Tag: Digital

Why doesn’t my government, and governments in general, provide useful statistics in digital format? [closed]

I live in Sweden, but this applies to all other countries as well.

I have a general interest in, and fascinations of, statistics and working with data in databases. By far the biggest obstacle has nothing to do with technically dealing with the database software, writing SQL queries, or designing databases. Rather, the #1 problem is:

Nobody wants to provide useful data!

I have spent a significant part of the last 20 years searching for databases/data files of all kinds. Time and time again, I end up at a “contact us for pricing” webpage, or a “Buy now for only $ 4,799!” text. Oddly, this does not just apply to commercial entities, but also authorities.

Even though the Swedish government has been talking about “open data” and “free information for all” for a very long time, the actual reality is that virtually none of that juicy data is available for you and I to grab and use. Instead, they have multiple layers of “red tape”, requiring you to pay through the nose for any kind of access, and in many cases, you aren’t even allowed to pay for it unless you run a major corporation with special ties to the government. It’s really bizarre.

The data they do allow you to look at is meaningless/shallow statistics, rarely if ever provided in a format which can be reasonably parsed by a computer and fed into my database for further analysis. The so-called “open data for everyone” often consists of nothing more than a bunch of formatted PDFs, useless for my purposes.

I’m not interested in static columns showing how many new people were born in 2020. I want a list of those people, with their names, genders, race, blood type, etc.

I realize that all data cannot be open without heavy abuse inevitably resulting from it. However, at least the Swedish government has this idea of “public records”, where you are theoretically allowed to request all kinds of data. The problem is that they only allow you to do this in person, over phone or via e-mail, and you have to do it manually and only request at most three (3) “units” each time. In practice, this makes it useless unless.

If this information is allegedly “public”, why are they so unwilling to actually make it available? I could send an e-mail to a Swedish government entity right now, requesting all kinds of information (including their full social security number) for a given person, and they will respond within 24 hours with it, no questions asked. I’ve done it many times. However, if I ask them for a Swedish_people.csv file with every person registered in Sweden and the same information I requested manually for one or up to three persons, they will refuse.

Major corporations are able to pay a lot of money to get access to their government APIs, but it costs a fortune and they wouldn’t let me buy access to it even if I had the money (because I don’t run a major company).

It doesn’t make any sense to me. I wonder why they have these double standards, and how they can possibly charge money for “public” records.

A dream of mine would be to be able to do:

SELECT name, email_address, physical_address, passport_photo FROM people WHERE current_city = $  1 AND gender = $  2 AND age >= $  3 AND age <= $  4 AND civil_status = $  5 ORDER BY distance_from_me DESC;

Of course, this is completely unrealistic, but you get the idea. I wish to have actual, curated records from (semi) trusted sources rather than having to play with the few, measly databases which are freely available to the public at no charge.

A perfect example of something very basic would be the telephone book. Back in the day, they sent out a complete book of every single person’s name, telephone number and address to every household in the entire country. This was standard practice all over the world, I believe. A digital version of that would be a .csv file which I could just download from a government website at a static URL, always kept updated. Nope. Nothing like that. I’m forced to use these third-party, commercial websites where I get to enter individual people’s names and send this information to the company in question. They are paying the government a lot of money to get this information, even though it could be made available for virtually no cost at all.

Why, since they used to provide this information in physical form, is it now unthinkable in the digital age?

I can not enter Digital ocean droplet and restart it

Hello,
I installed ubuntu 18 on Digital ocean droplet several days ago with ssh access, but tring to
get to it I got error in my console :
sh
ssh: connect to host NNN.NNN.NNN.NNN port 22: Connection timed out
I opened droplet in DO settings and saw:
https://prnt.sc/rdpstt

That is very strange and That is out of my expierence, I have no option to restart the droplet.
How to fix it?

Thanks!

Generate digital certificates for employees using the organization’s certificate

I live in Peru and we have a small problem in the organization where I work. Dozens of documents are physically signed daily but this is a waste of time since there are documents that must be signed by more than one person and these people are in different geographical locations.

I am thinking of using digital certificates to sign PDFs but this causes me another problem. Certificates are issued in the name of the Organization, not of the employee who signs. Buying (and processing) the generation of a certificate with legal validity for each employee will take time and money so my question is the following:

Is it possible to generate new certificates for each employee (with legal validity) using our institutional certificate as root certificate?

Is there an explanation for what all of the DLCs add in with the Talisman Digital Edition? [closed]

In short I bought the Talisman Digital Edition earlier in the week (oddly reminisced about the game that I hadn’t played for 30 years in the morning bought it and the starter pack in the evening). Have now bought the Season Pass because of a spot Steam Sale.

I added all the DLC in but found myself a bit lost in terms of what was doing what (e.g. the Dragons and Dark amd Light Fate tokens totally threw me).

Have started another game just adding in the base game, Sacred Pool, Frostmarch, City, Dungeon and Reaper expansions & it seems a balanced kind of game.

Is there a preferred amount of DLC to add in (or a preferred set of what to add?) and is there any explanation for what they add to the game (e.g. the Dragon tokens have totally thrown me)?

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions.

Password Policy for Digital Environment

When creating a Security Policy such as Password Policy, what are some of the typical assets that need to be protected?

And how does this affect, employees, contractors, vendors, suppliers, and representatives who access the organization-provided or organization-supported applications, programs, networks, systems, and devices.

Curios in learning more. I’d also appreciate real expertise details, in addition, if anyone has a good valid password policy that is written and implement, I’d love to read it and learn from it.

Which is better practice: digital password manager or a physical book of passwords? [duplicate]

These days, it’s not uncommon to have dozens and dozens of passwords for various sites and services. If you’re using different passwords for each service it can be basically impossible to hold all the passwords in your memory.

Some people keep a book with their passwords written down, and are occasionally mocked for doing so because if the book is lost or stolen, so are their accounts.

Others keep a digital password manager. These passwords aren’t hashed: a user can log in and see all their saved passwords.

The best solution (assuming we’re only using passwords) is to have unique, strong passwords memorized for each service, but that is implausible for the typical person and the volume of passwords someone needs.

Which of the following is the current best practice for a high number of passwords? Consider that the user needs to access these accounts from potentially several computers.

  1. Use a handful of passwords that you can remember and have several services share a password. (For example, three unique passwords over twelve services)

  2. Use a digital storage mechanism for storing passwords that can be accessed on logging in

  3. Keep a physical book of written passwords. Obviously it can’t be stolen digitally, but can be physically stolen or misplaced, and recovering from a lost book is very hard.

I’m assuming the person in question is keeping everyday information important to them (email, bank account password, so on) but not necessarily being specifically targeted by someone with resources. Any of these practices will probably fail against someone staging a coordinated attack.

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