81–90 of 193 posts
Has anyone here worked on government websites or APIs? I'm curious what the experience was like.
It's standards based just like any other SSO these days: OpenID Connect and SAML. Is there something specific you want to know?
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When it comes down to it the US has a fear driven culture, down to what essentially becomes paranoia. US violent crime statistics are at near all-time lows. Yet I know many, many people that will not leave their house without at least one firearm. This is in small towns that haven't seen a violent crime justifying the use of deadly force in many years. Many of these same people refuse to "live in fear" of the coronav…
I know you're just sharing your anecdote, but the vast majority (over 80%) of Americans live in urban areas. Many cities do in fact see violent crime. Although I don't own a firearm myself, I totally understand why someone else would want one in my neighborhood. Violent crime is not unusual where I live. Don't let your bubble from small town USA distort your view of the entire country.
Violent crime rates in the city very low relative to the past.
You are much more likely to be injured or killed in a suburban car accident than an urban assault/murder/mugging.
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When it comes down to it the US has a fear driven culture, down to what essentially becomes paranoia. US violent crime statistics are at near all-time lows. Yet I know many, many people that will not leave their house without at least one firearm. This is in small towns that haven't seen a violent crime justifying the use of deadly force in many years. Many of these same people refuse to "live in fear" of the coronav…
> yet they live essentially petrified of violent crime to the point of carrying a deadly weapon for self-defense on their person at all times That's an odd way of stating it. They're concerned, so they're arming themselves.. but continuing on with their lives. Sounds like the opposite of "petrified" to me.
It's clearly a major driving force in their lives. Perhaps petrified wasn't the best use of words. I'll suggest terrified as an alternative but the actual reality is all the same.
I've been kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint in the US. I'm pretty sure if I had a firearm that situation would have been worse. I would have either gotten myself killed or suffered the trauma of killing someone and watching them die. This isn't a movie where you go bang and the bad guy cleanly falls to the ground. Death by firearm is brutal and changes you forever (as my ex-military friends will tell you). Life isn't Hollywood and anyone who thinks their life will be the same and just fine after using that weapon is either a bona fide psychopath or delusional.
I also can't imagine waking up everyday and strapping a gun to myself just to leave the house. I'd consider that fear winning and an event that I've long sense gotten over continuing to have an outsized amount of control and power over me. I got out of my traumatic event losing an iPhone and $100. After a few months of initial PTSD my life hasn't changed one bit. I won.
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> Honestly I've found the USA very easy to deal with compared to the UK, France of South Africa where I've lived. ??? France as a foreigner: You arrive in the country, your employer already declares all taxes for you. While you may not have a tax ID to log in to impots.gouv.fr yet, everything is already registered in your name (because you gave either your SSN, or your visa number, or anything else). You send a lette…
To be fair, there are some small hurdles - you get issued a temporary SSN quickly, but it might take some time and documents ( like an original of your birth certificate less than 6 months old in French, or translated in France by an authorised translator which is a retarded thing to ask for and for which I've had to explain many obvious things to many French officials - they simply do not have the right to ask for t…
And yeah, the SSN isn't necessary. It is however usable for SSO through ameli.fr, for your taxes and many other services.
Is this the same authentication platform that TreasuryDirect uses? edit - looks like no. On the one hand a single sign on to both would have been nice, OTOH TreasuryDirect's authentication system is a PITA.
TreasuryDirect, the site that has case-insensitive passwords, disallows password managers, disallows the use of your actual keyboard to enter your password, and has this dumb on-screen keyboard with tiny keys that ultimately accomplishes nothing? Super trash. It still amuses me how few people, even those who claim security expertise, don't understand that commercial malware is able to hook the driver stack (and or br…
login.gov is open source! They also encrypt user data in a way that they can't access it without the user's password, precluding the formation of a national registry that could be used towards nefarious and anti-democratic purposes. As a result, account recovery looks a lot like re-registration, which I think is a great thing. https://github.com/18F/identity-idp It's built on Rails, and I'm really impressed at the en…
> They also encrypt user data in a way that they can't access it without the user's password I love how low our standards for government sites have gotten where this is seen as a plus and not something that's expected
Corporate customer databases I've seen have rarely even been need-to-know access limited, much less actually encrypted to internal users.
Why did they ever go with ID.me when they have their own comparable solution? I’ve used both and both are solid, one is expensive and externally managed though..
Has anyone here worked on government websites or APIs? I'm curious what the experience was like.
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There are ways to solve that problem whilst still protecting privacy, but there's no benefit in that for the ruling class. Once the infrastructure is in place, we all know governments would eventually use it to track all sorts of additional information/activity about us.
> use it to track all sorts of additional information/activity about us. They already do! There is so many quasi-national tracking and gov approved monopolies that they already get what they need. Everywhere is tracked with license plate scanners, so you can't go anywhere. Everyone realistically uses VISA or mastercard, so you can't buy anything. If you don't you're still probably banked and connected to credit agenc…
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The top entry for the list of cumulative non-disease or old age causes of death in the 20th century is "murdered by own government". Anything we can do to help prevent that is a good thing.
Interesting that you limit this claim to the century that saw two world wars and the largest ethnic extermination program in history. ID systems back then weren't any more thorough than the SSN every American is required to have and use for a litany of purposes today. I do not really see how replacing your SSN with a public/private key pair that you use to cryptographically sign tax returns, loan applications, or ele…
And before you say "but that can never happen!", stop for a second and rethink that. It has happened many, many times in human history, and it will absolutely happen again somewhere unless we do our best to confound it.