91–100 of 255 posts
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In this day and age of censorship, I feel the same about web hosting. The American government should provide their citizens with a small space of hosting to share their thoughts.
I do hope that web 3 brings a DNS service that can be bought once and owned forever that nobody can tear even from your cold dead hands. I'm not holding my breath though.
Please HN, let email die. it is unsecurable (universal) in transit or storage (mta's) and because of its reliability and universal adoption a ton of security depends on it like a very rotten and rusted link in a chain even a small child can break. It is an almost 4 decade old tech where any security you find for it is purely opportunistic. I am very concerned how people here are stating how good, simple and reliable…
E-mail is grotesquely expensive to manage because of its weaknesses and its use as a vector of attack.
The best replacement solution is an organisational portal that people use to communicate with the organisation and upload/download documents. Some governments and banks have already been handling interactions with external entities and citizens/customers this way for years.
The upload and download tunnel is secure, the receiver can scan the uploaded information (detonate in a sandbox if necessary), and the sender can trust the messages and documents that are downloaded.
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I always discover how Estonia is really amazing for lots of technology things. AFAIK they are by quite a margin the most advanced country in Europe when in comes to egovernment services. Moreover my (admittedly outside) impression is that they often go for technologically sound solutions not the ones which some large lobby organisation pushed for. This is particularly remarkable considering how small the country is,…
Probably because they're so small they're overlooked by the salespeople and lobbyists from the big corps. I imagine that helps a lot. In the UK there are plenty of smart people in Government who can and would build things in a sensible way (and sometimes they do!), but there are also legions of smooth talking salespeople who usually bend the ministers' ears more easily.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always discover how Estonia is really amazing for lots of technology things. AFAIK they are by quite a margin the most advanced country in Europe when in comes to egovernment services. Moreover my (admittedly outside) impression is that they often go for technologically sound solutions not the ones which some large lobby organisation pushed for. This is particularly remarkable considering how small the country is,…
It’s partially the result of the 2007 cyberattacks they endured. After that, they started taking cybersecurity very seriously. https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415
Quite apart from that, if they really took cyberattacks seriously theyd be voting with pen and paper.
Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.
while I agree with the idea of emails that can't be arbitrarily shutdown, SSN-xx-HERE@citizen.gov sounds like all kinds of awful. It will either be instantly unusable or require a gov approved SPAM filter, both of which are bad. It also seems like a good vector to force a backdoor on all comms.
In fact, I can't think of a single market dominated by a handful of large companies hasnt been improved by the introduction of a government competitor.
There's a reason telcos lobby hard against community broadband and that financial institutions dial back the usuriousness of their fees when the post office offers bare bones accounts.
Well, in Estonia, they have a different approach. 1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI. 2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services. 3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the reci…
1. An ID card you can use to access some services (carta di identità digitale)
2. Another card you can use to access healthcare related services and some other services (carta nazionale servizi)
3. SPID: your digital ID to access yet some other services, and also some of the above services. It is not released by the government but by other authorized entities such as banks, the national mail service and others. You need to pay a small fee for the verification, and sometimes an annual fee. There are different SPID levels but no one actually knows the difference between them.
4. PEC (posta elettronica certificata): a digitally signed email box you can use to send/receive documents, invoices, etc. or simply messages. Those are legally attributed to you and you can use it to talk to government agencies instead of sending registered paper mail. As SPID it is issued by an authorized third party.
We also have some smartphone apps that work as a combination of the above, and need some of the above to work.
As you can see it is a mess, a waste of tax money and we will need to waste more money in the future to make this mess work.
Nice :)
Edit: and by the way when you need something really important all the above are useless: you either need to start hopping from a public office to another (we have a lot of them) and/or go to a notary (a kind of medieval bureaucrat you pay a lot of money to sign and stamp sheets of paper)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always discover how Estonia is really amazing for lots of technology things. AFAIK they are by quite a margin the most advanced country in Europe when in comes to egovernment services. Moreover my (admittedly outside) impression is that they often go for technologically sound solutions not the ones which some large lobby organisation pushed for. This is particularly remarkable considering how small the country is,…
Probably because they're so small they're overlooked by the salespeople and lobbyists from the big corps. I imagine that helps a lot. In the UK there are plenty of smart people in Government who can and would build things in a sensible way (and sometimes they do!), but there are also legions of smooth talking salespeople who usually bend the ministers' ears more easily.
If I'm Fujitsu or Accenture and I lose $BigCountryContract, it's a Big Deal and somebody is not going to get his fat bonus. If I lose Estonia, "Whatever, it was pennies anyway". Smaller orgs also don't have the sort of complex bespoke requirements that allow consulting firms to really entrench themselves.
Well, in Estonia, they have a different approach. 1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI. 2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services. 3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the reci…
In the Netherlands we do have an inbox from the government ("Berichteninbox" which is optional, the alternative is snailmail), it's coupled to the Digital ID system (DigiD), both are apps and webservices. You can use DigiD to access information on your pension, or healthcare insurance etc. The inbox can be (optionally) coupled to many government organizations and you receive information on taxes for example. I like t…
The notifications you can set up to a normal email address invariably only say that institution X sent you a message, but never specify the topic. That means you have to login to see if it is actually important and actionable or just something you already knew or a confirmation of something you submitted.
Even worse is this common scenario:
* Get notification that X sent something to Berichtenbox
* Login to Berichtenbox (first get mobile phone for required 2FA)
* Message says new information is available in X's web portal
* Login to X's web portal (mijn.somethingsomething.nl)
* Read totally pointless message that could even have been sent in plain email
Compare this to the postal flow:
* Get letter, read it
I think these days you can deactivate Berichtenbox and receive important information via post again, but this was not an option in the first year or so, so even experimenting with it was risky.
> As j. b. crawford notes, the prospect for another federated, Internet wide communication system seem very remote at this point in time, so email is it. I really don’t think this is true, and is defeatist at best. SIP and XMPP both had a good shot at creating a federated Internet-wide communication system, and we are doing our best to build one with Matrix or die trying.
A short message instant messaging system can not replace a long message offline capable system like email. They are fundamentally different things. The achievable security is significantly higher for an offline capable medium for example: * https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim It is clear to me at least that we are stuck with at least 2 problems here. I have wondered if you could at least generalize the tw…