241–250 of 423 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're also about to ban niqab / burka.
They voted for the ban today. France showed that it had little positive effect for women. The University of Lucerne ran a study and came to the conclusion that there are around 20-30 women in all of Switzerland who wear a niqap or a burqa.
[flagged]
Please don't post generic comments and/or ideological flamebait to HN. It leads to generic threads and/or ideological flamewars, which we're trying to avoid because they're tedious and turn nasty. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
my bad !
I will elaborate and be "more thoughtful and substantive" as written in the guidelines, next time
I didn't know where to place the cursor, since the issue was inherently politic and not about technology, as the article states
But this article deserved political comments, nonetheless
Switzerland has an awesome electoral system [1]. Instead of being ruled by a president or a prime minister who can be polarising, divisive, or selective, Switzerland has an Executive Council. The 7 member Executive Council is composed of the top 7 candidates from each election. The chairperson of the executive council rotates each year, so that the top 4 vote winners each get a turn at being chairperson. This means t…
Well, that same system also voted on banning Muslim face coverings ("Experts estimate that at most a few dozen Muslim women wear full-face coverings in the country of 8.5 million people."), while a pandemic is going on and face coverings for protection are recommended. https://apnews.com/article/health-legislation-coronavirus-pa...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of countries (if not most) have this or something similar, anchored in either their constitution or at least in regular law. This should not come as a surprise either, since it's essentially the implementation of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Where it usually goes wrong, is with the interpretation of the words "privacy" and "communication". Also, governments have a habit of defining…
The universal declaration of human rights 12 [1] contains the very important word "arbitrary" as a qualifier of privacy violations. > No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. One reason for this has broad applicability: Ev…
My main reason for not bringing up the internal complications of the UDHR was to not add confusion, but you are completely right about how some of these rights can conflict.
You are equally right about the "arbitrary" part. However, when it comes to today's trade in personal profiles and governments scooping up everything they can get their hands on (legalized or not), I very strongly believe that all of it rather clearly fits the classification of "arbitrary".
I will even agree with that I picked an (extreme) side. But maybe not because I can't see nuance or because I ignore (at least not in private) what conflicts with my position.
It's more about being sick and tired of listening for decades to blatant privacy abusers arrogantly (and incorrectly) claiming that what they do is legal .. and how we just all should accept this new reality. It sure didn't help to see governments either buying that bullshit or simply not deal with it because of how it could harm their own (surveillance) interests.
Considering the now obvious rampant abuse and how far I believe we have veered off from how all this probably should have developed (in an ideal world), I'm convinced that the time for being nice and nuanced about all this has long passed.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini
Note: such a merger does not have to be overtly voluntary. It can also be a government seemingly dictating corporations or corporations covertly running a government. It's all about the two somehow joining forces (even if only because of shared interests and possibly still for different reasons), especially when against the interests of most citizens.
On the plus side all the lobbyist that were involved in this story have been recalled to order.
Quite a few people who voted against this did so purely because they didn’t want private companies controlling the system. If the proposal had been for the government to issue and control the identities, it may well have passed.
Which makes a lot of sense in Switzerland, since "the government is the people" is more true than in the overwhelming majority of countries on Earth. Pragmatic take from the Swiss as usual :) (said by a jealous French citizen)
As you said overwhelming majority, are there any countries that have direct democracy or come close?
“It is key for Switzerland to catch up with other countries when it comes digitalisation“ Why?
Imagine if you had to print a paper form and mail or deliver it to the local Government for even the simplest of administrative tasks. Because that is life in Switzerland.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Estonia too!
and Sweden. But these are largely outsourced to private companies iirc. There was a scandal in Estonia where they had to recall all the ID's because the main private key which signed them all got leaked (and that key was held by a private company)
"Much cheaper" here means we might expect criminals to break the RSA key for an individual Estonian ID card for less than a million bucks, whereas by design this ought to be impractical at any plausible price. It doesn't mean your bored teenager can make a fake ID on his laptop on a Friday evening. As a practical matter it seems likely key officials & police could be bribed for less than a million bucks, but forging RSA signatures might still be desirable in some circumstances, and anyway of course the mere possibility of this happening ruins public trust in the scheme.
Estonia switched to P-384 keys on the same platform. Unlike choosing random RSA keys (which involve finding large primes) choosing a good P-384 key is trivial so there's no temptation to come up with clever but insecure algorithms to mint keys.
What's interesting about this flaw is that it only happens because the keys are minted on the Infineon device you own. But we know Estonia has historically had some weird incidents which are best explained by keys not being minted on device but instead burned into the ID card after being made (and potentially recorded) elsewhere. Estonia's laws establishing these cards are clear that mustn't happen (if it did the government can seamlessly impersonate any ID, including ID issued to citizens, non-citizen residents and diplomatic staff) but evidence suggests it did, at least a few times and at least on some older platforms.
Estonia's IDs are all public using a very different scheme to Certificate Transparency, since it assumes you trust the Estonian government to decide which IDs exist - but with similar effect, if anybody is minting bogus IDs there would be a smoking gun in the official public records of Estonia.
On the other hand if the government (or a government agency perhaps without wider knowledge) has copies of some or all keys, they would be able to decrypt messages sent to citizens/ residents using the embedded PKI. We would not necessarily have any public evidence that this was happening if indeed it was happening.
You should probably be confident in Estonian IDs as proof of someone's identity in the usual course of things, but it may be prudent not to rely on this to keep secrets from the Estonian government or its allies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has its advantages and disadvantages. It is also the political system that caused this: "In 1991 following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI) became the last Swiss canton to grant women the vote on local issues." Notice how it was a court decision, not a result of the political process. I'd say 1991 is a bit too late to have full voting rights for women. https://en.w…
How can you so sure that your ideal is how they should live? What I admire about the Swiss is how they live and let live - they may disagree with the neighbour, but let them be.
Switzerland has an awesome electoral system [1]. Instead of being ruled by a president or a prime minister who can be polarising, divisive, or selective, Switzerland has an Executive Council. The 7 member Executive Council is composed of the top 7 candidates from each election. The chairperson of the executive council rotates each year, so that the top 4 vote winners each get a turn at being chairperson. This means t…
What happens when a council member leaves office unexpectedly, i.e. dies or resigns? Does it kick an election for everyone or just that one seat?
Since it's not done by popular vote, political games in that process are rare or just not excessive. The people trust the parliament with the process of electing their leaders, you better shouldn't fail them. So they mostly elect according to the current concordance.