4 ms·

Or countries could solve the issue for their citizens instead of making everyone invent their own, like Estonia and quite a few other european countries have. B

Or countries could solve the issue for their citizens instead of making everyone invent their own, like Estonia and quite a few other european countries have. By providing a physical card (or SIM) that allows people to log in where they want.

JoshTriplett 7y ago
Many people will not want "help" from a government to authenticate and logging in to a non-government site.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Many people don't like passwords either. The point being that sometimes we have to go with things we don't find perfect, just tremendously better than what we have now.
dredmorbius 7y ago
That could be very good. Or catastrophically bad.
peterwwillis 7y ago
So we can either: (1) wait for 200 countries to properly implement secure hardware tokens for every citizen (population of estonia: 1.3 million, population of the world: 7.6 billion) and wait for all apps and sites to properly support 200 different cards, or (2) implement a universal http standard to abstract logins away into authentication managers. The former requires bureaucracy, logistics, physical production and transportation costs, hardware adapters, and countless unknown considerations to get everyone in the world to be able to use it and get support for it. The latter requires a browser plugin, and for web apps to implement an HTTP extension similar to a content security policy.
- Avamander 7y ago
  Or (3) implement an universal TLS standard to abstract logins away into hardware tokens... but that's exactly what we have but don't use super-widespread. Estonia has demonstrated the solution scales easily into millions, Latvia is working on it, Finland as well and a few other countries, but they're 15 years behind from Estonia, rest of the world is at least two decades behind. I've always wanted to make wild predictions, now I can try, I think such personal hardware tokens will become wildly mainstream in 25 years, totally replacing passwords.

JoshTriplett 7y ago

Many people will not want "help" from a government to authenticate and logging in to a non-government site.

Avamander 7y ago
Many people don't like passwords either. The point being that sometimes we have to go with things we don't find perfect, just tremendously better than what we have now.

dredmorbius 7y ago

That could be very good. Or catastrophically bad.

peterwwillis 7y ago

So we can either: (1) wait for 200 countries to properly implement secure hardware tokens for every citizen (population of estonia: 1.3 million, population of the world: 7.6 billion) and wait for all apps and sites to properly support 200 different cards, or (2) implement a universal http standard to abstract logins away into authentication managers. The former requires bureaucracy, logistics, physical production and transportation costs, hardware adapters, and countless unknown considerations to get everyone in the world to be able to use it and get support for it. The latter requires a browser plugin, and for web apps to implement an HTTP extension similar to a content security policy.

Avamander 7y ago
Or (3) implement an universal TLS standard to abstract logins away into hardware tokens... but that's exactly what we have but don't use super-widespread. Estonia has demonstrated the solution scales easily into millions, Latvia is working on it, Finland as well and a few other countries, but they're 15 years behind from Estonia, rest of the world is at least two decades behind. I've always wanted to make wild predictions, now I can try, I think such personal hardware tokens will become wildly mainstream in 25 years, totally replacing passwords.