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Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Here is the thing, people use insecure password storage because secure password storage retrieval is seen as either "too slow" or it is seen as "not required". For example, how many people are still using md5 hashing for password storage?

It seems like all the govt issuing a secure online id will do is add another unused standard to the pile without changing the behavior that makes things less secure in the first place.

http://xkcd.com/927/ sums this problem up nicely.

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Except that the government can require this standard's use to file taxes, access certain important government accounts, etc. They have the ability to create a standard and make it stick.

> They have the ability to create a standard and make it stick.

This is rarely, if ever, the case. I can't actually think of any technical standards whose dominance originates from a successful government mandate.

Well, there is the metric system for one. Maybe the mini USB connectors used for charging mobile phones counts, too.

> Well, there is the metric system for one.

Thus proving my point. The US government has on multiple occasions attempted to propel the metric system into dominance in the United States, hand has consistently failed every time.

> Maybe the mini USB connectors used for charging mobile phones counts, too.

And yet my iPhone still has has a proprietary charging port.

Well, I suppose this shows more a problem with Americans themselves than with government standards. How come the rest of the world was able to adopt these government-mandated standards, but Americans (or an US company in the case of Apple) can't?

Reminds me that it's also the same with A-sized paper, with basically just the US and Canada stuck with letter/legal/whatever.

I'm not really seeing a "problem" here - uniformity in standards is a recipe for stagnation. There's no need for everyone to do everything the same way, and even less need for prescriptive standards that attempt to change people's behavior than descriptive ones that just document what people are already doing.

I'm a bit confused about the paper sizes thing, though A4 and Letter are simply two different paper size standards.

The EU mandated in 2011 that all new smartphones must use mico-USB to charge [1]

[1] http://www.dw.de/european-commission-says-standard-mobile-ch...

What has government ever done for us, part from GPS, metric, GMT, telephony, electrical standards, safety standards, the Internet etc?

When military technology enters the mainstream, and becomes the basis of technology in widespread use by the public, it goes without saying that the original military specifications are the initial "standards" present for that technology.

This isn't the same as the government attempting to mandate standards for public use, especially with the intent to alter the way people are already using technology.

In your list, only GPS represents a technology originally used by the military, whose initial military specification still mostly describes its current function. Everything else, and especially the Internet - which grew out of a DARPA project, but certainly isn't one any longer - is either a vague category (electrical/safety standards), areas in which standards have not originated from government mandates (telephony, the Internet, time zones), or areas in which government attempts to shift standards have been demonstrable failures (metric usage in the US).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Military_Standard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACA_airfoil

Educate yourself.

Well, it's fairly clear that standards for military technology will be set by the military organizations that are generally the sole users of military technology.

These aren't "standards" in the sense that they define the parameters for ineroperability of technology in widespread use by many disparate parties.

To the best of my knowledge, those standards are also in widespread use in the electronics industry.

I can think of a few: the US dollar, the railroad gauge, encryption algorithms, etc. The government is often the largest single customer of things so what they demand, someone provides. And since marginal cost is usually smaller than unit cost, one large guaranteed customer means that product or service is cheaper for everyone else than some competing product or service.

They can make it stick for government benefits and taxes and so forth. ("Use our IRS-ID or you can't file your taxes and we'll jail you for tax evasion.")

I doubt if they can make it stick in areas where people have a choice.

> They have the ability to create a standard and make it stick.

This was created by the USPS. Government agencies can't even agree on a standard to use amongst themselves. Through the public in this mess, and now the wikileaks mess and this thing ain't going anywhere.

The USPS contract is being led to have a contractor implement a solution compliant with Federal guidelines on authentication, though. The ideal is certainly that you'd eventually be able to use this same system to sign-on to other Federal government citizen-facing portals, if I'm understanding the article correctly.

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