swiley @swiley@social.cleverlibre.org

@matt @omnipotens I was thinking of fingerprints actually but it really doesn't matter.

@omnipotens @matt
You need an SSN to pay taxes. It's not required for anything else. They're not unique, they're trivial to forge, and they should not be used for anything other than social security accounts.

@matt @omnipotens We wouldn't want a biometric link anyway. All that does is create hassles for people who's biometrics change and make it easier to defraud people trying to authenticate you because every where you go you leave biometric information.

@omnipotens https://www.usa.gov/who-can-vote
I don't see an SSN on this list.

I don't think paper audits are fool proof. The reason electronic voting is a problem is that *you have to convince the skeptics that it's correct.* Most of the people skeptical of your voting scheme may not even understand PKI and other ideas necessary to judge it's correctness. The result is a mass rejection of the results like what we had last year.

@matt @omnipotens
There are serious problems with having a single ID number that's used for official things like this. We're already seeing how easy it makes fraud and how that affects people. It used to be illegal to use the SSN for anything other than social security, there was a good reason for that.

@ssl Parlor doesn't sound to me like it was run particularly well.

Also: there are hosting providers other than amazon. Parlor shut down because they realized they couldn't make a profit. Making a profit on the web means playing certain games and depending on businesses like Apple and Amazon. Most people aren't running mastodon instances for money.

@omnipotens Electronic voting can't be audited the way paper voting can. The last election should make it obvious what happens when a large portion of the population can't trust the voting system and that's what you get with electronic voting.

Also: you don't (and should not!) need an SSN to vote. The US has no unique ID numbers.

I've been running my own email for years and spent more than four years in engineering school but I still can't figure #encrypted email out.

Does anyone have advice for using s/mime with #selfhosted email?
Is the only option for distributing public keys ldap?

@icedquinn There are way worse things than mailman.

@geotechland @protonmail @Tutanota Arguably the best email for privacy is self hosted.