Lets remember his answer on stackexchange regarding how many Greeks pay high taxes vs Greek owners of Porshe Cayennes, when he not recognized and was asked for references for his figures:
"Hi, can you provider references for your figures? - Skiiv
The figures come directly from SQL queries I executed on the General Secreteriat for Information Systems database.... – Diomidis Spinellis"
People don't have a clue about the reality of politics in Bulgaria.
To put it simply: It is a mixture of crooks and shady billionaires with ties to underground criminal organizations and ex Bulgarian Secret Services operators.
To clarify further, things are so corrupt and chaotic that people voted a local TV star Slavi Trifonov to power. Which failed so miserably, that now they elected a government with some "new actors" and bunch of old corrupted faces. There is now even a local Hip-hop star in the parliament. Go figure:)
Even if this guy has good intentions, or technical expertise, fixing the always "broken" e-government (https://cnn.it/3m0f1CE) will not be easy or remotely possible.
To much corruption is lurking in the shadows.
Ah, a prime example of the infamous Bulgarian pessimism. Let me counter with some positive stuff:
1. For the first time in 10+ years the Bulgarian IT community is represented. To add to that, it's represented in both parliament and government. This is a huge change on its own.
2. For the first time in 10+ years there are new faces and young people (20 and 30-somethings) in the parliament and the government. Yes, this includes among many others, TV stars, musicians, artists. They are representing the people who voted for them and that I find is positive.
3. Fixing the broken e-gov, or starting anew, is indeed a hard task. That is why the local IT community needs to be positive and helpful. It's for the best of everyone and an important prerequisite to reducing corruption. This includes both administrative corruption (by reducing the number of people on administrative positions) and political corruption (by providing transparency through easing access to data and fostering public involvement in policymaking).
I have a first hand experience working with political parties and business entities in Bulgaria for more than two decades. Pessimism or optimism are states of illusion and tolerance non relevant to the reality of the situation.
New faces don't change corrupt practices. Jail-time for corrupt politicians and related third parties can. But the Judicial System is full with corrupt judges with ties to Secret Service and criminal underground and EU is not making any efforts to change this.
For the last 20 years there is not one representative, from any party, with proven corruption practices to serve jail time. All of this in country which is famous for one of the highest death rates in the world and one of the lowest standard of living in the EU.
Why will I be more corrupt if I know that the eventual punishment is proportional to my corruption? On the contrary, I will be more than happy to augment the corruption if the punishment is not that harsh. I can serve the simple punishment and leave for another country with all the money stashed.
It's never as simple cut as that. You are completely discounting the risk of getting caught, which is something you can actively work against.
If it wasn't, nobody would be committing (pre-meditated) murder any more, because that's got the toughest penalty (not really, but let's pretend for a bit) of all the crimes.
People who commit crimes act under the assumption they won't get caught. There's a body of literature showing that increasing the penalties of crime doesn't deter potential criminals.
To create change one must face the facts. Facing the facts is not cynicism.
I have shared facts, not some form of "rationalization" or emotional interpretation of reality. I agree with the author over the problem of cynical way of thinking, but I have witnessed a lot of failures in personal or business form as a result of optimistic views. Stoicism is my personal choice of mindset towards balance.
There is certainly corruption, but there is corruption everywhere. I've lived in both eastern and western Europe and I'd say the west is not better at all, I'd say it's even worse because the corruption is higher up and it involves a lot more money. But the people there don't go around repeating how corrupt everything is and don't generate new corruption by making it normal. This idea of corrupt poorer countries is also somewhat propagated by the richer countries and it should not be embraced as much by the people living there.
I get it though. Although I think nepotism does result in people voting for anything but a politician or what established media recommends, since those would be suspected to engage in corruption themselves.
From looking quickly at their product, it seems that the “blockchain” part of it is mostly here as a marketing buzzword more than anything: It seems that they are building a Merkle tree of logs and calling that a blockchain (you know, like the famous blockchain project called git).
I know you say this in jest but, now that you mention it, wouldn't git be a blockchain if it just had a decentralized consensus protocol to allow a cluster of repo servers to agree on the current state?
I'm usually the last person in the world to say anything should be on a blockchain but I feel something like this could be handy for hosting open source projects.
It won't be a blockchain anyway, because the data structure is a DAG (Directed acyclic graph) and not a freaking Linked list like blockchains!
And there's no need to agree on anything between repos, heck git allows you not to agree with yourself on your own repo between different branches. Git actually works completely fine between a number of different repository (the UX isn't great of course, but which part of git's UX is…).
Hmm. If we account for the DAG vs LL issue by calling it a "Manydimensional" or "Multiversal" blockchain do you think they will start up the money printer?
git IS blockchain without Proof-of-Work. So yeah, if you can add PoF somehow on top of it - you will get something somewhat like bitcoin-like stuff :)))
I wonder what "blockchain" means here. The word is all over https://logsentinel.com/ but it may be just to make "immutable audit trail" more buzzwordy.
> Technology alone will not solve anything. And my blockchain skepticism is a hint in that direction – many blockchain enthusiasts are claiming that blockchain will solve many problems in many areas of life. It won’t. At least not just through clever cryptography and consensus algorithms.
I'm a bit sad that marketing words work on customers, but that's just how the world is apparently. :) Thanks for the reply and major congratulations and good luck!
Look into technocracy if you're interested in learning more about appointing government officials based on their technical knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
Anyone know of any studies of famous techocrats and the overall view on the effectiveness of appointing ppl that aren't career politicians?
The former Soviet Union is generally considered an example. 89% of Politburo members were engineers and leaders like Leonid Brezhnev had very technical backgrounds
EDIT: to add some more context
Technocracy in the Second World (see: tektology) is quite common. In the First World the history of technocracy can't really be understood without studying the history of eugenics. This is also generally true of much of our science and even mathematical theory. Terms like "regression to the mean" have direct origins in eugenics theory
> In the First World the history of technocracy can't really be understood without studying the history of eugenics. This is also generally true of much of our science and even mathematical theory. Terms like "regression to the mean" have direct origins in eugenics theory
And yet studying the history of eugenics will not help you understand regression to the mean. It's certainly not a bar to understanding.
I wasn't implying that you need to know the history of eugenics to understand statistics. I'm sure most statisticians today don't have a good grasp of that history.
I was saying that you need to have a good grasp on the history of eugenics to have a good context to understand the history of technocracy, a political ideology, in the West
The PRC is one ongoing study. The leaders of four of China's provinces are former aerospace engineers. The minister of education, as one might expect, is a computer scientist.
That's equally important for non-politicians: only the most capable will get their lack of social skills ignored, and only sometimes.
Engineer-turning-politicians in non-democracies also do not need to make an impression on a wider public, but just on a restricted set of decision makers (or political mentors).
USA has had its own share of non-politician politicians (think Schwarzenegger and Trump, to name the few most prominent ones). And I am sure you can find many politicians throughout Europe who have an engineering background, it's just never highlighted.
In the USA, it's also that business accomplishments are valued more than problem solving skills, and in politics, you don't get the same freedom as in business: eg. late Steve Jobs would probably have an easy job of getting elected, but what would he have done afterwards? His mode of operation would not translate to democratic governance (even though, arguably, Trump attempted a similar style with less charisma), IMO.
Maybe Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg could run for the office? I'd honestly wonder what would the polls say about them (Zuckerberg is maybe not going to do so well with all the privacy-related negatives, but I wonder how much would people care about net worth vs that). But again, these are top-of-the-line businessmen, not top-of-the-line engineers, even if they've got engineering background.
Wouldn't it only be a technocracy if the leader of the space program or airforce or whatever was an aerospace engineer? Not just an engineer doing some standard government job like governor or mayor.
Chen Qiufa (electrical engineering) ran CNSA from 2010-2013, then became leader of Lioaning province. His successor at CNSA, Ma Xingrui (PhD mechanical engineering) ran CNSA for a bit in 2013 before being tapped as leader of Guangdong province.
His successor, Xu_Dazhe (also started as IC engineer), ran CNSA from 2013-2016, before becoming leader of Hunan province. Same story: Tang Dengjie, Fujian province, now national minister. Current CNSA head Zhang Kejian, physics, going by the pattern, he will "graduate" to some other province or national ministry in a year or two.
Not really, generally someone is considered a technocrat when she/he is appointed to some government position regardless of their political affiliation and purely because of their expertise in the area related to that position not because they might have a degree in STEM E.g. the current PM of Italy Mario Draghi can be considered a technocrat, but definitely not Thatcher or Carter.
I mean, hypothetically, there could be ways to merge technocracy and democracy. People could vote on a selection of top experts for example. Or perhaps people could vote for what technical background they think is most important for a position and experts of those backgrounds are automatically assigned to the role
So basically a government funded committee would decide who gets appointed to any public office. Alternatively we can just select a random person with a relevant bacgkround/degree..
Usually the term "technocrat" refers to an appointed official rather than a directly elected official, even if they're very technically knowledgeable.
For instance, Jimmy Carter would widely be considered a "politician" since he was directly elected, but someone like Janet Yellen could be considered a technocrat since she was appointed as Secretary of the Treasury due to her technical experience.
Having a bad legacy is just how academia and the media punish you when the plebs refuse to do it at the ballot box. It has no correlation - positive or otherwise - on what that person actually did.
I think a minister should be a good administrator. It is good if they are also specialist in the area, but not a requirement. Brazil science, technology and innovation minister is an astronaut and not much has improved in the area.
He is a well-known and reputable speaker at many local tech conferences, primarily on Java and security topics. He has also shown commitment in pointing out the numerous problems regarding the sorry state of Bulgarian electronic governance - no synchronisation of data between institutions, duplication of data, the need for getting paper verification notices from one institution to be admitted in another.
In case he sets up a good team of techies, I think he would be able to guide them in the right direction, because he is aware of the problems and has the technical competence for choosing the viable solutions.
>... Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Yes, HN's software filters submissions that it categorizes as promotional (from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.")
However, bozho's submission history is maybe borderline rather than over the line, so I've restored the posts now. The software can be a bit overzealous and I need to tweak it.
Maybe it would be a good idea to let users know when their submissions are detected as too promotional and remind them about the guidelines rather than automatically silencing them. (Like the "you're posting too fast" message, except less vague.) That would also tip off actual spammers, but if they evade the detector by posting less often... mission accomplished, I guess?
I'm sure you've thought about this for longer than I did, so I'll take your word on it. It's just always a bit sad to see people who appear genuinely confused as to what they're doing wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29542828 Though maybe explaining it to them wouldn't work either.
People can always email us at hn@ycombinator.com, which is listed under "Contact" on every page, and get a clear answer about what is happening. Many do just that.
Seasoned users can (and do) also notice these cases and email to let us know. And of course we review as many submissions as we can and rescue the good ones that have been caught in software filters.
It's true that some good posts don't get recovered this way. But I'm not aware of an alternative that would fix that without also seriously diluting the quality of HN. Not all, but certainly most of those posts are dead for good reason.
> we review as many submissions as we can and rescue the good ones
Rescuing good submissions is great, I just wish there were a way to somehow rescue good people making bad submissions, so that they start posting good ones instead. (Or at least stop wasting their time.)
Well... As a Bulgarian citizen and software engineer, I can't say I'm too enthusiastic about him(or the entire new government for that matter). Apparently founded a cyber security company yet his blog is hosted on:
1. The most godawful place on the planet. I used the company's services when I was 12-13 and I'm still embarrassed to say I've had anything to do with them, even as a client.
2. Didn't even bother to put an ssl certificate which takes literally two minutes and is free with, say, letsecrypt.
I always find funny how the IT community in the country decides who to vote for or whether to vote at all. But to address your concerns, although I don't understand how the technicalities around someone's personal blog relate to what kind of a politician they'll be (as opposed to... idk... its 10+ years of content for example):
1. Superhosting is the largest Bulgarian shared hosting provider. Although they indeed offer a relatively mediocre service, they're far from unusable and have low latency for his Bulgarian readership. Also his blog is somewhat old, so there may not have been much choice at the time.
2. He has configured TLS for both https://blog.bozho.net/ and https://techblog.bozho.net/ although no redirect has been added for the first site. As far as we know this may have even been intentional.
I sincerely wish that every single country in the world had politicians whose worst issue is forgetting to change to the new trendy provider and to set up an HTTPS redirection.
Different people have different priorities in life. You need to be a better person to accept that, however.
As another Bulgarian citizen and software engineer who've had the chance to interact with Bozho on a few of occasions over 15 years, I can't say I'm anything less than excited about the freshness and skill he can bring to Bulgarian politics.
A redirect has its security gotchas as well: if you usually rely on redirects to reach HTTPS sites, you are just as prone to get redirected to a malicious site using MITM attacks (eg. while on a cafe wifi). If there was a redirect, you could easily be MITM-redirected to eg. https://blog.bozh0.net and you might not even notice.
Browsers are finally starting to default to HTTPS without using a whitelist when no protocol is specified. That's the only reasonable approach, and hopefully in a few years, that's prevalent. Maybe browsers can also start doing something "smart" where they also fetch https resource when http is requested, and switch to https if they largely match.
Combining it with secure DNS is the only way to true protection against eavesdropping and MITM attacks.
HTTPS is not a strict improvement over HTTP. Indeed it adds SSL requirements to the client, increases resources needed to access/serve the content, requires to acquire and maintain a certificate, etc.
It's a common practice to offer HTTPS, but you shouldn't think of it as dogma. It's perfectly reasonable to provide both so that people using old terminals (an iPad v1, or an old game console for example) can access the content without technical issues. Or if you want a very low-resources device to access it.
It's all trade-offs and use-cases. One is not a superset of the other.
It's like saying every door should have a lock. No, not every door is improved by adding a lock. Many use-cases are actually not possible with a lock.
Different situations have different tradeoffs, and different people value different things.
The point of https here is to serve as a guarantee that the content you see is the content that was provided by the server and not something that was injected by somewhere between the two ends of the wire. The idea that it should support ipad 1 or old game consoles is just as valid as the idea that websites should support internet explorer 6 or that the linux kernel should have kept support for the i386. No, it's almost 2022, even potatoes can deal with tls.
> The point of https here is to serve as a guarantee that the content you see is the content that was provided by the server and not something that was injected by somewhere between the two ends of the wire.
As I highlighted above, a redirect from http to https is going exactly against this. If you care about MITM attacks for your visitors to that extent, you should not serve any traffic on HTTP. Yet that's a usability nightmare because of how web clients (not just browsers) operate today.
Of course it's valid to want your website to serve users of IE6 or iPad1. You may not care for such users but not everyone is like you, living in your country, caring about the things you care about.
There are many valid use cases for HTTP, and more broadly, keeping old devices and experiences working as time passes
My country (France) has many buildings and bridges from 500 years ago for instance. I hope these get preserved as there is a lot to learn from them, lots of beauty in them, and they may be more and more relevant in the future.
Not everything should disappear the instant there an alternative. Things co-existing is great.
Speaking as somebody with 20 years of international egov experience. Why is there an egov minister? There is no weird separate “electronic government” that’s somehow distinct from the “real government”. What typically happens in these scenarios is that the “egov people” are given a bunch of money to go play with in the corner while the grownups continue with business as usual. Also, having engineers that high up in the hierarchy is not sustainable. Come next elections, he is going to be out, and very likely all his reforms and changes will be undone by the next person. Just look what happened to the GDS in UK.
The engineering responsibility should be low in the hierarchy with wide political support across all ministries. Unless the ministry of social affairs sees, that the only sensible way to fulfill their mandate is to offer electronic services and is also able to execute that, nothing will get better in that area. The egov minister might walk back and forth the government meeting room on his eyebrows but he will not be granted the power to tell other ministries how to do their jobs.
A position represents an area that the government wants to focus on. That area may look more like vertical or horizontal integration. In this case it'd be horizontal integration, where an eGov is a function of all other aspects of the government, but also requires a common approach in terms of infrastructure, engineers etc.
You can think about it like object orientation (vertical) vs. functional programming (horizontal). Both have their use cases.
The drawbacks you're concerned about are resolved through communication. If there's ongoing communication, there will be synchronization.
The actual title it "Ministry of electronic governance" and there's also a "Ministry of effective governance".
These look like ministries introduced to address specific concerns or goals of the leadership. When something is "ministry of something" gets budgets and freedom to use these budgets and other tools that may not be possible if it was just "department of something under the ministry of other thing".
When Turkey used to be friendly with EU and had a goal of joining the EU, there was "Ministry of EU".
Some ISPs inject their own ads on non-encrypted pages. It was a prevalent practice in Russia as early as 2007-2010. Not sure if it's true for other countries and modern times, but the technical point is still valid: by using HTTPS, this kind of attack on your personal blog is eliminated.
If your goal is to pass a certain message publicly, then the injection is an attack to your goal.
These injections often completely broke functionality of any even slightly non-standard blog engines, as they were not tested by the designers of the injectors.
So, to summarize. We do have software engineers in those governments:
Singapore (the chancellor himself), Israel (min. of justice and now interior), Taiwan (egov min.), Bulgaria (egov min.).
Then Greece (Spinellis was just a secretary in finance). Israel has one more in the office of the prime minister, India has 2, but not in the state government and I'm probably missing Estonia and more Baltics. But in Estonia I only see Lipp working in some ministry, not leading it.
It would be nice if they were experts in anything, they are seemingly just picked because they either supported brexit or haven't pissed off bojo lately.
You seem to have an over-abundance of politicians. Unfortunately I'm not yet sure which is better -- having politicians with no expert knowledge, or having experts with no political experience... I guess we'll see.
Indeed, people are very excited here. The majority strongly believes that the previous politicians somehow stole so much of their money that their lives became miserable. The new government promises to fix this and eliminate 100% of the corruption - we are yet to see exactly how this will be achieved.
The funny thing (for some definition of funny) is that the rise to stardom of the new PM -- the one to "eliminate 100% of the corruption" -- started on a document crime and a blatant transgression of Bulgarian constitution.
The way this happened: he was appointed as an 'Economy Minister' in the caretaker cabinet preceding the current one and so he had to sign a declaration that his only citizenship is Bulgarian. (Bulgarian Constitution forbids foreign citizens from holding minster office). Yet, later it turned out he also had Canadian citizenship at the time.
He tried to justify that falsification of an official document, saying, quite politician-ly, that the truth/facts didn't matter as he had "always held Bulgaria first in his heart".
In the end, though, almost no one seemed to care about that and people voted for him.
So, yeah, people are excited but perhaps, at least for some of them, that's for a different reason.
Whether a person is a Canadian citizen does not depend solely on the person. Before he was appointed as a minister, he had requested his Canadian citizenship be terminated. The Canadian authorities took months to process his request, thereby creating a situation in which another country is to decide whether a person can be part of the government of Bulgaria. If this seems absurd to you, you're not alone. The idea behind the clause in question is exactly the opposite -- to not allow other countries to interfere with the government of Bulgaria.
This was a hot discussion before the elections and his main opponents (much like you) made sure everybody knew without context that he. blatantly. broke. the. constitution. And yes, considering that he won the election, apparently people did not care. And considering that the broken clause has been pointed out as especially outdated, out of touch with the real world, and even possibly discriminatory, I don't care either. To me he did whatever was in his powers to stop being a Canadian citizen and I'm pretty sure Canada is not trying to take control of Bulgaria via him, so in my eyes, the spirit of the clause was not broken. Not only that, but if he had not been appointed because Canada had not yet revoked his citizenship, then the spirit of the clause would have been broken as the bureaucracy of another country is interfering with Bulgaria's government having a qualified and impactful person be part of it. Much like the entire country, Bulgaria's constitution is in dire need of reforms and modernisation.
> Eg. you are not going to stop that nurse at the hospital from letting her sister in law into the doctor's office early even if it was not her turn.
Boy, what an example of a lie. I'd be more than happy even if they dare to limit themselves to stopping all corruption with public funds and government contracts.
Somehow I think I'll live if my doctor prioritizes a family member before me. There's a chance I won't even accuse them of a crime because of it, let alone blame the government for it...
I agree with you that we should be happy with the most blatant corruption eliminated, and living in a neighbouring country (Serbia), I've long advocated for an even more realistic goal of limiting corruption to a single digit percentage of all the government contracts. That's definitely not a good platform to run for office though, I agree.
FWIW, this is a mathematical tool called a contradiction to disprove a claim: you seem to be agreeing that they won't achieve 100%, so you are fine with the lie. That does not make it not a lie.
They are similarly not going to completely eliminate most of the corruption no matter what, even the corruption you are concerned with. The same case as above will play out in granting a large government contract when a clerk at the office discloses competing offers to his best friend who runs a company in the same space, or they add in particular requirements and clauses to exclude some competitors.
They are either "lying" of planning to achieve 100%-corruption-free society (sorry, they are being "diplomatic" to win the office first), or they are utterly unrealistic and unfamiliar with human patterns of behaviour. Lying is likely better if their motives are truly pure, but I'd have a hard time trusting someone who lies their way into office.
The ministers of the 4 departments with largest income from EU subsidies and internal tax collection are assigned to the Socialist Party, known for corruption - Economy and Industry, Labour and Social Policy, Agriculture, and Tourism.
Well, I care. The status quo for the last 20 years have tried to pit software developers against the general population numerous times. Why? Developers make good money compared to the masses.
Not to mention the countless intentionally botched e-gov projects. Oh, I care deeply
We read about country specific stuff on this site every day. Cut us some slack, will you
