Comment by miohtama

Have you seen our President? Minor conveniences are what trigger him into launching full blown DOJ investigations, wars, and economic disaster. If he realizes he can just "turn off" the EU, oh, he will threaten that on Truth Social tonight in a rant about how they should make a deal or else.

> having a digital ID wallet, that this needs hardware attestation (or something comparable) is somewhat of a direct consequence of existing laws/regulations regarding making IDs forgery safe

How do you figure? Isn't just having the digital ID be signed by a key belonging to the issuer good enough for that?

If something is actually important, don't put it on a computer. Don't let a computer be in the critical path of anything that actually matters. It's really quite simple. Even before "AI" this technology was not reliable enough for serious, important things--systems that need to be maintainable in adverse conditions (battle damage, etc), systems where failure is not an option (proving your identity, proving your children are yours, ...). If you care about your car, truck, tractor, or dozer being maintainable and reliable, don't get one with a computer in it. Until we can figure out how to make these things reliable and maintainable they're not to be trusted.

Can you show an example of defeating hardware attestation? It would be useful for many 3rd party ROM users.

Maybe not all of them, but certainly a few large, popular ones. You bring up a good point though, it seems surprising that Wero/PEPSI don't have more momentum. Maybe Europeans hate their continental neighbors more than American financial conglomerates.

True but also most places in the EU accept IBAN which is free (for individuals at least) and now relatively fast (seconds for the same bank, minutes or hours at most otherwise) so payment can still be done without MasterCard/Visa. It's inconvenient for a croissant but for anything slightly more expensive and that you don't need within seconds it's not too bad.

Most banks in Belgium (e.g. Bancontact, Wero, Pom) or Sweden (Swish, was renting ice skates with it just this winter) have their own system but typically only nationals use that. It's still enough for shops to get instant payments without those US cards issuers.

TL;DR: yes and it's wrong, but also IBAN works.

I think it's actively harmful to your own cause when you suggest corruption without any evidence. Just because politicians don't take action on an issue you think is important doesn't mean they're corrupt. It's more likely that the issue you think is important is simply not important to most voters.

Suggesting politicians are corrupt without any evidence will make that worse. If people think their politicians are corrupt they will further disengage with the political process, which will ensure there's even less pressure on politicians to take action on niche issues like this.

The EU does regulate Google and Apple through the DSA and the DMA. I don't think most EU politicians are corrupted by these companies.

I think it is far more likely that it is a lack of knowledge and incompetence. I am pretty sure that the majority of Parliament members, Council members and maybe even Commission members do not even know that there are viable alternatives outside Google (certified) Android and iOS. So they try to regulate their app stores, etc. instead.

I hope that with digital sovereignty becoming more important, there will be more interer in alternative mobile operating systems.

It's more of a case of the boy who cried wolf than it is of denial.

Too many people see something they don't like, imply a nefarious motivation without evidence, then expect everyone to agree that it is corruption.

If there is corruption, show the evidence. Otherwise, be honest and state that you don't agree with something. If you want to persuade people, back up your claims with verifiable evidence without falling back to nebulous claims of corruption.

No doubt there is corruption; but it’s also momentum. There aren’t stable and good alternatives for so many reasons so the duopoly has momentum

> Thousands security service and civil servants take their wages and look the other way.

Diplomatic status tax free too.

Who is doing this corruption?

If it's Apple or Google let us know in the US because we have laws to go after them for acting corruptly in other countries.

Vaguely asserting corruption without specifics or even naming the perpetrators isn't "taboo", it's just poor form and silly. Letting such vague accusations float without evidence, motive, or even people to blame, leads to nothing good, and only vague distrust, which itself enables corruption. It leads to people believing there's no way to know the truth, therefore helplessness, and results in fascism like in Russia.

Lazy cynicism is itself a form of corruption of one's own mind.

The question isn't if there's corruption, the question is who is behind the corruption.

Condescendingly and incorrectly assuming that others think that corruption is impossible is kinda rude and also dodges attempts at correcting the corruption.

Exactly. I have said this for a very long time and the EU (and many other governments) are not our friends and they are just as corrupt. Remember ChatControl?

Anytime anyone criticises the EU here, you will get downvoted even after trying to warn the EU defenders that they are not our friends at all.

I was asking for evidence about the EU digital ID wallets about what the "disinformation" was around it 3 years ago [0] and not a single link of it was given.

At this point, being an EU defender and supporting the "open web" are incompatible since you will be using your EU digital identity wallet [1] with your phone to login to your bank and the internet will push age verification with it, locking you out if you don't sign up.

[0] https://eudi.dev/latest/

Governments are place a higher priority on controlling internal threats than external ones. In this case the EU wants to control its own people more than it wants to avoid deoendence on the US. It would like both,but the former is more important

> At a certain point it begins to feel pointless.

I think you're right that they are incompetent. The point is not to make them understand it, but rather to make them see that enough people care. The problem is that most people don't write, so the politicians don't see that they care. Same thing for companies. How many GrapheneOS users say "well when it stops working, I just move to another service, and if there is none, then I live without the service entirely". That way the companies never see that there is a need.

https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/write-us_en

Before thinking about corruption or malice, I like to try to assume good faith. And I see a couple things:

1. Most people don't write.

2. The people who write are not always competent.

3. The people who write often have an agenda, too.

What's the consequence of that? Imagine what the politicians receive: tons of messages of people complaining, most of which are factually wrong. What to do then? How to know who is right? It's genuinely hard.

EDIT: please write here: https://european-union.europa.eu/contact-eu/write-us_en

Probably some combination of all three.

It's more than that, before recently the very idea of "digital sovereignty" was framed as a dangerous Russian conspiracy by the West's top info warriors.

Example: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/july/information-sovereignty

Yea that's fair / makes sense from a democracy point of view (even if I might disagree personally).

It's a bit odd that Europe prioritizes American big-business interests I guess? Idk, as an American it does seem kinda like an odd choice.

Does it really make sense? Right wing politicians are calling themselves patriots, why would they support foreign companies and give them so much power? Must be a dangerous mix of corruption and stupidity?

Google's business is advertising. Right now they don't care whether your phone is "authentic" or secure, because it doesn't cost them money. As AI-enabled bot fraud rises, they will care. Fighting this requires identifying human beings, and that requires trusted devices to be associated with human beings. We're in the foothills still, but look forward and up at where adtech is going.

Do we know whether this is possible? I'm clueless when it comes to phones, so this is a genuine question.

Sure, but then you need to receive an attestation from that external dongle, and/or pre-provision it with an identity (like a national ID smartcard.) It might work in places that distribute this hardware, but it's a crummy UX. I expect that the goal of these systems is to make ID verification a requirement for most routine device usage, sadly, and external dongles will crap that up from a UX perspective.

There is also the problem that most external hardware is less secure than things like Apple's SEP. (But on the other hand, probably more secure than the long tail of cheap Android phones, which use virtualization rather than real hardware.)

It's also an attempt to keep various malefactors such as America, Russia, Israel, China, etc out off the propaganda efforts driving a large amount of far right nationalists into violent uprising.

Australia started on this by banning kids from social media. Reddit kicked up a huge stink and sued the government over it. Also phone bans in school a few years prior.