Hackers had a live feed of every ID verification company scanned for over a year

https://hnrankings.com/49529621

Cultural pushback has so far prevented such a system from being created. I hope that continues but am not optimistic.

In functioning ID systems (and not having or wanting one is a valid political position which both the US and the UK took) this is not an issue.

I live in Poland, and we force rotating IDs on a (staggered) 10-year schedule, just so we can slowly upgrade them and introduce new features like these.

So the whole "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI" mumbo jumbo can be easily fooled by a gif file.

Sorry. Wrong.

    - get a VISA to be allowed to cross the border
    - send to the airline for my flight that will cross the border
    - show the real passport at the border

Also learned “know your customer” laws require US people to give passport + SSN to a foreign bank who then reports it back to the US. Given that such bank’s website involves disabling right-click for “security”, the only glimmer of hope is that the data is catastrophically lost due to stupidity before it can be compromised.

That's also assuming you can get all the documents you need for the initial ID. If you don't already have all the essential documents you'll need multiple appointments at government facilities. The local social security office usually has just one location. Mine required time off from work because they were open from 10 till 4 four days a week. This was just part of the process to get an ID for a child when we only had a copy of a couple documents instead of the originals.

Getting an ID for my grandma who made the mistake of being born black in the rural South during Jim Crow was a year long process, since she didn't even have originals of most of the documents. It took that long and was handled by one of her children that was a lawyer. For her we were getting an ID so the family could take her traveling, years before it was turned into a political issue to disenfranchise people.

Nobody arguing for the ID laws ever argues for raising their taxes for an ID that all citizens are guaranteed with the supporting infrastructure. They're arguing for it because they know people they don't want to vote will have trouble getting one

Systemic racism is very much a thing, and while perhaps not foundational in this particular issue, we see still see political fuckery that definitely targets by race: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/tarrant-count...

For multiple reasons.

Most operating systems and browsers come with a sync mechanism that many people default to, but it's no more than that: the default.

As for account recovery, most websites have a way to recover your account when you lose your password, there's no reason why that wouldn't work for passkeys. Every website with passkey access I've used so far makes passkeys optional and forces you to set a password already. If they switch their default to passkeys and add a password as an optional step, nothing would change.

When I'm on non-Apple I can scan a QR code on my phone and it will validate it the same way, using bluetooth to send enough info to the target computer to get me logged on.

It is not true. You can move passkeys between OSs if you have a password manager or an OS that has this ability. For example, I store my Passkeys in iCloud Keychain and I have them synced on all my Apple devices.

There are cases though, where the website can force the requirement of a device bound passkey, but that is something it is not very likely you will encounter.

It's not all sunshine and roses, though. Despite having Bitwarden set as the only passkey provider in my Android setup, the phone persistently only offers me Google. Which is empty, because as I said, I won't use one tied to things I can't control. Works great on desktops, though.

Passkeys can theoretically require you to be on hardware, I haven't found anything yet that requires that.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/us/pope-leo-xiv-bank-cust...

[1] A credit monitoring service that will give the institution that "free 12 months" at a vastly reduced bulk rate because it knows that in order to sign up for free credit monitoring you actually sign up, with a card, for their top tier product (which might otherwise be $50+ a month) on what is effectively a 12 month trial after which they switch you over to a paid subscription (hell, there may even be commissions paid to the institution for anyone who neglects to cancel quickly enough). The incentives are so perverse.

If Apple (or another large international company) suffers from decreasing margins, gets a new CEO and decides to turn the data it sits on into money there is absolutely nothing you can do, and you might in fact still stay a "forced" customer because of network effects (=> just consider whatsapp being an important communication channel in many places worldwide).

I think this attitude in general is often harmful; if your government sucks, fix the government instead of making yourself dependent on some quasi-monopolist private company.

If anyone has to have this type of control, better it be a local national government that you can in at least some small way influence.

For those unfamiliar, you are, of course, allowed to peacefully protest in support of Palestine in the UK.

Palestine Action is a specific group that was controversially labelled as a terrorist group after they broke onto a runway and spray painted military planes.

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

The principle reason why the Netherlands joined the EU was to sabotage the French-German alliance- all the alarm bells went off in the 1950s.

As do physical IDs, as somebody who's bought his younger brother beers growing up.

Theres no avoiding this, structurally. So the best thing you can do is not to introduce any additional points of failure.

Think about it, how many kids will get a gun just because some of the kids have access to guns through their negligent parents? If it's banned the path to getting it won't be straightforward.

Case in point; I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not! :D

It's definitely worth doing infinite security in order to avoid regulating social network algorithms, because