last Thursday, the German parliament passed a concept that had been proposed by the German government parties. The concept concerns the German criminal code and is meant to tighten laws against cybercrime. According to the new §202c, anybody who prepares a crime by building, supplying, distributing or making available passwords or security codes for data access or typical computer programs whose purpose is to prepare or commit such a crime, can be fined or sent to jail for up to one year. There were other changes concerning §202, but the one mentioned above is the one most criticized. Many people say that it's not possible to distinguish between programs that might be used to prepare a crime and programs that serve to detect vulnerabilities and secure computer systems (I personally agree with that statement). Therefore, §202c could criminalize many tools that are frequently used these days, for instance port scanners etc. There is no clear definition given in §202c and at the end of the day a German court might have to decide in individual cases. The intention of §202c, however, seems to be to criminalize only software that might cause a "damage". In order to become a law, the concept has to pass the German Bundesrat (upper house of the German parliament) as well. This could happen in July. Then the new concept would become a law shortly thereafter. It could affect openSUSE (in Germany) since the distribution of programs that fall into above mentioned category (yet to be clearly defined) is then forbidden. HTH, Th. PS: This topic is not of technical nature and should be discussed on opensuse-project. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
