FYI: allium.gnupg.org shutdown

[Werner Koch]

Hi,

the new year is coming and Germany will suffer from another restriction
on privacy.  As some of you might now, we are running the TOR server
charlesbabbage (aka allium.gnupg.org) with a throughput of about
10TB/month.  Unfortunately we are forced to shut it down tomorrow.  As
http://allium.gnupg.org states:

  THIS SERVICE WILL BE SHUTDOWN ON 2008-12-31!
  
  The German data retention law requires us to save the connection
  information before and after they have been transformed by the TOR
  server. This is clearly not acceptable for this service and so we have
  no other choice than to shut it down.
  
  It has been stated several times by the "responsible" politicians that
  the law explicitly targets services to provide anonymity. In the light
  of these statements and several criminal investigations in the past, g10
  Code GmbH (as the legal entity running this server) can't assume that
  there is is a reasonable chance to keep running the server without
  spending a lot of money on court cases or penalties.
  
  We sincerely hope that our Federal Constitutional Court will soon decide
  on this law and void the problematic parts of the law. As soon as that
  happens we will continue this service.
  

Anyway, I wish you all a Happy New Year 2009.

   Werner

-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Auschnahme regelt ein Bundeschgesetz.
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