Do Your Friends a Favor 13550

On Friday 04 November 2005 12:31, Scott stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

One thing that scares me is that ever since last year, the Belgian government has been experimenting with the so-called electronic ID card. It looks very much like the ID cards we currently have, but it's the size of a credit card and it has a chip.

In itself, this is not scary, of course, but the bozos in the government have contacted Bill Gates about it, and he's promised that the electronic ID card will become part of the supported security measures in Windows.

I see two problems arising from this scenario...: (1) The possibility that Microsoft regains its foot on the floor of the Belgian government; and (2) The danger that the electronic ID card will result into a compromised idenbreasty situation, considering that Microsoft technology will be used to handle its data.

As a sidenote, in regards to (1), Microsoft has had a bit of a storm up front by the green party - i.e. the ecologists - who were heavily objecting to Microsoft's monopoly abuse and were promoting GNU-Linux. The other leftwingers are also not too happy about Microsoft.

Fortunately, many municipal IT infrastructures are already using GNU-Linux now - as well as other *nix flavors - in server set-ups but most of the office desktops are of course still running Windows - sometimes even MS-DOS. There are however also still a lot of Windows NT-2000 servers and a couple of Netware servers.

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)