7 ms·

A year after outcry, IRS still doesn’t offer taxpayers alternative to ID.me

175 points by mhb 4y ago

throwaway57f43 4y ago
I am a US person living abroad . I tried to register with ID.me and got stuck on one of the last steps after scanning my face with my webcam, it asked for my phone number. ID.me said all my numbers were not valid, I assume they need a real phone number and not phone forwarding services like Google Voice that I use. I guess my only option to complete the ID.me signup is buy a US sim card, send it to my country, activate it and see if ID.me accepts it. I wish there was an easier alternative.
segmondy 4y ago
Tried to do the face scanning for ID.me. Try as I may, it never would work. I tried so many different backgrounds, dark, light, pattern. Indoors, outdoors, sunlight, artificial light, 2 different phones. It finally refused and told me to contact them. I just gave up and moved on.
throwawaymanbot 4y ago
[dead]
joenathanone 4y ago
Those seems like it should be an easy problem to solve, creating a login system isn't exactly rocket science.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Disclaimer: I interviewed with the USDS team that was embedded in IRS circa 2015-2016 to solve identity pre-ID.me, thoughts and opinions are my own. I have tried to get info out of IRS on the topic using FOIA requests, but they have not been forthcoming. I think there is heartburn over the whole ID.me situation (which they rushed into due to return fraud that occurred due to lacking knowledge based proofing systems, and got blindsided by the PR fallout of suboptimal machine vision/facial recognition tech and overzealous marketing). The article states Charles Rettig, who was then IRS commissioner, argued that login.gov can’t meet their request rate requirements, and yet it serves over 220 agency websites and is the primary identity provider for the Social Security Administration website since September 2021. I would be very interested in the technical challenges being more publicly available versus hand waving by the bureaucracy. https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action There was recent funding to have the USPS perform in person identity proofing; login.gov appears to be leveraging this. They are also working to offer login.gov to state unemployment systems concurrently (a colleague is on this team). https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/05/postal-service-should-act-swiftly-scale-identity-services-ig-says/367048/ https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/05/postal-service-sh... https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/10/labor-department-usps-team-id-proofing/378192/ https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/10/labor-department-... https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-identity-in-person/ https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-... https://tcf.org/content/commentary/biden-budget-would-significantly-improve-delivery-of-unemployment-benefits/ https://tcf.org/content/commentary/biden-budget-would-signif... https://www.gao.gov/assets/730/720919.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/730/720919.pdf > In addition to the forthcoming work with the jobless aid system, USPS is also working with GSA's Login.gov, a shared sign-on and identity proofing service. > “The Postal Service’s unmatched retail footprint offers a unique opportunity for government agencies, such as the General Services Administration that need to complete an in-person proofing. We are actively working with government agencies to do this today,” a USPS spokesperson told FCW. > In-person identity proofing is offered for Login.gov at seven USPS locations in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, according to the Login.gov website. Individuals start the process online and then bring state-issued identification and proof of address to be reviewed in-person to match the digital application with the real person behind it. My note/opinion: stronger requirements are necessary to enable login.gov to deliver whatever gap private identity providers (id.me) are offering and require federal agencies to use login.gov
  - landemva 4y ago
    I would be interested in reading the FOIA responses. Maybe you can redact your mail address and post on some doc share site. Crowd-sourced open government helps others, also.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      I will try to find a way to publish them without connecting them to this handle. I think, like ChatGPT, I’m simply not crafting the correct prompt to obtain the artifacts I’m seeking. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/06/foia-faq-nrd-wtf/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/06/foia-faq-...
      - nyc_data_geek1 4y ago
        Perhaps you could ask ChatGPT to craft the ideal FOIA request to obtain the datum you seek.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    PLEASE also just make this happen when I next have to go in to renew my State Drivers License/ID AND/OR my passport (years from now). Then login.gov can support the addition of known crypto IDs as alternate signatures and a review that can also happen at any of the interaction points (some USPS branches, DoL/DMV, Homeland Security offices for enhanced passport ID stuff).
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    I would need to be convinced Id.me is not wholesale fraud. If it can’t look at a passport picture and look at me, (which is the entire thing it’s supposed to do) then there is just nothing there. I think it’s Theranos level. Maybe sometimes they farm out the facial recognition to another company, maybe sometimes they just make it up, but usually just go to a real person who does the check manually.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Please not the post office. Small town post offices are so vindictive with no oversite giving them this power would be horrific. My house has not received mail for years now because my mother had cancer and could not get her mail timely enough for them. The turned her mailbox off and made her open a PO box if she wanted mail. When I later moved to the home I inherited I was not and have not been able to restore service, and the USPS just redirects me to the local post office :(
- simonw 4y ago
  Creating a login system for government is one of the hardest problems in service design. The UK digital government team have written about this at length, eg https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/19/single-sign-on-what-we-learned-during-our-identity-alpha/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/19/single-sign-on-what-we-le...
exabrial 4y ago
how about everyone gets a pgp key to establish a long term online identity... kinda like keybase sought to do. Not so great for sending secret messages, but really great for an identity toehold.
- LinuxBender 4y ago
  I like the idea but my preference would be a hybrid of this. - Go to the post office, have ID verified, papers verified, pictures taken, GPG keys created multiple so you can revoke one and leap-frog to another without being in an orphaned state, ID card printed that has a GPG signed PDF417 [1] code on both sides and a color picture. - Lost card? Go back to post office and have them revoke your card and your active GPG key. Get new card that uses one of your unused GPG public keys that have already been uploaded to the various government servers. - No RFID, no NFC, no Magstrip, no eco-friendly plastic. Make this thing nearly indestructible and only the PDF417 is used by sensors and can be scanned or photographed by someone paying their taxes or filing other government forms. - Braille dots along top of card to make it easy to find the card and to show which way to hold and insert card in readers that should also have corresponding braille dots. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF417 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF417
- anonporridge 4y ago
  You trust the average individual to keep a private key secure and backed up?
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    I imagine it would be the equivalent of a digital driver's license: signed by the government, can be revoked/reissued if you go in person to the post office or something.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/ https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/ https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/ https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/ https://www.fedidcard.gov/home https://www.fedidcard.gov/home
netfortius 4y ago
Why couldn't they design and offer alternatives similar to the French tax services (alongside many other French online services) [1]? [1] https://franceconnect.gouv.fr/franceconnect https://franceconnect.gouv.fr/franceconnect
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mike_d 4y ago
  Because it is the law in the United States that agencies must transition to the centrally managed login.gov. ID.me never should have been rolled out in the first place.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- sofixa 4y ago
  To expand on this, France Connect is open source and uses open standards (OAuth), so any government can adopt it.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    but muh "we must reinvent the wheel because look at these poor multi-billion dollar companies. how will they pay for their CEO's planes"
photochemsyn 4y ago
Yes, there's a solution, it's called one's social security number. If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud. Implementing a Chinese-style facial recognition and social credit score program in order to keep tabs on everyone is just another authoritarian fantasy project, and government incompetence during the pandemic is no excuse for creating such a dystopian system. One party wants to empower the Gestapo and the other party wants to empower the STASI. What could go wrong?
- comte7092 4y ago
  >Implementing a Chinese-style facial recognition and social credit score program in order to keep tabs on everyone is just another authoritarian fantasy project Who is doing this? Also, even the “social credit score” system in China has been greatly overblown and misinterpreted in western media. [0] [0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-e...
- skibidibipiti 4y ago
  [dead]
- LightHugger 4y ago
  a social security number is not called that because it has anything to do with security, or is a good idea to use for that purpose... your comment is equivalent to telling developers to stop wasting time on endless security fixes when we should just make computer hacking illegal, and prosecute people for it.
- toast0 4y ago
  > If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud. Who's going to do that? My spouse had an Oakland luxury apartment rented in her name, with her social security number and everything. But Oakland PD won't do anything, and nobody else cares either. The apartment management wasn't even sure they could evict because of covid restrictions at the time. It's fully reported, not our problem anymore.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> Five years later and more than $187 million in government investment later, however, it still hasn’t been widely rolled out. I know anything like this is going to be more complicated than it seems. Integration of lots of legacy systems, of which the federla government is probably about as complicated as it gets, with the most security-sensitive application possible. Still, and I'm really not an expert here, but I am astonished that $187 million could possibly not be enough to get this done. If it can't be done for $187 million, it seems likely it will never be done. But, intended with real humility and not sarcasm, I would love to hear more from someone who has more context. $187 million just seems astonishing. Or maybe the quote is wrong that it "hasn't been widely rolled out"?
- Terretta 4y ago
  $187M = $37M per year At average FAANG salaries with overhead (benefits, space, equipment both desk and datacenter/cloud, internal workplace support functions like Recruiting, IT, HR, ER, DEI...) that's 60 people. That's not many when dealing with multiple massive counterparties. You'll see ratios of non-dev to dev easily 10:1 to 30:1. Yes, they could genuinely spend $187M so far on a project accomplishing only 2 devs x 5 years worth of work and rework.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    That's actually good perspective,thanks!
    - welshwelsh 4y ago
      Also consider the cost per taxpayer. At $187 million that's roughly $1 per person. For someone making the average income, it costs them maybe $0.15 in taxes for ID.me. The IRS estimated that the average taxpayer spends $240 and 13 hours of time on their taxes. Multiply by 157 million taxpayers and that's $37 billion and 2 billion hours of labor. Although likely skewed by a small % who hire professionals, plenty of people spend $100+ on services like TurboTax. The IRS spending a couple billion to make the tax process a little bit easier is really not a big deal. $187 million is nothing, and if that's all it costs to streamline their ID verification process, then it means the government is much more efficient with our tax dollars than people give it credit for.
LanternLight83 4y ago
A friend has been waiting for the transition to receive last year's tax return-- eventually there will a deadline for collecting it and they'll need to do the video call or whatever (short on documents).
flangola7 4y ago
A centralized federal ID system, I'm sure there's no historical precedent for how this could go wrong.
- comte7092 4y ago
  The problem with historical totalitarian states was that they were totalitarian, not that they had identification. ID is a basic component of pretty much any functioning bureaucracy. Further, we already have near universal ID at the state level, what about the federal government makes it so much more magically tyrannical than the states?
  - flangola7 4y ago
    Germany had identification record systems before they became totalitarian, when Jews were treated as citizens and decorated veterans of WW1 under the law. A person does not know when their government will become totalitarian and cannot rely on legal solutions to data problems.
    - comte7092 4y ago
      What you’re saying is that water is wet. Name a government in existence that functions without a central identification infrastructure of some sort. Having ID isn’t what leads to totalitarianism, it is a ubiquitous fact of having a bureaucracy that delivers services to its citizens. In most instance, having government id is not a harbinger of risk of totalitarianism. There are more important things to focus on.
      - flangola7 4y ago
        >Name a government in existence that functions without a central identification infrastructure of some sort. Within living memory, the United States of America.
        mixdup 4y ago
hansvm 4y ago
> “Login.gov can handle less than 30 transactions per second,” Rettig told lawmakers. “We need more than about 1,500 transactions per second.” Even on a $2/mo VPS that's enough for image recognition in something as slow as Python. What gives?
- jf 4y ago
  I'm skeptical of the number that Rettig quotes. I'd like to know where he got those numbers. Also, the code that runs Login.gov is (mostly) in the public domain: https://github.com/18F/identity-idp https://github.com/18F/identity-idp – anybody with a $2/mo VPS could run the code and do their own load testing.
  - abofh 4y ago
    > If you are getting the error: > > LoadError: cannot load such file -- sassc > > Try make run for a short time, then use Ctrl+C to kill it That's.. confidence making.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Consider submitting a PR to improve that functionality as a public service.

175 points by mhb 4y ago

I am a US person living abroad . I tried to register with ID.me and got stuck on one of the last steps after scanning my face with my webcam, it asked for my phone number. ID.me said all my numbers were not valid, I assume they need a real phone number and not phone forwarding services like Google Voice that I use. I guess my only option to complete the ID.me signup is buy a US sim card, send it to my country, activate it and see if ID.me accepts it. I wish there was an easier alternative.

segmondy 4y ago

Tried to do the face scanning for ID.me. Try as I may, it never would work. I tried so many different backgrounds, dark, light, pattern. Indoors, outdoors, sunlight, artificial light, 2 different phones. It finally refused and told me to contact them. I just gave up and moved on.

throwawaymanbot 4y ago

[dead]

joenathanone 4y ago

Those seems like it should be an easy problem to solve, creating a login system isn't exactly rocket science.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Disclaimer: I interviewed with the USDS team that was embedded in IRS circa 2015-2016 to solve identity pre-ID.me, thoughts and opinions are my own. I have tried to get info out of IRS on the topic using FOIA requests, but they have not been forthcoming. I think there is heartburn over the whole ID.me situation (which they rushed into due to return fraud that occurred due to lacking knowledge based proofing systems, and got blindsided by the PR fallout of suboptimal machine vision/facial recognition tech and overzealous marketing). The article states Charles Rettig, who was then IRS commissioner, argued that login.gov can’t meet their request rate requirements, and yet it serves over 220 agency websites and is the primary identity provider for the Social Security Administration website since September 2021. I would be very interested in the technical challenges being more publicly available versus hand waving by the bureaucracy. https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action https://secure.ssa.gov/RIL/SiView.action There was recent funding to have the USPS perform in person identity proofing; login.gov appears to be leveraging this. They are also working to offer login.gov to state unemployment systems concurrently (a colleague is on this team). https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/05/postal-service-should-act-swiftly-scale-identity-services-ig-says/367048/ https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/05/postal-service-sh... https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/10/labor-department-usps-team-id-proofing/378192/ https://fcw.com/digital-government/2022/10/labor-department-... https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-identity-in-person/ https://www.login.gov/help/verify-your-identity/verify-your-... https://tcf.org/content/commentary/biden-budget-would-significantly-improve-delivery-of-unemployment-benefits/ https://tcf.org/content/commentary/biden-budget-would-signif... https://www.gao.gov/assets/730/720919.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/730/720919.pdf > In addition to the forthcoming work with the jobless aid system, USPS is also working with GSA's Login.gov, a shared sign-on and identity proofing service. > “The Postal Service’s unmatched retail footprint offers a unique opportunity for government agencies, such as the General Services Administration that need to complete an in-person proofing. We are actively working with government agencies to do this today,” a USPS spokesperson told FCW. > In-person identity proofing is offered for Login.gov at seven USPS locations in Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia, according to the Login.gov website. Individuals start the process online and then bring state-issued identification and proof of address to be reviewed in-person to match the digital application with the real person behind it. My note/opinion: stronger requirements are necessary to enable login.gov to deliver whatever gap private identity providers (id.me) are offering and require federal agencies to use login.gov
- landemva 4y ago
  I would be interested in reading the FOIA responses. Maybe you can redact your mail address and post on some doc share site. Crowd-sourced open government helps others, also.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I will try to find a way to publish them without connecting them to this handle. I think, like ChatGPT, I’m simply not crafting the correct prompt to obtain the artifacts I’m seeking. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/06/foia-faq-nrd-wtf/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/sep/06/foia-faq-...
    - nyc_data_geek1 4y ago
      Perhaps you could ask ChatGPT to craft the ideal FOIA request to obtain the datum you seek.
- mjevans 4y ago
  PLEASE also just make this happen when I next have to go in to renew my State Drivers License/ID AND/OR my passport (years from now). Then login.gov can support the addition of known crypto IDs as alternate signatures and a review that can also happen at any of the interaction points (some USPS branches, DoL/DMV, Homeland Security offices for enhanced passport ID stuff).
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  I would need to be convinced Id.me is not wholesale fraud. If it can’t look at a passport picture and look at me, (which is the entire thing it’s supposed to do) then there is just nothing there. I think it’s Theranos level. Maybe sometimes they farm out the facial recognition to another company, maybe sometimes they just make it up, but usually just go to a real person who does the check manually.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Please not the post office. Small town post offices are so vindictive with no oversite giving them this power would be horrific. My house has not received mail for years now because my mother had cancer and could not get her mail timely enough for them. The turned her mailbox off and made her open a PO box if she wanted mail. When I later moved to the home I inherited I was not and have not been able to restore service, and the USPS just redirects me to the local post office :(
simonw 4y ago
Creating a login system for government is one of the hardest problems in service design. The UK digital government team have written about this at length, eg https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/19/single-sign-on-what-we-learned-during-our-identity-alpha/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2021/10/19/single-sign-on-what-we-le...

exabrial 4y ago

how about everyone gets a pgp key to establish a long term online identity... kinda like keybase sought to do. Not so great for sending secret messages, but really great for an identity toehold.

LinuxBender 4y ago
I like the idea but my preference would be a hybrid of this. - Go to the post office, have ID verified, papers verified, pictures taken, GPG keys created multiple so you can revoke one and leap-frog to another without being in an orphaned state, ID card printed that has a GPG signed PDF417 [1] code on both sides and a color picture. - Lost card? Go back to post office and have them revoke your card and your active GPG key. Get new card that uses one of your unused GPG public keys that have already been uploaded to the various government servers. - No RFID, no NFC, no Magstrip, no eco-friendly plastic. Make this thing nearly indestructible and only the PDF417 is used by sensors and can be scanned or photographed by someone paying their taxes or filing other government forms. - Braille dots along top of card to make it easy to find the card and to show which way to hold and insert card in readers that should also have corresponding braille dots. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF417 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF417
anonporridge 4y ago
You trust the average individual to keep a private key secure and backed up?
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  I imagine it would be the equivalent of a digital driver's license: signed by the government, can be revoked/reissued if you go in person to the post office or something.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/ https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/id-card/ https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/ https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/ https://www.fedidcard.gov/home https://www.fedidcard.gov/home

netfortius 4y ago

Why couldn't they design and offer alternatives similar to the French tax services (alongside many other French online services) [1]? [1] https://franceconnect.gouv.fr/franceconnect https://franceconnect.gouv.fr/franceconnect

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mike_d 4y ago
Because it is the law in the United States that agencies must transition to the centrally managed login.gov. ID.me never should have been rolled out in the first place.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sofixa 4y ago
To expand on this, France Connect is open source and uses open standards (OAuth), so any government can adopt it.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  but muh "we must reinvent the wheel because look at these poor multi-billion dollar companies. how will they pay for their CEO's planes"

photochemsyn 4y ago

Yes, there's a solution, it's called one's social security number. If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud. Implementing a Chinese-style facial recognition and social credit score program in order to keep tabs on everyone is just another authoritarian fantasy project, and government incompetence during the pandemic is no excuse for creating such a dystopian system. One party wants to empower the Gestapo and the other party wants to empower the STASI. What could go wrong?

comte7092 4y ago
>Implementing a Chinese-style facial recognition and social credit score program in order to keep tabs on everyone is just another authoritarian fantasy project Who is doing this? Also, even the “social credit score” system in China has been greatly overblown and misinterpreted in western media. [0] [0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-e...
skibidibipiti 4y ago
[dead]
LightHugger 4y ago
a social security number is not called that because it has anything to do with security, or is a good idea to use for that purpose... your comment is equivalent to telling developers to stop wasting time on endless security fixes when we should just make computer hacking illegal, and prosecute people for it.
toast0 4y ago
> If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud. Who's going to do that? My spouse had an Oakland luxury apartment rented in her name, with her social security number and everything. But Oakland PD won't do anything, and nobody else cares either. The apartment management wasn't even sure they could evict because of covid restrictions at the time. It's fully reported, not our problem anymore.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> Five years later and more than $187 million in government investment later, however, it still hasn’t been widely rolled out. I know anything like this is going to be more complicated than it seems. Integration of lots of legacy systems, of which the federla government is probably about as complicated as it gets, with the most security-sensitive application possible. Still, and I'm really not an expert here, but I am astonished that $187 million could possibly not be enough to get this done. If it can't be done for $187 million, it seems likely it will never be done. But, intended with real humility and not sarcasm, I would love to hear more from someone who has more context. $187 million just seems astonishing. Or maybe the quote is wrong that it "hasn't been widely rolled out"?

Terretta 4y ago
$187M = $37M per year At average FAANG salaries with overhead (benefits, space, equipment both desk and datacenter/cloud, internal workplace support functions like Recruiting, IT, HR, ER, DEI...) that's 60 people. That's not many when dealing with multiple massive counterparties. You'll see ratios of non-dev to dev easily 10:1 to 30:1. Yes, they could genuinely spend $187M so far on a project accomplishing only 2 devs x 5 years worth of work and rework.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  That's actually good perspective,thanks!
  - welshwelsh 4y ago
    Also consider the cost per taxpayer. At $187 million that's roughly $1 per person. For someone making the average income, it costs them maybe $0.15 in taxes for ID.me. The IRS estimated that the average taxpayer spends $240 and 13 hours of time on their taxes. Multiply by 157 million taxpayers and that's $37 billion and 2 billion hours of labor. Although likely skewed by a small % who hire professionals, plenty of people spend $100+ on services like TurboTax. The IRS spending a couple billion to make the tax process a little bit easier is really not a big deal. $187 million is nothing, and if that's all it costs to streamline their ID verification process, then it means the government is much more efficient with our tax dollars than people give it credit for.

LanternLight83 4y ago

A friend has been waiting for the transition to receive last year's tax return-- eventually there will a deadline for collecting it and they'll need to do the video call or whatever (short on documents).

flangola7 4y ago

A centralized federal ID system, I'm sure there's no historical precedent for how this could go wrong.

comte7092 4y ago
The problem with historical totalitarian states was that they were totalitarian, not that they had identification. ID is a basic component of pretty much any functioning bureaucracy. Further, we already have near universal ID at the state level, what about the federal government makes it so much more magically tyrannical than the states?
- flangola7 4y ago
  Germany had identification record systems before they became totalitarian, when Jews were treated as citizens and decorated veterans of WW1 under the law. A person does not know when their government will become totalitarian and cannot rely on legal solutions to data problems.
  - comte7092 4y ago
    What you’re saying is that water is wet. Name a government in existence that functions without a central identification infrastructure of some sort. Having ID isn’t what leads to totalitarianism, it is a ubiquitous fact of having a bureaucracy that delivers services to its citizens. In most instance, having government id is not a harbinger of risk of totalitarianism. There are more important things to focus on.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      >Name a government in existence that functions without a central identification infrastructure of some sort. Within living memory, the United States of America.
      - mixdup 4y ago

hansvm 4y ago

> “Login.gov can handle less than 30 transactions per second,” Rettig told lawmakers. “We need more than about 1,500 transactions per second.” Even on a $2/mo VPS that's enough for image recognition in something as slow as Python. What gives?

jf 4y ago
I'm skeptical of the number that Rettig quotes. I'd like to know where he got those numbers. Also, the code that runs Login.gov is (mostly) in the public domain: https://github.com/18F/identity-idp https://github.com/18F/identity-idp – anybody with a $2/mo VPS could run the code and do their own load testing.
- abofh 4y ago
  > If you are getting the error: > > LoadError: cannot load such file -- sassc > > Try make run for a short time, then use Ctrl+C to kill it That's.. confidence making.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Consider submitting a PR to improve that functionality as a public service.