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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

As with the Proton payment network some 20 years ago, the Belgian state ceeded to all-powerful lobbying and weakened eID by e.g. disabling the encryption bit or by disallowing email signing outside of the state-sanctioned websites.

eIDs could have been wonderful little tools. Instead, they were forced on citizen's and now, we are facing an even worse setup with the Itsme app that links the smartphone to state services and degrades the owners of free, opensource or just rooted phones to second-class citizens by disallowing them access.

Some time ago Belgium also gave up its digital sovereignty by cancelling its Root CA. Instead, it now uses Digicert ROOT CA which is controlled by a US entity.

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Proton was way ahead of its time. It was great. And I was saddened to see it fail.

Itsme is pretty terrible all around. Their idea of "security" is ... quaint. Sadly they're not the only ones who are forcing people onto the non-rooted Android/iOS-duopoly. But unlike eID, Itsme isn't required for anything yet. AFAIK anything that requires Itsme also works with eID ... for now.

The eID card was doomed from the start by terrible usability. No device can read those cards natively, you needed a dongle. It also didn't work with native web technologies, you needed browser extensions. And if you lose your card, you need a weeks long replacement process, and cannot use your eID in the meantime.

Same problem with proton. Payment terminals needed to ask the consumer if they wanted to pay with proton or debit, and that added a few seconds of delay for the processing of every customer, which actually cost a lot to big supermarket chains, more than they saved with proton, and thus they dumped proton, and everybody followed suit.

Their functional successors, Itsme and Payconic have on the other hand great usability and thus have achieved much bigger successes.

While I agree that using card with computer is usually quite a bit annoying, but misplacing the card is not so big deal. A quick replacement card can be issued in less than an hour but it is not a "physical ID" (no photo), only electronic. It costs a bit more than normal eID card and it has shorter validity period. This can be active in parallel with the full eID card.

I personally rarely use ID card electronically, but I use mobile ID (phone sim application) instead which is much more convenient. Unfortunately this is phased out in this year and I haven't seen any full replacement for it so far.

Ah yes, Payconiq, which only works on a small subset of walled garden devices. As opposed to a cheap card which fits in anyone's wallet. A proton payment was essentially two button presses, card selection + OK. It only added delay because some terminals were slow or weren't very user friendly. Paying with Payconiq in a shop isn't any faster than Proton. Someone (or something) still has to decide which payment method is going to be used. And quite frankly, if two seconds is too much friction for a physical payment, I hope you never find yourself in a shop when the Payconiq system is down.

Actually mTLS has been a native feature of browsers for more than a few decades now, still is.

A card reader is very common in both laptops and PC's in countries where smartcards are common. Kinda supply-demand thing. Not to mention the readers are cheap.

For mobile devices you can basically use a smartcard SIM that provides similar functionality. But there are other options for secure secret storage on mobile devices.

Most of the hindrance is behind the willingness to pick a solution and commit to it. Doing it half-assed and never reaching the tipping point will doom every solution.

Proton could have been anonymous. Instead, it had all the downsides of cash without being anonymous.

Itsme is state-controlled single sing on. Payconiq is blended into banking apps, lately.

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