Slashdot Mirror
Estonia Sharing Its Finnish-Made E-Government Solution With Finland
paavo512 writes "For the last decade or so, Estonia has developed a national electronic data exchange layer called X-Road. Is is based on national electronic ID cards and allows creation of common electronic services like founding a company, declaring taxes or e-voting. Every day, over 800,000 enquiries are made via X-Road (the population of Estonia is 1.3M). According to the PM of Estonia, the solution is saving 2% of national GDP annually. The Estonian ID card technology was originally imported from Finland; however, it appears Finns have for 10 years failed to come up with any significant e-services making use of them. So it is now agreed that Estonian X-Road solution will be expanding to Finland as well."
You end up with a choice of: 1) wait for the service to come back up; or 2) visit an office in person and talk to a civil servant.
Basically the same choice you have when your bank's internet banking is down. If you need to initiate a transfer, you either wait for it to come back up, or you walk into a bank to do it. If their backend system is down, you can't walk into a bank either, so you just wait in that case. Same here; if you want to register a new corporation and the site is down, you either fill out the registration on paper and submit it the old-fashioned way, or you wait for the site to come back up.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Erwise: Started March 1992, Released April, 1992
WorldWideWeb: Proposed in 1989, Started late 1990, Released August 1991
I don't think "before" means what you think it means, but I'll accept the other three.
Dude, if you think that having separate driving license, passport and insurance number makes you somehow harder to track, then you are completely delusional.