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Comment Re: How much did X-Road cost to develop? (Score 1) 83

X-road is not also much a website per se but an background infrastructure to exchange data from different (state and private) databases and websites.

I don't know in what way this is finnish invention, AFAIK it was entirely developed in Estonia from the start. Maybe the idea as such originated in Finland. And p.s. - its open source.

Comment Re: In other news (Score 0) 663

Just out of curiosity - how do you manage to break them? I've had every conceivable Apple device and my 2007 iphone's cable is starting to disintegrate now (but still works).
And - if you don't get along with cables as such - maybe you should buy a micro-usb to lightning adapter from Apple. Then you can replace standard micro-usb cables.

Comment Re: This is why encryption isn't popular (Score 3, Interesting) 399

Yup. That's pretty much the case, as i said. You lose the encrypted documents. Generally people don't use it to encrypt day-to-day communitcations. Many people here confuse security and privacy (especially from the government). While our id card system is extremely good and easy for security, its no good for privacy from the governement.

  If i exchanged documents with someone that i want to hide from big brother, i would use PGP. But for legal communications with other individuals or businesses or government, i use the id card system.

Comment Re: This is why encryption isn't popular (Score 1) 399

I understand that for hiding things from the government the Estonian one is not an ideal solution. But the original problem involved communicating personal information with some kind of business entoty while securing privacy of said info from third parties while in transit. And for that the Estonian national ID card system is perfect as it is universal and accepted by everyone and all keys are in place and nothing needs to be exchanged.
If you want to hide something from the big brother you should not send the information to a business entity in the same country no matter what the encryption in transit is.

Comment Re: This is why encryption isn't popular (Score 5, Informative) 399

In Estonia these id cards are used for everything. You can log into banks, you can communicate with any state official. You can sign any contract digitally with them. You can encrypt documents to another person's public key. Etc. This is much simpler than banks and everyone giving out their own cards - i only need one.

Comment Re: This is why encryption isn't popular (Score 5, Informative) 399

The key pair is generated INSIDE the card. This is the norm with most PKCS11 cards. The private key never leaves the card, your public key is signed by state. So the state does not have your private key per se.
But that does not necessarily mean they have no means to decrypt it some other way - i don't even pretend to know that.

Comment Re: This is why encryption isn't popular (Score 5, Interesting) 399

Just as information - in Estonia we have national id cards which have PKCS11 for digital signing and encryption. Everyone already has a key that can be used to encrypt and/or sign data. For instance, the state sends speedcam fines to you via email that are encrypted to your public key and digitally signed by a police officer. Any person can encrypt data to any other person's public key provided that the recipient has an id card with valid certificates. The only caveat is that when the id card expires, the data is unencryptable because new certificates are generated in the new card and then signed by CA.

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