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Comment by Quothling | Hacker News Reader

Maybe 10 years ago, but other nations have caught up. Italy has their Sistema di Interscambio. Germany and France have taken digital sovereignty serious. Spain is big on open source (and ruby for some reason). Estonia has been miles ahead for more than 10 years. It's true that we have some ease of use systems compared to most of Europe, but we also have a lot of horror stories.

That being said it's not like us being shit at cyber security doesn't mean other countries aren't also shit. Look at Australia getting hacked by AI. I know it's all the rage to blame OpenAI, but really, shouldn't Australia count itself fortunate it wasn't an enemy nation state? Or that their lacking security got exposed before it was.

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You're conflating two different things here. What Denmarks excels at it implementing public IT solutions that makes processes smoother, like patient records, medical perscriptions, digital signature, a nation-wide digital identity, things like that. Digital sovereignty isn't part of this, and Denmark isn't particularly good at it, nor is it really valued that highly. Same for cyber security, I'd say that it's down to dumb luck that it's not worse. There is a city, Randers, they can't send email to the domain anders.dk (Anders being a pretty normal Danish name). Why? Because the butterfingered public employees in Randers could stop sending personal information about citizen to anders.dk, which has a catch-all email. They simply forgot the "r". The problem is the lax attitude to emailing sensitive information, probably via a Microsoft run Exchange server, but rather than fixing that, they just blocked the anders.dk domain.

I don't think I'm combining different things. I think the lack of focus on digital sovereignty is just another symptom of a public sector which still doesn't prioritises IT. Which I think follows my original post about our CPR system reaping what it had sown. I don't think you are wrong, but I think as far as my point on taking digitalisation serious, which I think is a required part of a mature public sector, I think all these lacking areas tell the story of a public sector which used to be the best in the world, but has been far too complacent.

As far as Randers cyber security goes. I imagine it'd be "fun" to do an right of access to documents, on the amount of unique visits their Microsoft Defender has registered to chatgpt.com and claude.ai.

That makes sense. I'd agree that IT isn't prioriteres, unless it's in some project form, the daily operations isn't valued. We see this in how contracts are written, software is basically purchased on a contract and expected to be run that same contract for years. There's very little incentive for operators to provide anything but the bare minimum, because the price is more or less fixed regardless of effort.

Mhh, I don't know. In Germany they proudly proclaimed their BAföG / Student loans (SU in Denmark) is now digital. But what was digital was just the client side, on the government agency side they still would print out the applications. And because they where used to people sending in paper, they had to hire more people to help with the printing. AHHHHH. That is the state of German digitalisation.

There are things I wish I could change in Denmark, mainly the power sockets and number system (Base 20 what the heck?) but Denmark is on a good course when it comes to IT understanding. Both the broader society and government implementations.

Yes yes, Estonia is better. But Denmark is still doing good.

Doing well has two dimensions (at least). One is the degree of digitalization, and here I think youre right, Denmark is doing well. The other dimension is security, and here Denmark is not doing so well.

As all security professionals know, people dont care about security, until they are hurt, and often even after that. Lost privacy doesnt hurt if you dont think too much about it.

What we are also seeing is that governments/administrations dont care about security (with exceptions). They really want to go ahead in the digitalization dimension, but not so much in the security dimension.

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