John - Nostr Hypermedia

Wordle 1,560 3/6* ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟨🟩⬛🟨⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Guess the hidden word in 6 tries. A new puzzle is available each day.

Minute Cryptic - 26 September, 2025 (a difficult one. I was given a programme for a school play I was in, from 1995, as the news about digital IDs broke. Which most people are for, which I'm not against, but I'm also quite skeptical about what they'll achieve. In the early 1990s my school trialled, for maybe a year, memory is not perfect, swipe cards as a way of registering pupils. I was done in conjunction with class registers - the teacher would call out the names of the pupils to get them to say "yes sir" or "yes miss" as a kind of visually backed biometric identification. It took about two days for myself, Ashley, and others to work out that double lessons were relying on the swipe cards. On double lessons you could hand your card to someone else to swipe in because all a person had to do was run a card through a reader at the door. I don't think it happened much because class sizes were quite small. But the next stage, were the swipe cards used by the state, in that case the school, to validate pupils, it would necessarily need another authentication factor. Whether that was a PIN or biometric authentication. Which would work well for class registration. They had digital, parent controlled, lunch cards at my nephews school, whereby if someone's card was undercharged or they forgot it they could use someone else's card, possibly with the aid of the cardholder to get lunch. I don't think it happened but one could also convert money from parents on the lunch cards to cash by reselling, presumably at less than face value, more desirable snacks. The only way that a government ID will prevent Bad Things is if it's biometric, if people play by the rules, and if cash, or equivalent value, doesn't exist. Because people doing anything illegal don't give a shit about IDs and aren't going to play by the rules unlike the postmasters in the British Post Office Scandal. It will, TBF, also help if, god forbid, a truly authoritarian government gets in and wants to make the life of [insert your creed/ethnicity/politics here] difficult. I don't think this government has bad intentions regarding digital IDs, like China's National Online Identity Authentication App, and I'd quite happily use a digital ID. I also think it will be subcontracted to people like Microsoft, Palintir or Oracle (any of whom may do a good job), subject to AI evaluation (see post office scandal), and other bits as underfunded and ad-hoc as large chunks of the British state. Like most countries we already have the infrastructure for a police state but lack the police or the inclination, for now. So whatever. It'll effect muggles, haemophiliacs and other healthcare users, and I wouldn't vote Reform because a lot of racists would. I'm sceptical because scepticism makes for a better system not a worse one. Not checked for spelling or grammar.) "PR pro .rD?" (4,6) 🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣🟣 🏆 0 hints – 4 under the community par (24,540 solvers so far).