And interestingly, code.overheid.nl runs from a residential ip address.
That's not a fair characterization. The company that runs it might be bought. That's not planning to put it in USA hands
And you have concrete proof that this is indeed the plan, stated by the government as the official position, or this is based on your own extrapolation of rumors?
The amount of misinformation that any story related to any European country seems to pull in is crazy, seems to be something about the continent that makes some parts of HN feel blood in their mouth or something.
Parliament has asked government with near unanimity to prevent this from happening. Government has not even acknowledged that this should be prevented.
The dutch government has an authentication system called DigiD. It's effectively an OAuth protocol for government sites, and one of the few ways in which the Dutch government has centralized IT. Every dutch citizen can get access to it, and probably will need it at some point to deal with the government (paper options are meant to exist, but you can already guess on how easy the availability of that is.)
DigiD is currently hosted by a dutch company named Solvinity and developed by Logius (the governments in-house IT development organization). Solvinity is currently in the process of being bought out by another company, Kyndryl, which is based in the US. The government approved the takeover under the previous coalition (who are no longer in power.) The takeover currently is under extreme public scrutiny because of everything to do with the US - most people are at least vaguely aware of the deadly combination of the US CLOUD/PATRIOT laws, which would compel Kyndryl to hand over data on any dutch citizen to the US government for any reason[0]. The US government right now is also not exactly behaving like a good steward with the powers it has, instead favoring maximum exploitation within (and outside, if the lawsuits are any indication) it's legal limitations. Given DigiD is effectively a list of personal information on almost every dutch citizen, that's pretty concerning.
On an employee level, the takeover is deeply unpopular - some government workers have actively reached out to the press to warn about the deal, something which very rarely happens as government workers aren't expected to publicly break with government policy. This has led to a motion to change away from Solvinity being passed... in 2028. At the same time, the government (this time: the elected politicians) is unwilling to reconsider it's stance on the Solvinity takeover, claiming that because it already said it was OK before, it can't change its mind now.
[0]: It's also, almost certainly illegal in a GDPR/AVG (local version of GDPR) sense. US/EU privacy laws are fundamentally incompatible with one another because of these two laws, and the courts keep shooting the international data transfer agreements to bits every time. Even on a basic level, having your government authentication systems legality tied to whether or not Max Schrems wins his court cases is a bad idea.
The result is that the information needed to log in to all the important government systems becomes subject to American jurisdiction. Foreign agents will be able to authenticate themselves as any Dutch citizen and act on their behalf.
That’s not what I’m seeing.
IP address is currently 147.181.37.238, which is assigned to ODC-Noord via RIPE.
ODC-Noord is a data centre for national government organisations according to https://www.odc-noord.nl/
Kind of interesting how the perspective is so different from the inside! Maybe it's the typical "the grass is always greener..."?
Most notably the Labor and Welfare Administration with 3000+ open repos.
I love the idea of my city, region or nation (or planet) working to solve a problem and releasing the tool to the public. I just don't want every government to duplicate all the same work, some duplication and competition is fine. But the idea that different places have different specialities etc....
We have 342 municipalities, all buying the same apps (from 3 or 4 vendors) to deliver basic services to their citizens. Common Ground aims to replace all of those with open source solutions.
We need technology to serve citizens instead of the other way around. We do not need European versions of big-tech because the resulting oligarchy will be as bad.
> Machine-readable Dutch law execution. regelrecht takes legal texts, encodes them as structured YAML, and runs them as deterministic decision logic. The engine takes a regulation and a set of inputs, evaluates the decision logic, and returns a result with a full explanation trail
Can someone explain this to me? Not the technical aspect, but rather a user story or use case, maybe with example. I can't really wrap my head around it. Thanks in advanced.
As for the use case, it seems to be an explorative exercise to see if something like that can help provide more transparency and consistency within systems of law, "whether machine-executable legislation can provide an answer" to complex and opaque cases. The websites linked earlier have more information + examples.
I think that's the project.
"Modern calculation engine as a building block for the entire government. In collaboration with the Benefits Service (Dienst Toeslagen). Can we develop a general calculation engine for the government? This project explores how such a system could help in executing complex regulations for citizens and businesses, for example, when calculating benefits."
Bringing the boring old legal system closer to smart contracts.
But I don't have a clue if this is really the case.
Integral – A Federated, Post-Monetary, Cybernetic Cooperative Economic System
sam_lowry_•1h ago
dewey•1h ago