The original idea for the ID verification was broken by design anyway. The only safe and secure way is a chain/tree of trust, e.g. with PKI, where you could generate some certificate just for that particular service, while keeping your root key safe. Then, in the case of leak, the most you lose, is one particular key for one particular service that could be immediately revoked. You could even slap zero-knowledge proofs for particular properties (e.g. if the person has a driver license or not) without de-anonymizing the account. In the rare even of root key leak you should be able to physically go to the authority and make a new one, while revoking the old key. I don't see any other better alternatives than this.
This is effectively the EU age verification system.
Your government (which already has all your details) generates certificates and you just give those out. The other side can the use simple public/private key verification to ensure the cert is valid. Also government does not get information who you gave the cert to and if you create a bunch and single use them the other side can’t follow you between uses using the certs.
The US Government is one of the reference implementations of PKI.
Unfortunately, IDs are issued 50 different ways by the less competent states.
Combine that with accusations that getting new IDs constitutes systematic racism (a widely held belief on HN), ignoring that the ruralest of India has been able to do this successfully, and you're not getting digital ID any time soon.
The difficulty for the US is people seem to be against a Federal Government ID. India doesn't seem to have this stigma and hence rural India can solve this problem.
eID PKIs have very little in common with the web PKI. There's a national root of trust with strong attestation. It's a very simple trust relationship. You already trust the respective government to issue IDs.
Plenty of European countries have an eID CAs and it works fine. The PKI part is a solved problem.
Doesn't even need ZKP, the CA can just issue an attestation.
I've experienced this "solved problem" when visiting Germany during COVID. On every entrance to a mall there was somebody with a scanner device, and they only let you in if the scanner showed a green mark. I've been fully vaccinated (not EU) but my code didn't show a green mark on their scanner and I was promptly denied entry. The solution was to show them my German friend's code on my phone, this registered just fine, so I could enter anywhere.
So the whole "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI" mumbo jumbo can be easily fooled by a gif file.
The three times over needed to provide a scan of my passport were: to enroll in a university course, to buy from an e-commerce site, and to become an app developer. None of those orgs really needed a scan of my passport, which I can't really revoke like a cracked password, and will now sit unencrypted somewhere until they are hacked and are shamed into handling their customers data more like radioactive waste.
I think with passkey you don't own the private key. It's in your device and managed by the OS. That's one of the reasons I don't use passkeys (the other being that if I lose the device I can't access my account)
My passkey is synched with iCloud which has all hardened settings set to on, so if I switch devices (I have) its seamlessly. You can also export Passkeys is my understanding but I have not tried it.
When I'm on non-Apple I can scan a QR code on my phone and it will validate it the same way, using bluetooth to send enough info to the target computer to get me logged on.
Yes, you can. Either you can physically own the key on the physical device (i.e. Yubikey/Google Titan/HSM) or you can use software (KeepassXC, Bitwarden).
Most operating systems and browsers come with a sync mechanism that many people default to, but it's no more than that: the default.
As for account recovery, most websites have a way to recover your account when you lose your password, there's no reason why that wouldn't work for passkeys. Every website with passkey access I've used so far makes passkeys optional and forces you to set a password already. If they switch their default to passkeys and add a password as an optional step, nothing would change.
My passkeys are in my self-hosted Vaultwarden. If I can't put them there, I don't use them.
It's not all sunshine and roses, though. Despite having Bitwarden set as the only passkey provider in my Android setup, the phone persistently only offers me Google. Which is empty, because as I said, I won't use one tied to things I can't control. Works great on desktops, though.
Passkeys can theoretically require you to be on hardware, I haven't found anything yet that requires that.
I don´t think I've ever come across a service that only used passkeys. Username/email + password + 2FA is usually the primary form of verification. There's usually a way to recover your account through email.
It also dropped off the front page, pretty quickly, despite getting a lot of upvotes and comments. I was surprised by that, as this is exactly the type of story that tends to spend a couple of days on the front page.
But it’s also the kind of story that won’t stay down, and will definitely be back.
It appears as if there are folks here that don’t want to talk about this.
OK. That's how it got all the upvotes. I am here fairly often, and in my neck of the woods, it was only high up for about three of them. I note that it starts its drop (quickly) at about 9AM, East Coast time. I should note that front page is 30 or less, and, according to that graph, it was only there, for about ten hours; most of which wasn't daytime, in the US. I only noticed it, the first time, because I woke up in the middle of the night, and checked the site.
But it's still the type of story that should have had a much longer tenure, especially as it was Krebs.
I am now thinking that the access may have been through a backdoor. It certainly seems to have operated like a direct intravenous link.
That is an unfair conclusion. These people run complex networks like the rest of us, they probably have a range of detection systems and, also like the rest of us, an almost impossibly large attack surface to consider internally and on their supply chain.
The problem is that it is really, really hard to make something secure even if you try and follow all the best-practices you know.
I guess the awkward bit is marketing everything as certificate this, accreditation that and overselling how secure it is although I don't really know how else you would word it, "as secure as we know how"?
This is the answer. The more failures, the more justification for more draconian restrictions of civil liberties.
I can hear the defense now: "Oh, yeah, you blame the honest, good, handsome people trying their best to protect you and you let the hackers off scot-free! We must make sure that hackers don't have access to the tools that aid them to commit these crimes, like books and computers. Anyone could be a hacker."
Funny was just testing the pilot of the Irish Government Digital Wallet. Definitely seems like the way forward if we're intent on doing identity verification. I'd rather the government mediate this than a bunch of random 3rd parties.
We also have a Danish wallet now, AltID, which implements an anonymized (assuming no collusion between issuer and eavesdropper or service provider) age verification protocol based on batches of single-use tokens which contain no personal information (except that they can be traced back to you by the issuer).
It's been released and in production since summer. Since then, several social networks have apparently started A/B testing age verification for their EU users, but how many of them actually integrate with the anonymous solution that is now available and in production? To my knowledge: 0. They all use Persona.
This highlights one of my main criticisms of EU's naive approach to regulation of tech companies. They fail to realize that any regulation that they impose will be complied with in the most malicious way possible, which is how we got cookie banners with dark patterns instead of a simple HTTP header saying no thanks to cookies.
Well, that's at least a positive. I hope this means they are also forced to accept the weakest credential type, and that they can't require you to present the identity proof that the wallet also provides when verifying your age. Because if they are allowed to do that, then that is what will happen.
probably gov will outsource to 3rd party for gov to build system to track and manage ID. Sometimes though also to manage, as in Denmark's MitID mainly managed by NETS under government set rules.
As a citizen under the France Passoire[1] and in an increasingly fascist chauvinist nationalist drifting in the geopolitical landscape, I wouldn’t be that found of delegating too much of these responsibilities to some centralized governmental institutions.
Note that’s this is not here some rant against any governmental power, just that in context, large private group use them as puppets and shrink their budget which of course impact quality of deliveries (not shaming the people who do the hard job without the relevant means). And while more distributed governmental topologies would have their own caveats, at least it would less likely offer opportunities for single point of failure.
On the end of the day, it is the state that issues these ID documents. So if you let the government go bad, IMHO the form of the documents does not matter that much.
During the totalitarian communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the state would regularly interfere with passports of people considered not loyal enough - withholding them outright or inventing extra paperwork that was necessary for the border police to let you out of the country. They also controlled all supply of foreign currency, both in an out.
Then if someone was actually allowed to travel outside the country but failed to return, their family and relatives would be punished, including demotion at work & prohibition of higher education.
So if your government goes bad, this is what will happen - the form of the ID takes at that point does not make much difference.
I live in the UK and was having this exact discussion with someone recently - I'd actually prefer Apple to be the owners of my digital identity over the UK government who would happily throw you in jail for expressing support for Palestine Action.
I think this is a bit of a non sequitur. The government will still be able to throw you in prison in either scenario. They will also be able to compel disclosure of your records in either scenario. So the difference is really just that in the scenario where apple verifies your identity there's an additional actor in the mix over who you have zero influence. It seems strictly worse.
Your digital identity would then be under the jurisdiction of the US government, who (despite talking a big game) are arguably worse for that same sort of behaviour.
If anyone has to have this type of control, better it be a local national government that you can in at least some small way influence.
I understand the sentiment, but your government you can actually fix by voting.
If Apple (or another large international company) suffers from decreasing margins, gets a new CEO and decides to turn the data it sits on into money there is absolutely nothing you can do, and you might in fact still stay a "forced" customer because of network effects (=> just consider whatsapp being an important communication channel in many places worldwide).
I think this attitude in general is often harmful; if your government sucks, fix the government instead of making yourself dependent on some quasi-monopolist private company.
> You can fix companies by voting a government too
Indirectly only. This is typically also always too late; instead of doing "the right thing" in the first place, companies are disincentivized by regulation from doing "bad things" again.
Regulations are like scar tissue, they don't help against getting burnt in the first place.
Preemptive regulation typically sucks, and is admittedly extremely difficult to get right; most governments don't even bother trying.
Corporation know this and exploit it ruthlessly-- there are almost never consequences as long as they keep to the letter of the law, even when acting with intent, against better knowledge and causing astronomical damage to society (just consider the whole leaded gas disaster for an extremely clear example).
> throw you in jail for expressing support for Palestine Action.
For those unfamiliar, you are, of course, allowed to peacefully protest in support of Palestine in the UK.
Palestine Action is a specific group that was controversially labelled as a terrorist group after they broke onto a runway and spray painted military planes.
It would be best for any such ID system to capture only the minimum data to fulfil their function. Pre-WW2 Dutch records also listed religion, which made it very easy for the Nazis to round up and murder them. Some examples from Kansas show that even recording sex/gender is risky - state law requires driving licenses to record the original sex/gender from the first birth certificate leading to trans women having an M sex/gender marker getting arrested and prosecuted for identity fraud.
LOL, no, not in this side thanks. Be it by giant transnational corp or centralized all powerful government, the ruin of the noosphere is equally awful.
You know, it always bugged me that the NSA (and more directly Google, and my phone company, and so on) know where I was at exactly this time a year ago, but that I do not.
If you are in California the DMV makes tens of millions of dollars a year selling all the data you give to the DMV, which is why I give them a P.O. Box.
CADMV claims on their web site that they cannot accept a P.O. box as a residence address. I have yet to find anything in California state law supporting this policy, though IANAL. Their enforcement seems to be quite lax.
It is a REAL ID requirement. It is federal law. States issuing REAL ID compliant identity documents must mail them to your physical address. USPS provides that data for address validation.
DPVCMRA = delivery point is a commercial mail receiving agent. Any sort of location with PO Boxes.
I used to work for my state's DMV. They'd sell vehicle registration data to various companies, which is how and why you get those "we've been trying to reach you about your car warranty" phone calls. I don't know about CA, but KY had a problem with tracking who ordered and who paid for that data. When I worked there, we found a number of "purchasers" who only paid for Year 1 but stopped paying afterwards.
Federal law requires state DMVs to supply that data to the car manufacturers. So if you own a Chevy, they have to send your data to Chevy in case there is a recall.
That's why I say "Our lobbyists have more money than your lobbyists". Every state has sunshine laws to show who the lobbyists are, what they lobbied on, and to whom. Some states separate those lobbyists into legislative & executive branch lobbying.
I suggest you look at who voted for those bills, who lobbied them and who hired those lobbyists.
How exactly does that work? How can you sneak a live feed past detection systems? It is incomprehensible to me, considering this is highly regulated and sensitive data. It is just open ports sending what they shouldn't be sending all the way out or what?
Brian Krebs' article makes a good case for the ID source being a harvester on the internal Hertz Car Rental network, and likely other similar consumer services that log ID for asset security and recovery.
These are hardly military grade networks, as long as the driver licence scans make it to the database and can be used to identify and recover damages from accident or theft it's unlikely anybody has cared much past that functionality.
I’ve been following the development of the drivers license sharing system from Apple where different fields can be selected; are there any implementations of PKI based identification systems where multiple certificates can be generated and revoked when compromised?
I’ve often thought that replacing the US social security number with a more robust root key makes for a fun thought experiment. Hard to imagine how such a system could securely serve so many people but passports with embedded chips seem to be doing okay.
Not in the US. Several EU countries have PKI systems integrated with identity documents that let the requester to ask for age (for example) and then only age is supplied. But their PKI systems are for the whole ID document.
As for the passport, the key/PIN you need to authenticate to the chip are printed on the page with the photo. Otherwise "hackers" can only determine nationality of passport. The standard is ICAO 9303.
SSN was never intended for identification. My original card, issued in the 1970s was clearly marked "not for identification". In the original numbering system, the first 3 digits identified the office/area where the card/number was issued and the next 2 digits identified the filing cabinet. 700s were set aside for railroad workers (until 1963) because the legislators did not want railroad workers to be included in social security.
No worries! Governments who used this company are taking responsibility and now have a plan to, at the very least, replace all IDs they forced people to expose and to make sure the old ones are unusable!
That's a sarcastic joke. It's how governments demand private companies react, but ...
> This week a massive new data breach has been revealed that should put the nail in the coffin for the idea that any sort of age or identity verification could be safe.
Yeah just like how the multiple breaches and utter negligence from the incumbent credit bureaus killed the credit file managed by private companies.
Concrete ZKP age verification schemes are hardly zero knowledge.
Imagine your idealized ZK address verification scheme. It would go something like: I show up at a website, it sends me some challenge, I send back a signature of the challenge that could only be made by someone with an of-age ID, but without specifying who. Everyone is happy.
Now little Johnny borrows my ID, and uses it to setup some oracle that provides ID validation for every kid and bot in the country. Woops.
To stop that you must compromise the idealized zero knowledge properties of the scheme, and in doing so you create the potential for harm/risk for everyone.
Sure, it's better than sending an ID card live feed to the dark web, but the risks of ID card theft are at least somewhat easy to understand.
Some of the threats to human rights don't even require the departure from the 'idealized' model-- as even the idealized model requires an ID issuer to issue the of-age person an ID. And so if the ID ZKP is widely required then the issuer can unperson you by simply declining to issue you an ID.
I think there's a number of people reading this who clearly didn't detect the satirical nature of this single sentence. It's blunt and obvious, but even so...
I still don't understand why the simplest approach isn't used: ban kids from using the Internet unsupervised. There's really no good reason why a six year old should have internet access.
The argument is that there are parents who are too stupid/lazy to enable parental controls on kids devices and society has a duty to protect kids even if their parents are negligent. Also, kids interact with other kids, so even if you do everything right your kids wind up with access/peer pressure through the kids with bad parents.
I dunno if I agree but I think that's the thrust of it.
In the olden days, the doc would hold your nuts and tell you to turn your head and cough. This was to detect if you had a hernia (which was a medical exception).
The bunghole inspection was to see if you were the receptive partner in anal intercourse because being a gay man was a criminal offense.
Allegedly, lesbianism was never outlawed because Queen Victoria was so offended by the idea of it that she prohibited the legislation from even being heard in Parliament.
so... for military grade identification systems instead of face photo with id document next to it, you make banghole photo with id document next to it?
This is precisely why the authority doing these checks needs to be the government that already issues the IDs.
Using ZKP as the EU proposes is the only way to prevent this data being leaked to unreliable third parties and leaves the knowledge with the institution it derives from in the first place.
I don't know why HN rails against it constantly, it is the obvious technical and organizational solution to this issue.
Government systems leak information all the time. The type of institution managing the data makes little difference. Its how the institution manages the data that matters.
Yep that's the only thing you lose, apart from a huge number of literal images of kids in the hands of literal criminals.
> I don't see any other better alternatives
Not doing age verification!
Your government (which already has all your details) generates certificates and you just give those out. The other side can the use simple public/private key verification to ensure the cert is valid. Also government does not get information who you gave the cert to and if you create a bunch and single use them the other side can’t follow you between uses using the certs.
The alternative is do it offline.
Unfortunately, IDs are issued 50 different ways by the less competent states.
Combine that with accusations that getting new IDs constitutes systematic racism (a widely held belief on HN), ignoring that the ruralest of India has been able to do this successfully, and you're not getting digital ID any time soon.
Plenty of European countries have an eID CAs and it works fine. The PKI part is a solved problem.
Doesn't even need ZKP, the CA can just issue an attestation.
So the whole "eID/CAs/ZKP/PKI" mumbo jumbo can be easily fooled by a gif file.
The three times over needed to provide a scan of my passport were: to enroll in a university course, to buy from an e-commerce site, and to become an app developer. None of those orgs really needed a scan of my passport, which I can't really revoke like a cracked password, and will now sit unencrypted somewhere until they are hacked and are shamed into handling their customers data more like radioactive waste.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/#SI_an...
When I'm on non-Apple I can scan a QR code on my phone and it will validate it the same way, using bluetooth to send enough info to the target computer to get me logged on.
Most operating systems and browsers come with a sync mechanism that many people default to, but it's no more than that: the default.
As for account recovery, most websites have a way to recover your account when you lose your password, there's no reason why that wouldn't work for passkeys. Every website with passkey access I've used so far makes passkeys optional and forces you to set a password already. If they switch their default to passkeys and add a password as an optional step, nothing would change.
It's not all sunshine and roses, though. Despite having Bitwarden set as the only passkey provider in my Android setup, the phone persistently only offers me Google. Which is empty, because as I said, I won't use one tied to things I can't control. Works great on desktops, though.
Passkeys can theoretically require you to be on hardware, I haven't found anything yet that requires that.
[0] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/09/fbi-probes-service-selli...
But it’s also the kind of story that won’t stay down, and will definitely be back.
It appears as if there are folks here that don’t want to talk about this.
https://hnrankings.com/49529621
But it's still the type of story that should have had a much longer tenure, especially as it was Krebs.
I am now thinking that the access may have been through a backdoor. It certainly seems to have operated like a direct intravenous link.
BTW: Thanks for this link: https://securitywall.co/tools/ipa-analyzer
Looks interesting.
‘Just make the encryption secure and so we can read it’
‘Just check everyone’s id but make it totally secure’
The problem is that it is really, really hard to make something secure even if you try and follow all the best-practices you know.
I guess the awkward bit is marketing everything as certificate this, accreditation that and overselling how secure it is although I don't really know how else you would word it, "as secure as we know how"?
I can hear the defense now: "Oh, yeah, you blame the honest, good, handsome people trying their best to protect you and you let the hackers off scot-free! We must make sure that hackers don't have access to the tools that aid them to commit these crimes, like books and computers. Anyone could be a hacker."
It's been released and in production since summer. Since then, several social networks have apparently started A/B testing age verification for their EU users, but how many of them actually integrate with the anonymous solution that is now available and in production? To my knowledge: 0. They all use Persona.
This highlights one of my main criticisms of EU's naive approach to regulation of tech companies. They fail to realize that any regulation that they impose will be complied with in the most malicious way possible, which is how we got cookie banners with dark patterns instead of a simple HTTP header saying no thanks to cookies.
Note that’s this is not here some rant against any governmental power, just that in context, large private group use them as puppets and shrink their budget which of course impact quality of deliveries (not shaming the people who do the hard job without the relevant means). And while more distributed governmental topologies would have their own caveats, at least it would less likely offer opportunities for single point of failure.
[1] https://francepassoire.com/
During the totalitarian communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the state would regularly interfere with passports of people considered not loyal enough - withholding them outright or inventing extra paperwork that was necessary for the border police to let you out of the country. They also controlled all supply of foreign currency, both in an out.
Then if someone was actually allowed to travel outside the country but failed to return, their family and relatives would be punished, including demotion at work & prohibition of higher education.
So if your government goes bad, this is what will happen - the form of the ID takes at that point does not make much difference.
If anyone has to have this type of control, better it be a local national government that you can in at least some small way influence.
If Apple (or another large international company) suffers from decreasing margins, gets a new CEO and decides to turn the data it sits on into money there is absolutely nothing you can do, and you might in fact still stay a "forced" customer because of network effects (=> just consider whatsapp being an important communication channel in many places worldwide).
I think this attitude in general is often harmful; if your government sucks, fix the government instead of making yourself dependent on some quasi-monopolist private company.
Indirectly only. This is typically also always too late; instead of doing "the right thing" in the first place, companies are disincentivized by regulation from doing "bad things" again.
Regulations are like scar tissue, they don't help against getting burnt in the first place.
Preemptive regulation typically sucks, and is admittedly extremely difficult to get right; most governments don't even bother trying.
Corporation know this and exploit it ruthlessly-- there are almost never consequences as long as they keep to the letter of the law, even when acting with intent, against better knowledge and causing astronomical damage to society (just consider the whole leaded gas disaster for an extremely clear example).
For those unfamiliar, you are, of course, allowed to peacefully protest in support of Palestine in the UK.
Palestine Action is a specific group that was controversially labelled as a terrorist group after they broke onto a runway and spray painted military planes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Action
What's going on in France?
The principle reason why the Netherlands joined the EU was to sabotage the French-German alliance- all the alarm bells went off in the 1950s.
DPVCMRA = delivery point is a commercial mail receiving agent. Any sort of location with PO Boxes.
https://developers.usps.com/addressesv3#tag/Resources/operat...
Disclaimer: I used to work for my state's DMV.
Federal law requires state DMVs to supply that data to the car manufacturers. So if you own a Chevy, they have to send your data to Chevy in case there is a recall.
I suggest you look at who voted for those bills, who lobbied them and who hired those lobbyists.
These are hardly military grade networks, as long as the driver licence scans make it to the database and can be used to identify and recover damages from accident or theft it's unlikely anybody has cared much past that functionality.
Hackers Had a Live Feed of Every ID Verification Company Scanned
(Huh? How do you scan a company?)
The original title is easier to parse:
Hackers Had A Live Feed Of Every ID This Verification Company Scanned
I’ve often thought that replacing the US social security number with a more robust root key makes for a fun thought experiment. Hard to imagine how such a system could securely serve so many people but passports with embedded chips seem to be doing okay.
As for the passport, the key/PIN you need to authenticate to the chip are printed on the page with the photo. Otherwise "hackers" can only determine nationality of passport. The standard is ICAO 9303.
https://www.icao.int/publications/doc-series/doc-9303
SSN was never intended for identification. My original card, issued in the 1970s was clearly marked "not for identification". In the original numbering system, the first 3 digits identified the office/area where the card/number was issued and the next 2 digits identified the filing cabinet. 700s were set aside for railroad workers (until 1963) because the legislators did not want railroad workers to be included in social security.
https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0110225045
That's a sarcastic joke. It's how governments demand private companies react, but ...
Yeah just like how the multiple breaches and utter negligence from the incumbent credit bureaus killed the credit file managed by private companies.
It's getting really tiresome
There are zero knowledge proofs
There's a EU initiative https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-mak.... The direction is generally good, but I'm not very positive about the implementation (as with everything comes from the govs).
Imagine your idealized ZK address verification scheme. It would go something like: I show up at a website, it sends me some challenge, I send back a signature of the challenge that could only be made by someone with an of-age ID, but without specifying who. Everyone is happy.
Now little Johnny borrows my ID, and uses it to setup some oracle that provides ID validation for every kid and bot in the country. Woops.
To stop that you must compromise the idealized zero knowledge properties of the scheme, and in doing so you create the potential for harm/risk for everyone.
Sure, it's better than sending an ID card live feed to the dark web, but the risks of ID card theft are at least somewhat easy to understand.
Some of the threats to human rights don't even require the departure from the 'idealized' model-- as even the idealized model requires an ID issuer to issue the of-age person an ID. And so if the ID ZKP is widely required then the issuer can unperson you by simply declining to issue you an ID.
It's definitely worth doing infinite security in order to avoid regulating social network algorithms, because
I dunno if I agree but I think that's the thrust of it.
The bunghole inspection was to see if you were the receptive partner in anal intercourse because being a gay man was a criminal offense.
Allegedly, lesbianism was never outlawed because Queen Victoria was so offended by the idea of it that she prohibited the legislation from even being heard in Parliament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_assent
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=MEPS+assh...
But more serious and non joking answer, the new thing from the "department of war" is testosterone level lab exams for existing servicemembers.
https://news.google.com/search?q=US%20military%20testosteron...
https://www.google.com/search?num=10&client=firefox-b-d&hs=Y...
Using ZKP as the EU proposes is the only way to prevent this data being leaked to unreliable third parties and leaves the knowledge with the institution it derives from in the first place.
I don't know why HN rails against it constantly, it is the obvious technical and organizational solution to this issue.
Theres no avoiding this, structurally. So the best thing you can do is not to introduce any additional points of failure.
I am so much more afraid of monopolies invading my privacy than roving hackers, or my corner store. Governments are the ultimate monopoly.
Case in point; I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not! :D