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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

#81

Post by eesmith »

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…

"just an int32"

I remember hearing that Zimbabwe, during its period of hyperinflation, had problems because the databases for the banking system couldn't handle a time with $100 trillion banknotes, and ATMs didn't work because of overflow errors.

If only they had used int128. :)

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

#82

Post by dzhiurgis »

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…

Given reliability and security of payment systems - simple credit card (chip/nfc) should be enough for identity. You could pull off entire election using payment terminals.

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

#83

Post by surgical_fire »

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…

Is it in anyway worse when the money you had was some strips of paper, or metal coins, or goats, or salt?

All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.

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

#84

Post by boobsbr »

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…

Not an int32, but a BigDecimal.

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

#85

Post by dijit »

surgical_fire wrote: post #83
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…

Is it in anyway worse when the money you had was some strips of paper, or metal coins, or goats, or salt? All of those have some very annoying fail scenarios too.

yeah, it's worse.

Someone trips over a cable and now your region of the world can't recognise that you have any wealth of any kind.

Or, you can get debanked by the state. :)

Hard to do that with coinage- but you can have your coinage destroyed in a fire (or via theft, of course).

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

#88

Post by have_faith »

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…

Regular banks create new money all the time (loans). There’s no difference to the central bank conceptually as far as I understand, they both record debits/credits to accounts (double entry).

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

#89

Post by lxgr »

u1hcw9nx wrote: post #39
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…

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…

What's the difference to losing your backpack containing all these separate items? And conversely, it's very possible to carry a recovery Yubikey, a single-use login code etc. in a separate bag.

Getting a new (e)SIM abroad can be very annoying, depending on the mobile network, which is why I try to avoid mandatory SMS authentication as much as possible.

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

#90

Post by dijit »

cess11 wrote: post #74
dijit wrote: 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…

BankID also doesn't have Windows support. There's a defunct app that used smart-cards but it's fully deprecated and does not function.

But yes, it's owned by the banks not the state; if anything though this increases its weakness.

You can use BankID to identify with the tax agency, the public health services and police. (and more: this is just what I'm aware of) and there's an expectation that you have a BankID.

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