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Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

When does this end? When do our useless governments put a stop, once and for all, to these ridiculous lax security practices in corporations?

I feel like I'm being forced to become a luddite--not because I don't love technology but because it's being used for such evil and potentially life-destroying purposes.

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Our government is run by a gerontocracy born decades prior to PCs and the internet. They have no idea what the root problem is or how to fix it. How many of them even know the absolute basics? What a for loop is? Or Postgres? Or http vs https? Anything they actually do will be written by lobbyists on behalf of tech giants and other multinational corporations and big donors.

Between that and the increasingly fundamentalist, censorious, puritan, social justice takeover of tech companies, I also feel like I'm being forced to become a luddite despite my life long love for technology.

Of course they understand. The issue is that they don't care. They don't care about you or me. They don't care about whether you have Internet access and if you do whether it is slow or fast. They don't care whether you are homeless or rich or if you are high on drugs or a personal trainer to the stars.

If you make a big enough issue about how they apparently don't understand, they will create a committee to study the issue then ignore the findings. They don't care about you or your problems.

I think the takeaway is that government represents too many people and you cant satisfy everyone, so leaders listen to citizen action groups and lobbyists who are able to aggregate all these different viewpoints into more broadly popular legislation and show with their supporters that these ideas would be popular among a given electorate.

After having interacted with politicians, I am firm in my belief that most of them don't care about their constituents.

At the federal level I think the care is chiefly about re-election. At the state level I see a mix of people who are involved out of a sense of civic duty, and people who have designs on moving up and acquiring more power.

If politicians represented fewer constituents I think they'd be forced to care more about their constituents, if only because each individual voter wields more power. I certainly think that I have more power to influence my local politicians than I do my state representatives (let alone my federal representatives). My local politicians also live more proximate to me, and share more in the physical problems of the region. My US Senators live in my state, and that's about all they have in common with me.

This is what we get as a society when we aren't collectively involved. Why should our politicians care when we don't? How many of your neighbors have done the work to change politicians' votes or to raise their own politicians up?

I agree with you, but I also think there are many disparate problems we can point at. Ultimately, it all boil down to - we get the results of our efforts.

There's a both sidesism here - one party that's demanding censorship (because misinformation, danger, etc.) when they used to fight it, the other party seemingly defenders of classic big corporate entities, yes it does seem hopeless.

I think it has to get worse before it gets better. If almost everyone's personal information, SS and so forth, even IMEI's, addresses, mother's maiden, you name it, is available on the dark web, then that'll basically mean the corporate world will have to create a new mechanism. For example, the most obvious is the entire system in which credit worthiness is determined.

I know two people with identity theft issues, and in both cases people opened up accounts that impacted credit worthiness. That's really lousy if you spend a long time searching for a home to buy, and when you're in contract something like this happens and your credit gets dinged. Blame the banks and the credit industry as much as the hackers. They made this impossible-to-contain information literally the key determinant of your ability to get a loan in order to purchase a home.

I am becoming less luddite, but way more partial to older technology.

This situation could be greatly improved if these companies didn't have or need to have this data in the first place.

Prepaid mobile plans carry a lot of stigma with them - perceived to be "low-class", or even criminal by many. But at least your SSN and address won't be in their database.

I don't know about the US, but here in the UK prepaid mobile isn't necessarily looked down upon, but it's significantly more expensive than a contract. It's the main reason why people just go with a contract despite being locked in for 2 or more years. Even sim-only contracts are considerably cheaper.

In the US, prepaid is a much cheaper option for all but the highest volume users. The drawback is that you get deprioritized on the cell towers making mobile data nearly unusable in many cities or at large gatherings like sporting events.

I've been using Liberty for a while now and it's been fine. It's 2G but I'm like 90% of the time always around wifi I trust so not a major deal. No reason to blow tons on data I don't use.

With AT&T at least if you want the highest priority on their towers you have to be on their Elite plan (QCI 7 I believe), which is post-paid only

Yikes. Is that something that AT&T openly advertising?

What does the “priority on the towers” do?

If you want to use your mobile data, you get sent to the back of the queue. Higher priority users might get 50mbps. You will be lucky to get 1mbps and in some cases less than that.

I don't know if there is an impact on call availability as well.

A converstation earlier this week pointed out the EU system: eIDAS [0]. it looks pretty interesting how its decentralized.

I could see something like this running from each state's DMV (or the postal service if you didn't want to use your local state DMV) to help ensure you are you.

It would be interesting to hear what people that use it say, because i'm sadly stuck in a very US world :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS

We already have systems for notarization, perhaps we could try to leverage that, updating it for more modern purposes. I could see them issuing things like smart cards. Then again we have some pretty hardcore religious zealots who refuse to do anything even remotely resembling a national ID system, so it will continue to be fragmented and subject to each state's implementation.

if the cost of identity theft, i mean bank fraud, was put on the banks this would be less of an issue.

all companies do not need better security. banks need better processes so my ssn and address cant be used to mess up my life.

the banks have the money to fix this.

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