IDK what it's like now, but DigiD used to be 2 racks in a separate cage. Even if you can access the floor, you're not getting physically near the servers.
What's wrong with the government taking over admin of DigiD? I just don't understand why the government won't consider funding it. It's a public infrastructure service at this point.
Why is DigiD even a product that needs constant maintenance? From my experience using it it's just a pretty simple authentication/data sharing system. Every oauth provider has something similar. Why is it a whole separate product that is owned by some company?
As a French person, I'm confused as to why DigiD is not a government-run project like FranceConnect is. I'm even more bewildered that an American company thought that they could take over the national identity management system of an European country, as if this was business as usual.
Meanwhile Palantir is getting in tight with the UK government, to the point of managing the UK's firearms, explosives, and poisons licensing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403043
Here is my naive take on sovereignty, and how everything should work in the new "USA decided to kill its own dominance, and attack its allies" world. The world is now balkanized, let's live in that reality.
1. Almost every country has amazing universities with software tracks. A big issue is that universities often don't prepare their students for the real work, aka making and supporting products.
2. Governments should greatly favor products created by the students of their own universities.
The goal of every country should be to foster a sovereign software flywheel. Anything else seems pretty darn silly.
> Almost every country has amazing universities with software tracks.
Simply not true. It’s questionable what “best program” means for software engineering. It’s a hard craft to teach in classrooms and apprenticeship/mentoring model is reputable. Even if every country had such a system today (far from it) it wouldn’t produce devs with 10 years experience until 10 years from now.
> Governments should greatly favor products created by the students of their own universities.
Simply not true. Go with the best tool for the job. Favoritism for domestic industries is fatal in highly innovative industries. Even if your own product is better (American Gopher was far superior to European HTTP, American UNIX was superior to Finnish Linux, American Perl was superior to Dutch Python), adoption matters.
Looking backward it seems really bizarre to favor locals, doesn’t it?
The alternative is building the capacity to evaluate and mitigate risk.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 44.6 ms ] threadNetherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48278406
But now they want NL Wallet to use Google and Apple accounts for login, so this is happening again.
1. Almost every country has amazing universities with software tracks. A big issue is that universities often don't prepare their students for the real work, aka making and supporting products.
2. Governments should greatly favor products created by the students of their own universities.
The goal of every country should be to foster a sovereign software flywheel. Anything else seems pretty darn silly.
Simply not true. It’s questionable what “best program” means for software engineering. It’s a hard craft to teach in classrooms and apprenticeship/mentoring model is reputable. Even if every country had such a system today (far from it) it wouldn’t produce devs with 10 years experience until 10 years from now.
> Governments should greatly favor products created by the students of their own universities.
Simply not true. Go with the best tool for the job. Favoritism for domestic industries is fatal in highly innovative industries. Even if your own product is better (American Gopher was far superior to European HTTP, American UNIX was superior to Finnish Linux, American Perl was superior to Dutch Python), adoption matters.
Looking backward it seems really bizarre to favor locals, doesn’t it?
The alternative is building the capacity to evaluate and mitigate risk.
There are European countries that are obviously pro-russia...
A good model is 5g WiFi: trust the foreign dumb parts and provide your own smart parts.
But that requires excellent state capacity. Specifically intelligence sharing with domestic regulators- which many countries struggle with.
At the the end of the day, the processors won’t be designed locally, and trusted computing is quite rare.