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Comment by dane-pgp | Hacker News Reader

> In the mean time there was also a desktop application available to read out the NFC chip of an identity card. This app is only available through the Windows 10 app store. With all my computers running Debian or Ubuntu, that was no option for me.

I fear this isn't a temporary oversight but a sign of the long-term trends towards governments only supporting the major platforms. Those platforms will then complete the quid pro quo by "voluntarily" banning apps that the government doesn't approve of, like bittorrent, Tor, E2EE messengers, VPNs, etc.

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This is miles from a temporary oversight. In the Netherlands unchecked citizen surveillance is the norm, and that has nothing to do with being a democracy. The same way the US "still" is a democracy but unchecked surveillance is pervasive.

"Dutch civil servants used social media to spy on citizens, says study"

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/05/19/dutch-civil-se...

"Dutch secret service 'also has access to information from PRISM'":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860215

"The Netherlands, a surveillance state?" (2017):

https://www.ictrecht.nl/en/blog/the-netherlands-a-surveillan...

"Sweeping surveillance powers planned by Dutch government" - "The Netherlands is already the most heavily phone-tapped country in the world" (2016)

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/sweeping-survei...

"With a population of 17 million, the Netherlands is already the most heavily phone-tapped country in the world – with about 26,000 taps granted to the police and other agencies, excluding the security services, every year, according to figures from the Department of Justice."

The author of the article just made himself part of this list...

> "With a population of 17 million, the Netherlands is already the most heavily phone-tapped country in the world – with about 26,000 taps granted to the police and other agencies, excluding the security services, every year, according to figures from the Department of Justice."

Not surprising, given that the Netherlands is the major port of entry for drugs into Europe - alone the port of Rotterdam had cocaine seizures worth 5 billion euros in 2021 [1], and Europol estimates 1500 distinct criminal organizations in the cocaine trade.

[1] https://www.nrz.de/region/niederrhein/rotterdamer-hafen-koka...

[2] https://www.nzz.ch/international/die-niederlande-sind-fuer-d...

Glad to hear that this is all in the name of the war on drugs. /s

It's difficult to molest a child over the telephone.

In other words all this surveillance is done for a useless purpose?

Out of paranoia, I do all my piracy on a completely different machine than all my banking, taxes, official stuff anyways. Which is also a separate machine than the one I use for work.. How many devices does one person need?

You only need one machine running Qubes OS: https://qubes-os.org. Works for me.

Purism, framework, and similar are coming at the right time then, eh?

Most recent government services operate via the web or APIs anyhow.

Plus suing for alternatives to Google/Microsoft duopoly should be front and center for fringe firms in the space.

Probably too late, honestly, but still worth trying.

Honestly, FirefoxOS received a lot of flak for not "focusing on their browser", but if it had succeeded it would have been a huge win for digital freedom and privacy.

Germany supports ID card reading on almost all distros: https://www.ausweisapp.bund.de/en/open-source-software

These "smartcard" ID systems (which were reasonably open) are getting deprecated all over the EU in favor of smartphone-based solutions.

I mean couldn't you just run Wine or something?

That's a good point, at least for the immediate problems, but I suspect that in the longer term, governments will make their apps check for genuine Windows/macOS installs using remote attestation, like some online games are already doing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/riot-games-anti-cheat...

Roll over and play dead often enough, and eventually the world around you will just assume you don't care and stop bothering to even inform you of the upcoming tricks they'll be requiring you to perform.

If its only available to get through the Windows App Store, is that even possible to do? I haven't actually used Wine in a very long time, so I don't actually know how that would interact with the App Store.

Then there is the question about interacting with the hardware for reading the card as well.

App store says WPF to me which won't work in Wine.

You don't need to use UWP/WPF/whatever it's called these days to get the application into the MS Store. Good ol' Win32 programs can be packaged and distributed through there as well.

Microsoft wants you to use their new APIs but they realised they couldn't force developers to do that. With their efforts for a mobile phone operating system dead in the water they've been more accepting of normal applications for a while now.

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