If there is such a thing as a most wrong stereotype, german efficiency is it.
I didn't know there was ever a real thing named De-Mail. I named a fictional email-like service De-Mail, in my book The Dread Space Pirate Richard. it's closer to Reddit than email, however.
My take on De-Mail was that of a forum & messaging system where you can never be sure if anything you see or hear in it is true or honest or factual, in whole or in part, but at least it's entertaining or stimulating, and that's what mattered most! there's a major comedy piece written around it.
"The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – "the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet".
Those methods include covert measures to ensure NSA control over setting of international encryption standards..." - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryp...
"Simultaneously, the N.S.A. has been deliberately weakening the international encryption standards adopted by developers. One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method." - http://www.propublica.org/article/the-nsas-secret-campaign-t...
The Snowden leaks themselves have the GCHQ congratulating the NSA in frank terms for controlling and exporting international standards, noting how it has driven great gains for the US.
Given that Germany was one of the victims (including the companies mentioned in the article) of standards-based cryptographic subvertion - the only suprise in this article was that it took Germany this long to announce their own initiative.
One can also surmise this as an indicator that the NSA is back to the usual and that IoT standards are being actively influenced for sabotage.
For IoT in general, there will be very fragmented protocols.
For _industrial_ use cases, the clear winner is IEC62541, aka OPC Unified Automation [1]. There is no real alternative, so that issue is basically already settled. And from a technical point of view, its actually quite good.
[1] https://opcfoundation.org/about/opc-technologies/opc-ua/
