> At least allow us to use names instead of numbers
Many people probably think in terms of "fd 0" and "fd 1" instead of "standard in" and "standard out", but should you wish to use names at least on modern Linux/BSD systems do:
I don't have macos right now but I think that it doesn't have these files. What's worse is that bash emulates these files so they might even somewhat work, but not in all situations. I distinctly remember issues with this command:
Bash and zsh also allow, and modern Borne-compatible shells (sh) might too:
echo >&2 error_message
On Linux, /dev/std* requires the kernel to do file name resolution in the virtual file system because it could point to something nonstandard that isn't a symlink to something like /proc/self/fd/XX and then the kernel has to check that that should hopefully point to a special character device.
For all countries? I was always wondering about that when doing one of these wonderful "take a selfie of you holding your passport" "authentication" procedures...
The big drawback of one time passwords is that it doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks such as phishing, which is in practice one of the most common attacks on systems of this scale.
The logistics operation involved in distributing codes is also very expensive and inflexible. You may need to authenticate payments a dozen times in an hour one day, when you are on a farmers market which doesn't take card payments or you are out dining with friends, and another day not at all.
Given all this, a good old public key infrastructure makes sense. But that is unfortunately also usually the first step to a complexity explosion.
> The logistics operation involved in distributing codes is also very expensive and inflexible. You may need to authenticate payments a dozen times in an hour one day, when you are on a farmers market which doesn't take card payments or you are out dining with friends, and another day not at all.
Neither of the scenarios you describe would require you to authenticate using MitID: Peer-to-peer payments in Denmark are typically done using the app MobilePay, which only requires MitID authentication during setup. And you never need MitID authentication when paying in person, at most you'll need your card's pin-code
> You may need to authenticate payments a dozen times in an hour one day, when you are on a farmers market which doesn't take card payments or you are out dining with friends, and another day not at all.
It's very unlikely people would need to mess about with MittId/BankID if they can't use card payments at a market. Firstly, if they're doing the almost-unheard-of clunky approach of using their mobile banking app to make a bank transfer, it would probably be authorised using their touch/face ID instead of BankID/MittID. But far more likely, they'd use one of the ubiquitous mobile payment apps: Vipps (Norway), Swish (Sweden) or MobilePay (Denmark).
> The big drawback of one time passwords is that it doesn't protect against man-in-the-middle attacks such as phishing, which is in practice one of the most common attacks on systems of this scale.
This is true and was definitely a criticism of the old system, where websites would open the NemID iframe and ask you for your username, password and a specific indexed OTP code, without providing any authentication to you. You only notice something weird if it asks you for an the index of a code that is not on your card but maybe the scammer is lucky and guesses an index that you have and then they can use that phished username/password/OTP triple to perform an unauthorized action.
The new system is slightly different, because if you use the mobile phone authentication it will send you a notification to your phone, but if you use the (bespoke, non-standard) OTP dongle it still does not authenticate itself towards the user. However the codes are now time-based so if they collect an OTP code they can only use it in a ~30s window, so the phished credentials have to be used immediately.
You can have a mixed system, such that revocation lists are downloaded and cached every hour or so, and you can even try to check online more often than that, but fall back to the downloaded lists if the system is down.
This is pure misinformation. I have personally never seen such large crows as the anti war demonstrations of 2002-2003. There 100k people marching several times for several weeks in the European capitals I know.
Some estimate that these were even bigger than the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. These put the total number of people going out in demonstrations world wide at 30M+. This war was massively protested against, any which way you count.
That trivial definition sees limited use in the real world. Few countries that are popularly considered democratic have direct democracy. Most weigh votes geographically or use some sort of representative model.
Most established definitions of democracy goes something like, heavily simplified:
1. Free media
2. Independent judicial system
3. Peaceful system for the transfer of power
The most popular model for implementing (3) is free and open elections, which has yielded pretty good results in the past century where it has been practiced.
Considering social media pretty much is media for most, it is a heavily concentrated power, and if there can any suspicions of being in cahoots with established political power and thus non-free, surely that is a threat to democracy almost by definition.
Let's be real here: It has been conclusively shown again and again that social media does influence elections. That much should be obvious without too much in the way of academic rigor.
Of course social media influences elections. Direct or indirect, the principle of democracy is the same: the electorate hears a diversity of perspectives and votes according to the ones found most convincing.
How can you say you believe in democracy when you want to control what people hear so they don't vote the wrong way? In a democracy there is no such thing as voting the wrong way.
Who are you to decide which perspectives get heard? You can object to algorithmic feed ranking only because it might make people vote wrong --- but as we established, the concept of "voting wrong" in a legitimate democracy doesn't even type check. In a legitimate democracy, it's the voting that decides what's right and wrong!
You write as though the selection of information by algorithmic feeds is a politically neutral act, which comes about by free actions of the people. But this is demonstrably not the case. Selecting hard for misinformation which enrages (because it increases engagement) means that social media are pushing populations further and further to the right. And this serves the interest of the literal handful of billionaires who control those sites. This is the unhealthy concentration of power the OP writes about, and it is a threat to democracy as we've known it.
By that logic, the New York Times also threatens democracy. Of course, it doesn't, and that's because no amount of opinion, injected in whatever manner and however biased, can override the role of free individuals in evaluating everything they've heard and voting their conscience.
You don't get to decide a priori certain electoral outcomes are bad and work backwards to banning information flows to preclude those outcomes.
No. The difference is that the New York Times has not been specifically engineered to be an addictive black hole for attention. Algorithmic social media is something new. Concentration of press power has always been a concern in democracy and many countries have sorted to regulate disability of individuals to wield that power. We get to choose as a society the rules on which we engaged with one another. Algorithmic social media is an abuse of basic human cognitive processing and we could if we wanted agreed that it’s not allowed in the public. It’s not a question of censoring particular information or viewpoints. – Here is that the mechanism of distribution itself is unhealthy.
> it seems like the were fulfilling their legal obligation (at the time)
Rather, their illegal obligation (at the time)?
It was clear from the start these import tariffs are illegal. Only congress can set them. It says so in the constitution! Hand waving at some pretend emergency doesn't give you the right to ignore constitutional law.
The logistics companies should probably have fought these clearly illegal tariffs from the start. Instead they played along and collected the fees. There's probably some interesting legal precedence here to be made, should this argument hold in court.
There are many reasonable ideas for import taxation. But what you describe was not what happened. China fought back with their own tariffs, and you may well have paid less import tax on your Temu knock-offs than you did for some widget made with both higher environmental and labor standards in some western European country.
Many people probably think in terms of "fd 0" and "fd 1" instead of "standard in" and "standard out", but should you wish to use names at least on modern Linux/BSD systems do:
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