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

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181–190 of 194 posts

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

#181
post #74
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also British, living across the bridge in Malmö, Sweden. I really like the centralised system, it makes navigating society surprisingly easy when compared to say, Germany or the UK. The difference is that I sort of trust the Swedish government, they've never really done anything to breach that trust - up to and including their handling of COVID (while controversial, they took the stance of individual liberty and a "c…

BankID is not a government thing, it's developed by a company founded by a bank consortium. Once upon a time the state aimed to build an public good in this space but bank representatives in the committee responsible managed to block it. I was under the impression that it doesn't work under GrapheneOS, great news that it does. Other than that it shares some of the characteristics detailed above, refusing to run if it…

The banks did not block it. The Swedish state did not want to spend 50-100 kr per citizen to distribute the secure element. They instead opted for aligning with the one set of institutions that already had somewhat good customer knowledge and could bear the cost, the banks. The incumbent telco (Telia) also tried but their system was even worse than bank id.

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

#182
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.

Not in payments... but I thought I've read many times payment systems specifically do -not- use floats, more often integers with a known/predetermined denominator. Is that roughly accurate?

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

#183
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Side question, but what happens if there's a technical error with the service provider that leads to double spending?

Example: we bought tickets worth 300 EUR from Deutsche Bahn, they were hit by a DDoS and couldn't complete the transaction.

We got charged *twice* (i.e. 600 EUR and not refunded yet. AND no tickets!!!

Now they claim all they can do is to give us 600 EUR in vouchers (that are not even transferrable).

Would a Chargeback work in this case?

And my friend (who's ordered the tickets) has a very traditional bank that only gives a statement monthly, and probably accepts claims on every 29 of February, between 7 and 8 AM and only by fax (IYKYK those German companies...)

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

#184
post #128

Dane by choice (refugee). Would just add as a counterweight to the negative views from people outside the country. From a technical and user point of view, MitID have had less outages than Cloudflare, AWS and MS Azure in the last year. While I agree with the single point of failure, I also like that I setup my startup with all government and banking online via a login I had the last decade, painless and faster than m…

As someone who was part of developing the “start your business”-registration system in DK, I’m pleased to hear that! (It really is pretty complex, but a lot of effort went into making it both user friendly and reliable)

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

#185
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon" at a construction site You conveniently neglected to mention that it was the site where a _mosque_ was being constructed. Changes things a bit.

You’re right, it’s totally acceptable to arrest someone for saying we love bacon at the vacant construction site of a potential mosque. I’m sure the construction equipment was very unhappy.

You know exactly what you're doing, and so did the people agitating at the construction site.

They should have been arrested and taken away from the site as a courtesy to the public. You can't agitate on public property and cry foul when someone calls the cops.

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

#186
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you! Will read up on this.

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

#187
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, it’s totally acceptable to arrest someone for saying we love bacon at the vacant construction site of a potential mosque. I’m sure the construction equipment was very unhappy.

You know exactly what you're doing, and so did the people agitating at the construction site. They should have been arrested and taken away from the site as a courtesy to the public. You can't agitate on public property and cry foul when someone calls the cops.

[deleted]

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

#188
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Digital passports and ID's the route to recovery starts to get hairy. 1. You need to verify yourself in person to get id or passport. You may need someone you know with you and have real interview. 3. But government gives only digital ID's so you need a phone to get it. 4. You can't buy a new phone or get a new SIM unless you can pay for it. You can't pay for it unless you have a phone and credit cards there. Bu…

It's probably not a great idea to depend on friends or family to remotely bootstrap you out of a situation like that anyway, given deepfake impersonation scams.

I give friends a codeword before I go overseas (verbally but next time I'll write it on a note).

I learnt my lesson after online access to my bank was blocked for two weeks and I also lost a card two trips ago. Plus Chile blocked my phone IMEI (their beaurocracy fucked me up completely).

Western Union plus friends are a fantastic backup for when things go pear shaped.

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

#190
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also British, living across the bridge in Malmö, Sweden. I really like the centralised system, it makes navigating society surprisingly easy when compared to say, Germany or the UK. The difference is that I sort of trust the Swedish government, they've never really done anything to breach that trust - up to and including their handling of COVID (while controversial, they took the stance of individual liberty and a "c…

>incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon" at a construction site You conveniently neglected to mention that it was the site where a _mosque_ was being constructed. Changes things a bit.

This is why Britain is doomed.
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