Ever since the net was new I have failed to understand that Denmark rejects to use a common suffix (like eg. .gov.dk or whatever they like) for all sites published and maintained by the government. So is danmark.dk a part of the government? What about nyidanmark.dk? Ok they are not difficult, but what about nemid.dk and netid.nu? Which one do you think is from the government?

In the danish newspapers there is right now an article where the stupid (sorry, but I hate that suffix) .nu domain is the official website from the danish government and not the more obvious .dk  domain.

So what is the big deal about you might ask! There are great many things where this is not really a big deal, but NemID is a central key server and login system for all communication with the government. You do your taxes this way, you can change your name this way and it is (or is going to be) the signature system the banks must use for your online banking!

I’m sure that there is a lot of really good people who has been working to make NemID as good and secure as possible and I do not blame them for not doing a good job solving the given task. While NemID does have other small issues I do believe that they have tried to hit a good middle ground between usability and security (disclaimer: I have not been evaluating the system as a whole so my opinion is based on generally available information).

What I find important is that the government assume that we trust their websites, but does not give way to know it is their page. I wish they would wake up 😉