391–400 of 674 posts
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> Crazy to imagine that we are still baking in dependency on US providers in european societies As long as the capital city is in Washington, this is normal.
Not sure I‘m getting what you are saying - us providers‘ capital city is always in Washington DC, no? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding something here
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> Do all German hospitals serve vegan food? Can't speak for Germany, but they do in the UK. It would be illegal discrimination against a belief for them not to.
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UK law protects some philosophical beliefs equally to religions. (what qualifies is a bit of a mess as it's all case law)
(On a practical note, I imagine it's easier for hospitals to just serve vegan food for anyone who is vegetarian/Muslim/Jewish rather than have specific kosher/halal meals)
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We're talking about an essential government service, not just another weather app. You have to look at this through the lense of national security, the debate about EU digital sovereignty, and the requirements of the GDPR in light of the US CLOUD Act, as well as prior decisions of EU courts about these issues.
Yes all that you wrote is true. But that does not magically change anything to what I previously stated: in the real world all smartphones are either Apple or Android... I don't know what the eIDAS 2.0 requires in term of security but it may make the choice the implementers made here unavoidable in practice, as hinted by @webhamster. If so, it seems that a solution, if technically possible, might be to mandate that O…
So you're claiming that Mobian doesn't exist? PureOS doesn't exist? PostmarketOS doesn't exist? Ubuntu Touch doesn't exist? SailfishOS doesn't exist?
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Why would this be? Bureaucracy / inability to change?
Several reasons I can think of: 1. Google and Apple have a much larger ecosystem and are entrenched in their OSes, which means that they have a much better picture of the user than any government app ever will. They also have surveillance mechanisms that government apps are unable or unwilling to implement. This helps detect and prevent fraud (fraud prevention is mostly just mass surveillance used for good). 2. The e…
Anonymity isn’t anonymity if you can’t generate millions of them cheaply.
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Yes all that you wrote is true. But that does not magically change anything to what I previously stated: in the real world all smartphones are either Apple or Android... I don't know what the eIDAS 2.0 requires in term of security but it may make the choice the implementers made here unavoidable in practice, as hinted by @webhamster. If so, it seems that a solution, if technically possible, might be to mandate that O…
correction. in the real world all smartphones are either apple, android or none/other. in terms of legals, you really do have to cater to all three, which is why we don't have one world government.
Now, "other" than Apple/Android is so small as to be negligible and governments also have a duty not to waste taxpayers' money, which means not spending hundreds of thousands to cater for an ultra small number of people who have an easy access to an alternative.
To have government apps work only on iOS and Android is perfectly reasonable in the current state of the world where this covers 99% of smartphones.
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Sure, let's just arbitrarily exclude ~1million people because they're not running the government's preferred American spyware.
This is an unfair and a straw man argument, is it not? Are you also unhappy that in a democracy the 51% choose how the other 49% are going to be governed? Why device attestation is required is quite well explained by this github comment [0]. I am in the industry and I agree fully with it, because it is a fact a problem for most smart phone users in terms of security. 0 - https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/…
I'm not going to replace my 1200 EUR smartphone with a device that forces me to have an account with Apple or Google. I've been issued a German identity card, which is its own computer that includes a digital identity already. I also own an expensive card reader, which together forms a system that is completely capable of supporting any attestation anyone would need. They should just stop excluding me already.
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So what can be used as an attestation API? WHAT will make sure that when a phone says "you're paying 10 euro to $coffee_place" that it isn't a bitmap being shown over "you're paying 10.000 euro to $scammer", above the pay button. Note: needs to be a real guarantee that isn't a permission question away from going away. Either governments can develop (and pay for) THAT technology, or they can use Apple/Google ...
That seems like a weak argument to require attestation? What would attestation prevent that scenario, specifically?
The scenario it would prevent is that a government gets a filled in form with someone requesting unemployment benefits, or reimbursement for a medical procedure on account X ... and then government finds out after payment, later, in court, that the owner of the phone never agreed to it and it needs to pay it out again (because the claim, true or not, that a scammer initiated the payment agreement in some way rather than the owner). Same for business and agreeing to a loan and ...
It is NOT to protect you, the owner of the phone, against scammers (it does not really do that at all), it is to protect companies and especially governments AGAINST the owner of the phone. It is a way to fire most EU government employees by allowing automation that currently can't work because you can't legally trust phone and internet automation to be binding in court.
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We're talking about an essential government service, not just another weather app. You have to look at this through the lense of national security, the debate about EU digital sovereignty, and the requirements of the GDPR in light of the US CLOUD Act, as well as prior decisions of EU courts about these issues.
Yes all that you wrote is true. But that does not magically change anything to what I previously stated: in the real world all smartphones are either Apple or Android... I don't know what the eIDAS 2.0 requires in term of security but it may make the choice the implementers made here unavoidable in practice, as hinted by @webhamster. If so, it seems that a solution, if technically possible, might be to mandate that O…
If it's not possible to create such a system for mobile phones because of legal issues (as you seem to acknowledge and judges have found in the past), then the focus would have to be on creating hardware devices in the EU, ideally with open source hardware and software. These can be made reasonably secure, have been used by banks for a long time, and would enhance digital sovereignty.
What I find unacceptable is the attitude "well, it will violate the law but as a matter of practicality it's the only choice we have right now so we'll just do it."
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The non-technical narrative is very simple: Google, Apple, or the German government can revoke your ID at any time. You cannot purchase or sell anything[1], sign any contracts, have a job, rent an apartment, use public transportation, or receive any kind of government services without an ID. This should sound extremely alarming to everyone regardless of technical knowledge. [1] Maybe with cash, for now, but cash is c…
It also makes you sound like a conspiracy theory nutjob, and the current political climate in Europe is such that people are really sensitive to this sort of alarmist messaging (which they erroneously perceive as fascist rhetoric) and will not listen to you because they don't want to be associated with those people . I don't think we can win this fight. Personally I tried to advocate against eIDAS in Austria and I've…
But then again, maybe there is nothing that can be done. It boggles my mind that even on HN most people are defending this. It seems like freedom is a completely lost cause.
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German citizen here. So why is an implementation going forward when you already know it will not serve all citizens? Why are we not refusing to implement this until we know we can make it work on all devices? Personally I recently switched from an AOSP based android without Google Play to Ubuntu Touch. In the future with better hardware support I will probably switch to postmarketOS.
because then it will never get done. There are still people using old Nokia phones, for those there will never be a solution. The usual 80/20 rule applies here as well. And if you really are a German citizen, you know how slow the wheels of government already turn in Germany, I assume next week you would be the one complaining that "Germany is so far behind" and that "other countries are so much faster at implementin…
No one wants support for toasters and washing machines. We're talking general purpose compute hardware. TCP is also supported on all these devices. Quite frankly, it's probably easier to implement, if you are not fighting a locked-down OS like iOS.