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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

#71

Post by TonyStr »

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…

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.

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

#72

Post by LeonidasXIV »

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…

All of this is true.

Having lived in Germany it's quite different, but I'd argue the centralized handling of the CPR is actually quite convenient and doesn't meaningfully impact privacy. In Germany every authority has its own ID for you anyway (my password manager has a category "Government Primary Keys" for this), however that means that you have to provide all your information from scratch to every authority. This would theoretically lead to more privacy if we lived in 1926, but now computers are ubiquitous and a rogue government (like Germany is close to electing) can just correlate these keys together. Relational databases have existed for decades and JOINS are cheap. Thanks to surveillance capitalism by now we have very sophisticated ways to deanonymize people, the government can just hire someone to do it.

So the privacy in Germany is most often inconvenience for the citizen paired with hardly any privacy gain from a potentially hostile government. At this point I think the better solution is to avoid electing hostile governments. To Denmarks credit, they're currently doing that better than many other European countries.

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

#73

Post by balboah »

In Sweden there’s at least one more competitor to BankID called Freja. There’s also some kind of EU-level system.

Would be cool if multiple actors were allowed and shared the same kind of auth signing method so that there aren’t just one point of failure. Or something distributed like a blockchain type of signing method, at least I don’t think Bitcoin or Ethereum have downtime that often, and authorization should probably be read heavy only to check if some identity is still allowed

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

#74

Post by cess11 »

dijit wrote: post #58
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…

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 notices rooting and the like. Also no Linux support.

Edit: I agree that it has a convenience to it, but I strongly suspect it has a latent tyrannical potential and that future governments will exploit this to a further degree.

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

#75

Post by filcuk »

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 can't say this is exactly what you're after, but this article is really interesting https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html

Similar to what the author describes, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this information is generally not public.

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

#76

Post by wasmitnetzen »

VorpalWay wrote: post #13
Gravityloss wrote: post #7

Don't banks have their own id:s as well? At least in another nordic country, you have quite many login possibilities to many services. Banks even provide cross-login.

As I understand it, BankID in Sweden is still run by one organisation co-owned by the big banks, and banks handle verification for issuance. There is still a single point of failure for the operation of the system.

There is technically a second provider, Freja, but that is basically only supported by government agencies, and even that is spotty.

There are talks about a state-provided one coming soon, because of EU E-ID laws.

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

#78

Post by loloquwowndueo »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #53
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone "enthusiastically digitized" (as much as possible) in a foreign country alone and then they lose their iPhone Plane tickets, all hotel reservations, they don't remember any phone numbers. They use ApplePay and other mobile payments. Cards may be in the same wallet case. Without a trusted device or Recovery Key, Apple may impose a security delay (24 hours to several days) before allowing a password res…

Temporarily losing access is just inconvenience. Imagine the same but you lost the wallet with your only cash and your passport in pre-digital times, you are far from the nearest embassy and nobody understands your language. You are fully at the mercy of the locals and your money aren‘t coming back.

A wallet is a wonderful invention that allows you to lose all your important items in one fell swoop

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

#79

Post by u1hcw9nx »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #53
u1hcw9nx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone "enthusiastically digitized" (as much as possible) in a foreign country alone and then they lose their iPhone Plane tickets, all hotel reservations, they don't remember any phone numbers. They use ApplePay and other mobile payments. Cards may be in the same wallet case. Without a trusted device or Recovery Key, Apple may impose a security delay (24 hours to several days) before allowing a password res…

Temporarily losing access is just inconvenience. Imagine the same but you lost the wallet with your only cash and your passport in pre-digital times, you are far from the nearest embassy and nobody understands your language. You are fully at the mercy of the locals and your money aren‘t coming back.

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. But neither bank does not recognize you without digital ID.

You need friends to bootstrap your life, but you are also in the middle of loneliness epidemic and have no friends, you parents have died. What do you do?

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

#80

Post by joha4270 »

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…

Alas, no matter how the bits that makes up my bank balance looks, in practice its still a single point of failure where I might simply lose access to my money if the right service is down. Cash has much better uptime stats, even if it can be inconvenient to carry around.
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