Not 2 days ago, but in February, iirc.

We are thankfully on quite the shopping spree, we have also decided to include women into conscription (and that conscripts can be used for real missions, iirc) and we are financing and building Ukrainian weapons like the Flamingo.

Also, Scandinavia has pooled our airforces into one airforce, surpassing the UK, France etc. in size.

My country does this, however there are multiple authentication options.

The main one is a private company that provides an authentication system using private certificates. When you try to login to an authenticated website your phone pops up a message asking you to verify the login and enter your PIN. That signs the request with your private certificate and sends it back to the provider. Other actions such as transfering money or signing contracts require you to authenticate using a different certificate, with a different PIN. The private certificate stays on your device (there are mechanisms to generate a new one if you lose your device).

The other options are ID cards with a USB card reader or a mobile signature in the SIM card of your phone. For government website and utility companies you can usually authenticate with your bank as another option.

I prefer it to username/password as all I need is my ID number (which unlike the US doesn't need to be private) and my phone. And basically everything you need to use to adult uses this system.

From next year there will still be one private company claiming to offer this service, yes, but they are under no obligation to keep doing so, and if the market is already so unprofitable that the national postal operator immediately exited it once freed from the obligation of remaining in it, it is questionable how long a private company will remain.

One particular concern I have is whether that company will be connected to the Universal Postal Union; if they aren't, sending letters to and from foreign countries will suddenly be a minefield. I don't know and have been trying to find out.

Yeah, the only dumb thing about the digital mail is that they're not just using email with an official registry.

They could have started some kind of certification thing for email providers and even funded a couple of certified email providers much more effectively than the digital post monstrosity.

That would have been awesome and forward looking, and perhaps even helped ordinary people get better security for their personal emails.

Perhaps we'll get there some day.

I don't think a massive market concentration in a single cloud service is good for societal preparedness, regardless of whether there are technically other options.

In the same way, it concerns me how much Sweden relies on BankID, but that's a different thing.

"specialist hellhole" :D