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Quothling • today at 10:23 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

mrweasel • today at 10:40 AM

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.

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Mashimo • today at 11:08 AM

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.

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