Diia provides access to digital documents and government services for Ukrainian citizens. The documents in the mobile app are accepted by officials. Also a few government services are available.
Is all software developed for every democratic government open source? Weird take to call it illegal. They only got this system up a couple years ago, and they've been dealing with an invasion for the last 2 years.
All software running on citizen devices should be open source in a democracy. As they should have a noscript/basic (x)html portal, if reasonable, to lower the technical exit cost of any "app platform" and to provide a fair, low technical cost, and nearly equilavent access to any alternative platforms past present and future.
"The software industry" is full of scammers (planned obsolescence, etc). It is very hard for govs (democratic) to stay clean here.
EU started to regulate Big Tech, it is only the beginning.
> "Now is not the right time for elections" - Zelenskyy the stalwart defender of Democracy™
Its literally part of there constitution that they don't have elections whilst they are at war, and from a practical standpoint how would it even work for territories on the front line or under occupation?.
Was the UK one of the powers of democracy fighting against dictatorships in WW2?
UK paused elections for 5-6 years during an existential war. Ukraine is currently fighting an existential war.
It’s very likely that all continental European democracies also would have voluntarily suspended elections, but they were occupied by the German Nazi government and not given a choice.
Finland, another democracy, also decided not to have their people vote for a new president in 1940 due to WW2. They also postponed their 1943 parliamentary elections.
> Due to the lingering threat of another war and the Karelian refugees' dispersal throughout Finland, regular presidential elections were cancelled, and instead the two hundred and eighty eight 1937 presidential electors were summoned to select a new President.
I figured with these new election security measures, that lead to the most secure election in history here in the US, they could securely hold an election. Just mail out ballots to registered voters addresses and have drop boxes.
You’d be very very wrong, if that’s what you actually think. Mail is not reliably working across large areas of Ukraine, millions are displaced and not residing at their “registered voter address”, and anyone in occupied areas would be entirely disenfranchised.
Also I need more context on how “election security in the US” translates to “securely holding an election in occupied Ukraine”. I’m not up-to-date on the specific developments in the USA and also have no idea how they would translate over in Ukraine. I need you to help me understand what you are saying there (with specifics) enumerating which “new election security measures” you are talking about. All I’m aware of is an increase in voter ID requirements. And I’m not sure how that would help the areas of Ukraine who are not free to receive mail or even establish a drop box voting center.
1) The majority of Ukrainians did not want to hold elections. Polls have been done on this. Polling places would be massive targets, for one, but also it would be a logistical disaster. Half of the country is displaced either internally or in occupied territory or a refugee in Europe or on the front lines where unnecessary rotations would be dangerous. Overcoming those problems would require a lot of money, during a period when Ukraine is struggling to pay their soldiers and keep the country running.
2) The Ukrainian Constitution explicitly shuts down elections during wartime by default. It would be more legally challenging to have one, than to not have one.
> Uncaught TypeError: document.querySelector(...).computedStyleMap is not a function
This happens because they hijack the built-in hash navigation, essentially breaking functionality that would've worked if they just left it alone.
If you really need to use shiny features unsupported in all browsers use polyfills, we learned this decades ago. Screwing up something so simple doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the project.
Open source is a gift left by the wayside for people to pick up or not. It's not a customer-vendor relationship.
You're free to react as you want, but it's good to keep in mind that if you want the maintainers to care, you should be willing to enter into a customer-vendor relationship.
I would agree with you unless this was the official government app for interacting with the government. They have a bigger responsibility than a random library. It is nice that it's open source though so people can audit it.
I once put an easter egg into some open source code used by many millions of people. Nobody found it until a colleague talked about it at a conference maybe a decade later.
People talk about audits, I at least don't think audits can be relied upon to find much. It's nice when audits happen, don't misunderstand, but I don't assume that opening the source of something means that any badness will be found. That assumption requires several leaps of faith.
I am immensely impressed that the developers here are using widely-supported but technically-experimental interfaces and methods. Without IE-like polyfill bloat.
One of my recent favorite experimental features is TLS Encrypted Client Hello, which protects against one of the last MitM attacks used by authoritarian governments to filter the Web. I note that while ECH is experimental, it is also widely supported, including by Firefox. Firefox needs to pick up the pace with implementing the CSS Typed Object Model API, which they thoroughly document on MDN. Bravo to the Ministry of Digital Transformation. And for those users who want better Web API support with good privacy protections, there is Brave (I only switched away from Firefox back in the day because Chromium had better experimental Wayland support, and better memory management on my dinosaur).
Brave, the chromium fork that hijacks affiliate links? GTFO.
And you know, they could still use this feature on chromium browsers, just feature test it before breaking it on Firefox. Or use any of the many ways to achieve the same result, classList.includes is one. It's webdev 101, don't be impressed by their lazyness.
And an aside, MDN is maintained by users like Wikipedia, not by Mozilla. If you're missing something there you can just add it, even if Firefox will never support it.
27 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 57.4 ms ] thread"The software industry" is full of scammers (planned obsolescence, etc). It is very hard for govs (democratic) to stay clean here.
EU started to regulate Big Tech, it is only the beginning.
If there's no law against it, then it's legal.
Being a democracy has nothing to do with it. If you're an adult, you should learn the basics of law, because the law applies to you anyway.
Ukraine does have its flaws, with the influence of the oligarchs being a major one, but to not consider it a democracy would just be silly.
Its literally part of there constitution that they don't have elections whilst they are at war, and from a practical standpoint how would it even work for territories on the front line or under occupation?.
UK paused elections for 5-6 years during an existential war. Ukraine is currently fighting an existential war.
It’s very likely that all continental European democracies also would have voluntarily suspended elections, but they were occupied by the German Nazi government and not given a choice.
Finland, another democracy, also decided not to have their people vote for a new president in 1940 due to WW2. They also postponed their 1943 parliamentary elections.
> Due to the lingering threat of another war and the Karelian refugees' dispersal throughout Finland, regular presidential elections were cancelled, and instead the two hundred and eighty eight 1937 presidential electors were summoned to select a new President.
Also I need more context on how “election security in the US” translates to “securely holding an election in occupied Ukraine”. I’m not up-to-date on the specific developments in the USA and also have no idea how they would translate over in Ukraine. I need you to help me understand what you are saying there (with specifics) enumerating which “new election security measures” you are talking about. All I’m aware of is an increase in voter ID requirements. And I’m not sure how that would help the areas of Ukraine who are not free to receive mail or even establish a drop box voting center.
2) The Ukrainian Constitution explicitly shuts down elections during wartime by default. It would be more legally challenging to have one, than to not have one.
FSF says it's copyleft comparable to the GPL, but isn't compatible with it. (although, can be re-licensed by following a two-step process)
> Uncaught TypeError: document.querySelector(...).computedStyleMap is not a function
This happens because they hijack the built-in hash navigation, essentially breaking functionality that would've worked if they just left it alone.
If you really need to use shiny features unsupported in all browsers use polyfills, we learned this decades ago. Screwing up something so simple doesn't give me much confidence in the rest of the project.
You're free to react as you want, but it's good to keep in mind that if you want the maintainers to care, you should be willing to enter into a customer-vendor relationship.
I once put an easter egg into some open source code used by many millions of people. Nobody found it until a colleague talked about it at a conference maybe a decade later.
People talk about audits, I at least don't think audits can be relied upon to find much. It's nice when audits happen, don't misunderstand, but I don't assume that opening the source of something means that any badness will be found. That assumption requires several leaps of faith.
One of my recent favorite experimental features is TLS Encrypted Client Hello, which protects against one of the last MitM attacks used by authoritarian governments to filter the Web. I note that while ECH is experimental, it is also widely supported, including by Firefox. Firefox needs to pick up the pace with implementing the CSS Typed Object Model API, which they thoroughly document on MDN. Bravo to the Ministry of Digital Transformation. And for those users who want better Web API support with good privacy protections, there is Brave (I only switched away from Firefox back in the day because Chromium had better experimental Wayland support, and better memory management on my dinosaur).
And you know, they could still use this feature on chromium browsers, just feature test it before breaking it on Firefox. Or use any of the many ways to achieve the same result, classList.includes is one. It's webdev 101, don't be impressed by their lazyness.
And an aside, MDN is maintained by users like Wikipedia, not by Mozilla. If you're missing something there you can just add it, even if Firefox will never support it.