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Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

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Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#151

Post by lxgr »

Muromec wrote: post #113
lxgr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does that propagate to every entity worldwide using passports for identification, including all non-government-affiliated companies and KYC providers?

That's very true for a lot of PKI systems too. The revocation lists are published, but nobody is reading them.

At least they exist. I've tried looking into this in the past, and I haven't really found any public passport revocation list, even of just numbers (i.e. without disclosing associated names or any other sensitive data).

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#152

Post by kakoni »

tiku wrote: post #86

Meanwhile the Netherlands is selling the DigiD system to foreign companies and today it came out that we are also are going to outsource of of our key tax systems to an American company.

Finland did that + lot more. Tax system from Gentax, EHR from Epic and social benefits from Salesforce.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#153

Post by dheera »

azalemeth wrote: post #31

I'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes th…

WeChat effectively is all of this but does work on rooted phones. There are far too many brands and variations of phones all over China running various forks of Android for them to keep track of.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#154

Post by ksimukka »

dijit wrote: post #17

Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens. You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify. Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card. (I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough…

More like a float with a precision of 18.

Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about precision and reliability.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#155

Post by niels8472 »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #102
ivan_gammel wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does any government in the world issue only digital IDs? There‘s always possibility to have your travel passport as a backup (and when traveling abroad your domestic ID is suitable for recovering passport).

Not yet. Soon.

Considering the actual physical id cards have an nfc chip which is used as the second factor for the digital id, this seems unlikely.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#156

Post by hagbard_c »

Msurrow wrote: post #135
dariosalvi78 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Italian living in Sweden, Malmö, and lived in the UK in the past. I don't get the obsession you Brits have against IDs, in Europe you are pretty much the only ones. But a lot of what you say resonates with my observations: - single point of failure: absolutely, but so is the "sign in with Google" or equivalent. It's just too convenient. I'd rather have a public service do it than a private company that can cut you ou…

> They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes. That must be the swedes. Danes complain constantly, about everything. Edit: if you need examples.. DSB trains are slow/never on time/bad service/..; Post Nord takes WEEKS to get a letter out/too expensive. Well we switched to another provider now, Dao, so we’ll complain they are even worse! And complain why they…

> i can keep going all day

Denmark is like the Netherlands - where I'm originally from - and in some ways like Sweden - where I live. More like the Netherlands, really, Swedes are less likely to vocalise their dissatisfaction because they're more 'konflikträdd' or 'scared of conflicts'. Descartes may have claimed that 'Cogito, ergo sum' is one of the foundations of western philosophy but as far as the Dutch go 'Queror, ergo sum' often seems just as fitting.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#157

Post by parl_match »

ksimukka wrote: post #154
dijit wrote: post #17

Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens. You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify. Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card. (I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough…

More like a float with a precision of 18. Most of us who work in payment systems care a lot about precision and reliability.

Okay... but a float? High precision sounds great but uh... got a lot of issues. If you know what I mean.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#158

Post by delusional »

chii wrote: post #50
dijit wrote: post #17

Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens. You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify. Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card. (I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough…

> that the "money you have" is just an int32 well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based. Aka, that number you have is a calculated value, not a stored, arbitrary value. Except...perhaps the central bank's, where they could really just generate that money as an arbitrary value to lend out to other banks. footnote: of course, your account balance is cached, so that it is not r…

> well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based.

Not really. That's how the accounting works. It's the gold standard, and what we guarantee our customers, it's not universally how we store it though. Plenty of bank systems store just singular balances and infer that back into "transactions" in other systems to make the balance even out. Then the errors in those balances are manually corrected by looking at the sums.

IT systems only rarely match the legal frameworks they operate within.

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#159

Post by delusional »

TonyStr wrote: post #71
chii wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that the "money you have" is just an int32 well, luckily, that's not how money is stored, but instead, they're transaction based. Aka, that number you have is a calculated value, not a stored, arbitrary value. Except...perhaps the central bank's, where they could really just generate that money as an arbitrary value to lend out to other banks. footnote: of course, your account balance is cached, so that it is not r…

Do you know of any resources where I can read about how banks store digital currency? Would be interesting to see how international transactions are handled, if they chunk data into months/periods, etc.

I'm a banker. What you're looking for here is called "interbank clearing". In europe that would be SEPA[1]

But yes, most clearing is done daily. Each bank basically submits their daily flow of money to each other participating bank, and the central ACH (Automated Clearing House) keeps track of the balances. There's some processes in there by which banks can dispute charges, which is super interesting, but also way to complicated for me to detail here.

[1]: https://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/what-we-do/epc-paymen...

Re: Tell HN: MitID, Denmark's digital ID, was down

#160

Post by delusional »

winstonwinston wrote: post #136
Tehnix wrote: post #114

I see a few people here complaining about the idea of a central digital identity service. As a Dane, having lived in other countries, MitID is an insanely superior to anything I've ever tried. It simplifies so many touchpoints with the government, and is honestly such a good upgrade going from nothing -> physical NemID card with codes -> digital MitID (literally "My ID"). The only real disruption I'd say is if you ha…

> I see a few people here complaining about the idea of a central digital identity service. Digital identity service is fine for gov services. It’s not OK as a hard requirement for anything else such as banking. Digital ID in my country is down for about 7 days and counting. iOS app no longer opens after the recent update. I cannot pay tax without digital id app working but i can do banking and everything else.

> It’s not OK as a hard requirement for anything else such as banking.

It is in fact not a hard requirement. It just happens that when you have a relatively cheap and efficient digital identity, which is by definition trusted by the government, banks will use that to reduce risk. It's not that they can't verify your identity any other way, this is just the obvious and easy one.

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