The EU wants you to log into YouTube using your state-issued ID card The EU’s enquiry into online plantations platforms will recommend a hands-off approach that will delight Silicon Valley. A draft of the enquiry was leaked this week. The study, part of the EU's Digital Single Market wheeze, also sneaks in one of the EU bureaucrats' top favourite obsessions: national ID cards. You shouldn't be …
Risk to the Government that one of it's citizens might be doing something on the Internet which can't be tracked?
If every website in the world has to verify your ID with the database in Big Brother central whenever you visit it, then that is far better than just tracking IP addresses, and even makes Tor useless.
You'll just create a market for stolen credentials - access the site and it'll show you for free the ID details for a well-known politician, so you can enter those to go further into the site 'legally', where you can go buy a bunch of other ID credentials. Then you can go surf happily.
If all the websites are required to verify with a central database, then that's one hell of a scalability problem, not least a security one. If it doesn't have to verify then there's no onus on the individual to provide anything identifiable. Also, you can only verify the details provided, or are we all supposed to fit cryptographically-protected fingerprint or iris readers to our PCs, phones and tablets?
"I must admit I would like to see the source to that sentence.
I'd love to see him explain the reasoning on live TV. My guess would be something like "HURRR. DERP. More than one password is difficult to remember, innit?"
On the subject of the near-inevitable compromise; just imagine that we all went over to this system and your account was compromised. You'd be effectively barred from the internet until it was sorted...which could be years.
>Estonia kept it's own culture and language
Good for them but exactly how did that make a bit of difference to western civilization? Yes perhaps American culture isn't Louis the Sun King but an awful lot of Brit posters on here have told me in the past they loved Family Guy, Bill Hicks etc. Yes the English speaking world culture has largely merged into a giant mass media blob but don't entirely blame us Americans. We did a lot to make your language the Lingua franca the world over (mostly because we can't learn other languages worth a damn lol).
We did a lot to make your language the Lingua franca the world over
After World War II, yes, but the groundwork was laid globally over the previous century, with English replacing French as the language of diplomacy and replacing German as the language of science and technology.
So, late to the fray again... ;-)
Actually no - not strength for I might hurt some one! Give me patience!
“for every consumer to have a multitude of username and password combinations is not only inconvenient but becomes a security risk.”
He can take my PseudoIdentity when he pries it from my cold dea...
Actually fuck it - he can have that one I'll have a new one now - and perhaps another tomorrow. It would appear that big bruv does not like the fact that we still crave anonymity and privacy.
In one breath the EU bashes the US about privacy shields and in the next they try to throw everything wide open.
Is there any chance that we could possibly have EU bureaucrats who know a little about their allocated area of responsibility - or failing that some who know to keep their mouths shut when burdened with a desire to spout such utter shite.
This is getting a bit too much like China's "Real Name" internet policy. If we continue to exist within the EU, we'll have this sort of crap forced upon us in the future without being able to object to it.
The reach of Big Brother might just be about to take a huge step too far.
“For every consumer to have a multitude of username and password combinations is not only inconvenient but becomes a security risk.” The irony here being that instead of having multitudes of logins that the government might not possibly be able to get hold of, your ID details will probably be all accessible to them, so any data in any account linked to the ID is easily snooped on, with a high chance of it being automated!
The other thing about it is that once a criminal has your ID details, they have ALL of your online accounts!
Faecebook have been demanding ID such as passports and driving license / ID cards. They have started with obvious pseudonyms but will eventually get round to everyone. Having verified IDs on their users increases the value of their snoop haul.
Nobody with any intelligence has succumbed to their demands as far as I know.
It is ridiculous that a website that deals in fatuous crap is taking itself so seriously that it thinks it can do this.
I lurk in the bowels of t'interwebs as this is quite an easy way of keeping in touch with friends however should they ask for any useful id data from me I shall be buying a lot of raspberrypi zeros and configuring diaspora on them and handing them out to people I wish to communicate with.
@Paul (already a number) 164
"If we continue to exist within the EU, we'll have this sort of crap forced upon us in the future without being able to object to it." And if we leave wel will get the same thing only faster and politician's will ignore our objections.
Brextremist's offer us a utopia that doesn't exist.
"This is getting a bit too much like China's "Real Name" internet policy. If we continue to exist within the EU, we'll have this sort of crap forced upon us in the future without being able to object to it."
I doubt it. There are enough ex-iron curtain countries who will object to it. The unified Germany being one. They are actually quite strong on privacy in many respects.
This post has been deleted by its author
Wow. That's unexpected to say the least. I'm not sure whether I think it's the greatest bit of transparency and open governance ever, or a recipe for abuse of some kind that I haven't identified yet. Probably moot as our gov wouldn't give such an idea the time of day, but interesting. Must learn more about this...
It's not a quality of ID cards as such (which are mostly 2-factor authentication systems and bugger else), but a quality of related services, and most importantly, a quality of legislative framework. If there are laws stating that citizen is entitled to see who's been accessing his/her private records, and on what grounds, it should be a good thing. Provided that these laws are actually followed and enforced. That there are not too many "special" and secret exceptions to the rule. Heh. Getting on the swampy ground already.
Undergoing criminal investigation/surveillance is obviously one of those exceptions - it's a bit daft to reveal data queries in realtime, as it may tip off the perpetrator. On the other hand it is very dangerous to provide an authority to hide the queries. That'll get abused in no time. Maybe there's a middle ground available. Like delaying their publication for the period of investigation (strictly under judicial oversight) and updating the record afterwards. Just like it's done with the phone tapping - third parties who happen to converse with a person under surveillance will eventually get a notification that their phonecalls from period /.../ were being recorded in connection with a criminal investigation of /.../, and they are entitled to review these materials if they so desire.
And of course the elephant in the room - secret services and their covert operations. I would be mightily surprised if there was a country under the sun where citizens would be informed of being a 'person of interest' for local spycatchers, even if the interest happened to be erroneous.
Interestingly, for Estonian ID card it is not mandatory to activate its digital certificates. Or using it for anything else than scraping the ice off the windshield. But it is mandatory to have the card.
Ref:
Really? EVERY time it's checked? Even if it's the state snoopers doing the checking?
If you'll believe that you'll believe anything.
For instance, you probably think all this stuff is being done for your own good.
Lenin's phrase about "useful idiots" comes to mind yet again.
"for every consumer to have a multitude of username and password combinations is not only inconvenient but becomes a security risk."
And keeping a database of all these details on websites isn't an even bigger risk?
I look forward to the day when it's possible to administer a slap round the head via the internet every time a bureaucrat proposes something particularly stupid.
"I look forward to the day when it's possible to administer a slap round the head via the internet every time a bureaucrat proposes something particularly stupid."
If you can that useful facility added, why stop at a slap round the head? Think of what fun we could all have with the adslingers et al.
>Estonian robo-commissioner Andrus Ansip
Estonia is the Mississippi of the EU (Hungary is the Alabama, geographical distance aside). Just took a look at the median income of that country and they are not first world. Scraping the bottom of the barrel letting them in and now paying the price.
Ask yourself (and Orlowski) why the NATO cyber centre is in Tallin... Probably the donkey has a smartcard and knows how to use it, unlike the US were getting rid of magstripes looks an hard task...
That said it's ok for me to use an electronic id to access government services (Italy has something alike in its National Services Card), but I would never use it to access Gmail...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
