What exactly is net neutrality and should you care?

Whereas, in every centrally planned economy, that works out just ducky, right? Just ignore the shortages and lines comrade, at least we don't have to suffer the tyranny of free choice. Your betters will tell you what you need and can buy.

Although it drives lefties crazy, the plain fact of history is that capitalism has made more people wealthy and raised the average standard of living far better than socialism. Do some get rich, and some get poor? Yes. But that's better than everyone staying poor.

Did you know that most million dollar fortunes in the US don't survive three generations? One to make it, one to preserve it, and one to lose it. For more, read "The Millionaire Next Door".

The real villain is the company that builds barriers to competitors. They usually do this by having the government pass laws making it prohibitively expensive for newcomers to compete--this is the antithesis of capitalism.

Want to start a hospital to provide inexpensive medical services? First, you have to have a "Statement of Need" proving that your hospital is needed by the community (including current competitors). Good luck with that.

Just look what's happening to Lyft and Uber right now. Existing taxi companies hate competition, so they are trying to regulate them out of existence.

Have you seen what New Jersey did to Tesla? According to New Jersey, you need to sell cars through a dealer because...well, for no good reason, really, besides rent-seeking. It's facing similar laws in Georgia and Massachusetts.

Here's the thing: markets change. When you have a fungible item like bandwidth, you may be undercut if you raise your rates too high. We're still in the growth phase of the internet (although not quite the explosive 90's boom).

Nobody's forcing anyone to be on the net. Rent-seekers will always try to take a bite, and regulators excel at finding ways to put the screws to those they regulate, especially if they can play one against the other.

The bottom line is that someone's got to pay for the wires, fibers, switches, routers, etc. It's just a matter of letting the market decide or some bureaucrat.

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While that may be true where you live, our government is currently making the transition to "fully digital", meaning that any and all letters from any and all government bodies, local or national, are to be delivered to an inbox you have at a site called www.e-boks.dk. You have no choise in the matter. You can't even pick a different provider for your inbox or set it up to forward whatever you get to your normal e-mail adress. All you can do is set up a noticifaction mail whenever something new is delivered to that inbox, so you know you have to go check it.

This whole system is then dependent on yet another system the government has come up with called "Nem-ID" (Easy-ID) that you set up with your social security number as your user name and a password of your own choosing, but that's not all. In order to make it even more secure, you're sent this little credit card sized piece of laminated cardboard with a series of codes on it. When you need to log into anything that uses Nem-ID - and that's starting to become pretty much anything and everything, including any and all local and national government sites, doctor's websites, banking sites etc. - you need to type in your social security number and password and all that gives you access to is a four digit code that then corresponds to a six digit code on your laminated piece of cardboard. Put that in and you're then granted access.

Again, you have no choise in the matter. The card is sent to you and you HAVE to use it. Some government bodies have completely removed the option to call them or even send them an e-mail if you have questions or problems. They can ONLY be contacted by using this card. You can't even show up at a physical adress anymore. The buildings are locked and can only be accessed by employees.

For those who don't immediately see some of the troubles this could cause, let me type it out:

- First off, it's Java based and we all know what a tightly secure system THAT is!

- Many of these sites aren't accesible through "library computers", since public internet providers don't want to take responsibility for the security of your personal data, meaning you HAVE to have a computer and internet access from home.

- But wait! You can just use your smartphone if you don't have a computer! Yeah, cause no one's looking over your shoulder in any way when you use those... There's no way Apple, Google or Microsoft are keeping track of what you're doing on your device and there's certainly no chance that less than law abiding citizens would physically look over your shoulder to obtain your codes if they had the chance. Nope. Ignorance is bliss.

- And what if the service goes down? We had a problem a while back when there was this big Java hack. All the government websites were down, but did that stop the government from punishing people for not checking their inbox for letters telling them to turn up for audits and all sorts of other stuff? Nope. The public was held fully accountable for "failing to check e-boks", even when the system was inaccessible.

That's just some of the crap we have to deal with here where someone IS actually forcing you to be on the net. Communication with any government body is made completely impossible if you're not. What a fantastic idea! Let's make ourselves completely dependent on technology, so that cybercriminals can lay waste to our entire society at the click of a mouse button, if they so choose. Sounds like a great plan!

Bruteforcing would be practically impossible, apart as a denial-of-service. there's usually 40+ code combos per customer(we have a similar system here too, but the banks do the login part instead of the gov.)

However, spoofing and exploits can and sometimes do work. mostly though, it's a relatively safe system compared to most.

Our cards have 132 combinations of 4-digit codes with corresponding 6-digit codes, so yes, it's almost impossible to bruteforce. But, as we've learned over the years, in the world of cyber crime, nothing's ever really impossible. It's just a matter of someone being good enough, tenacious enough and persistent enough to crack it.

Spoofing is a problem, but the biggest threat to people who don't have a computer at home and need to use some of the few public accesspoints there are, is good old fashioned pickpocketing. I'm pretty good with my hands, so if I really wanted to, my guess would be that 2-3 weeks of intensive training as a pickpocket would be sufficient for me to go somewhere public where people use this code card, catch a glimpse of someone's code and then pick off the card to do with as I please.

It's more difficult now, but it's not at all impossible.

And that's how this system works too. Problem is, as soon as I know your intitial user name and password, I may not be able to break in, but I'll sure be able to cause you some aggrevation when I punch in the wrong code 3 times and you can't get access to your netbanking site or that very important piece of mail the county just sent you that you're required to answer within three days, or it'll have consequenses. And you'll really be annoyed when you're not able to contact anyone who has anything to do with it, since no one does phone service anymore.

All you can do is go to the Nem-ID provider's site, put in your username and password and tell them your card's been compromised. Then you wait five days for a new one and that should be it, assuming they haven't already figured out that someone knows your password and now wants you to create a new one, at which point it could take up to 10 business days to get everything set up again.

In the meantime, the county is sending you reminders on e-boks that you can't read and before you know it, you owe the county $1,000 for failing to comply with something you had no idea that you had to comply with in the first place, since you couldn't get access.

The simplest way to overload this system is to spread a keylogger around to gain access to a bunch of usernames and passwords and then lock those users out. Once the first hundred users are locked out, someone's going to notice the problem and shut the whole system down. Chaos ensues.

And therein lies the problem. It's been decided by law that this is the way things are supposed to run from here on out.

You are required by law to have an e-boks account where you receive mail from local or national government entities.

You are required by law to have a working e-mail adress where they can send you notifications about new letters from said entities. Not reading your e-mail is not considered a valid excuse for failure to comply with government injunctions, for instance.

You are required by law to have Nem-ID and use it to book doctor's appointments, apply for social security, apply for building permits, request a printout of your police records or medical records and a whole host of other services.

There's no way around it.

Actually, I've just re-counted it. It's 148 codes. The card folds in 3 to make it the size of a credit card. There are 44 seperate codes on the first credit card sized piece and 52 on each of the other 2, so yeah. It creates a problem for the vision impaired, if that's what you're thinking. The font is something like "Verdana" size 6.

Update


www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31128823



"In an article on Wired", here is that link....

www.wired.com/2015/02/fcc-chairman-wheeler-net-neutrality/

first two paragraphs...

Outages and slow speeds are a thing of the past!!