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Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

> signing official documents like grades from school

I have no Earthly idea why a) this needs to be done digitally, or b) for the EU to be involved (at EU level) with this.

Unfortunately if you pitch mission creep vs the principle of subsidiarity, the former wins every time.

University grades are standardised already. This is useful because it allows people to work in other countries, digitally signing them prevents fraud.

This is just one use case for eIDAS, then you have things like interacting with different government institutions, banks, et cetera, et cetera.

There are a lot of people who live in/work/visit other EU countries as is their near absolute right. We should therefore standardise technology on the EU level to make their lives easier.

Great, very good! Now if you want to standardize encrypted communication, please do it with the help of security researchers, not like this.

Other than this questionable browser CA thing, do you think there are any specific flaws with the crypto system presented in eIDAS.

Alright, so I am not a security researcher so actual security researchers may not share my views. Also, as mentioned in the site, the full text of the new regulation is not public yet. And finally, I have only skimmed whatever text is available given that it's over 100 pages and I skipped over most of the EDIW stuff (it's a really complex system that I can't understand/audit in 20 mins).

But with that out of the way, no I don't have any other complaints, I think the regulation is generally a move in the right direction.

> University grades are standardised already

... for some value of "standardised"?

UK[0]: First, 2:1, 2:2, Third

Germany[1]: 1 to 5

France[2]: "on a scale from 0-20"

[0] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/students/success-guide/ug/assessm... [1] https://www.uni-passau.de/en/international/coming-to-passau/... [2] https://u-paris.fr/en/higher-education-in-france/

Since you obviously ignorant of how it works. When you get a degree you get a transcript where all local grades are translated to to ECTS, which you then would use to apply for jobs. Of course in the tech industry grades or even whole degrees are generally disregarded but in finance and other fields they of course, are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECTS_grading_scale

> When you get a degree you get a transcript where all local grades are translated to to ECTS, which you then would use to apply for jobs

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22job+application%22+%22ECT... gets me only a handful of results and a warning that 'It looks like there aren't many great matches for your search'

Do (m)any European employers know about this scheme?

The diploma comes with an explanatory supplement (at least mine does), so employers don't really need to know about it, they just need to read (and maybe they won't do that).

Job applications in Europe typically list a degree that is required, rarely the score that an applicant is expected to have received. Nonetheless, ECTS scoring is nowadays awarded to every degree that is obtained in a country that is a signatory to the Bologna accord. To answer your question, it is an established standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process#Signatories

> ECTS scoring is nowadays awarded to every degree that is obtained in a country that is a signatory to the Bologna accord

It seems that ECTS is indeed useful to those who move internationally between institutions during a course of study (Erasmus and similar).

I'm struggling to detect much of a use case once a qualification is achieved and someone's looking for work.

> To answer your question, it is an established standard

OK, but so is Esperanto :)

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