STILL TRUE: Facebook and co to handle taxpayers' ID Cast your minds back to June 2011 when The Register exclusively revealed the Cabinet Office's plans to allow British citizens to sign into public services online via social networking log-ins such as Facebook. Now, if you glance at the national press today, you'd be forgiven for thinking that something new had happened with …
So thats':
80 people to render the animated gifs
43 people to lay out the tables/write the html/using notepad and mspaint
38 people to write a navigation system using iframes and javascript
15 people to hack the navigation system into the rest of the site
9 people to design a logo that says "Works best with Internet Explorer 6"
You've completely failed to take account of:
The Project Managers,
Project steering commitee,
Project Board,
Executive Sponsors,
Public Oversight Officers,
Service Review Committee,
Quality Assurance Officers,
Risk Assessment Group,
Technical Engineering Group,
Technical Development Group,
Developers of Technical Groups Dept,
Europe Integration Specialists
Welsh Steering Board,
Scottish Steering Board,
Northern Irish Steering Board,
Financial Accountability Executives,
Procurement Executives,
and Jeff, the webguy who's actually building the site.
The article piqued my interest enough to go and have another look at gov.uk.
There still seems to be a problem rendering fonts on buttons and dialogues (Chrome).
I ended up on this page: https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-holiday-entitlement/y/full-time/starting/2012-07-01/2012-01-01/5-days
If you calculate your holiday entitlement, based on starting this year on 1st July, with a holiday year that runs from 1st January it tells you that you have 14.1 days:
It also tells you that this is calculated as: 5.6 (statutory entitlement) x (fraction of year: 0.50) x 5 (days per week) = 14.1 days
This is wrong twice. For one thing, the calculation above equals 14.0 days. For another, the fraction of the year should be worked out in days (182/366) and not rounded. The equation should be 5.6 x 5 x 182 / 366 and you get 13.9.
This is just the kind of pesky mistake that causes disagreements between employers and employees and just goes to show that the government should butt out of website development as well as the railways.
Another waste of money duplicating the functions of directgov on gov.uk, whats the benefit to the tax payers?
And if its anything like previous changed and update to government websites links will get broken and not redirected to the correct pages. The amount of times i have typed a link thats been provided from a government document to find 'that page cannot be found' error and have to go to google and do a search to find where the info had been moved too. HMRC is particularly bad for this and so is the Environment agency.
"True fact, the money went on equipping everyone at GDS with iPhones and Macbook Airs so they can hot desk at Aviation House."
If that's true (and I could believe it), then that particular piece of information deserves a lot wider attention and a few heads on the chopping block. There's a much cheaper way to hotdesk. It involves roaming profiles and a sysadmin that knows what they're doing. How many people does "everyone at GDS" equate to? Are we talking ten, fifty, a hundred? Also - security!
Very, very true. We are talking all staff at GDS so maybe 2 to 300 people. That maybe why the fonts are so big on gov.uk, normal type is hard to read on a 11 inch air screen. Although devs do get nice 24 inch monitors to plug them into.
Saying that no need to believe a random post, this is of course a matter of public record, or if not should be.
I hope they leave it as 'allow' rather than 'require', because you won't catch me signing up for any ID that weasels Farcebook or its pointless chums anywhere near my life thanks.
Government should stop trying to be so nauseatingly 'down wid da kidz innit' and get on with something useful, like calling an election. This isn't it.
"Government should ....get on with something useful, like calling an election"
For what point? So a different numpty can move into number ten, making the same vacuous noises, with exactly the same incompetent and sh1theaded policies, the same out-of-touch disregard for the workers and taxpayers of this country, and the same fatuous focus on "solving climate change". The "big society" becomes "one nation". Woohoo.
We tried having an election to get rid of Smiley Brown, and just got Tony Blair Mk2. Kicking this shallow, spineless twerp out sounds good, until you notice that the only possible replacement is no different. He's never done a proper job, is another Oxbridge toff and party hanger on ("I say! You rough looking fellows! We're all working class here in the Labour Party, what what!").
It's Guy Fawkes we need, not the sad panda.
This post has been deleted by its author
I thought Cameron had done a stint as a TV executive or something? Probably not as real life as Major having been born into the circus before becoming an accountant but still.
Facebook implements OpenID doesn't it (along with Google, Yahoo, et al.) If that's what they want to implement, it's pretty robust and well proven (and free). And it doesn't mean Facebook gets to see what you're looking at. They just provide the authentication.
The government is trying to be seen as *not* holding the data, so they can't be to blame for the inevitable dvd in the mail or usb left on a bus or what have you. So, yes, openid fits the "it's not us, honest" bill, it already exists, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're now forced to give your everything to teh zuck... bitch.
All upsides, right? No, not quite.
It's still the government shirking its responsibility to get it right. And from their perspective, there's no single party to blame when the inevitable happens, so that's low on "accountability". Also, how would you verify the person behind the made-up email address? So that doesn't fit well in their model. Now I'm the first to say their models need changing, but that doesn't automatically mean openid will be at all suitable.
But the main problem is that it's yet another "we need something, this is something, we need this" type "solution". The lack of understanding, verily the lack of thought at all is what's the real problem here.
You shouldn't go "hey, we can try $whatever, why not?" but instead you really need to understand what they're trying to do, list all the requirements and non-requirements, then find a list of candidates, sort them by desirability, cut the undesirables, then see what's left. I suppose it's possible openid will be "good enough". It's also possible that we need something new entirely.
I haven't done a thorough investigation but my hunch is that zero knowledge-proofs will prove necessary for a long-term, scalable solution --scalable in the number of uses, as that will inevitably increase, and not so much in the number of users, as that's been done clear enough--, unless privacy is simply unimportant. But really, the government needs to start trying to understand what it's trying to do, and so far it's been failing horribly. No ready-made solution can fix that. Not even the hiring of an ex-grauniad hack.
Those of us complaining about gov.uk have been whingers in the wilderness but when it goes live on October 17th, we'll be faces in the crowd.
The GDS mob have been all about playing with cool technologies, and very little about user and stakeholder requirements. A typical example is a recent blog post about how they have rolled all their own MI tools because , clearly, nothing on the shelf could possibly be good enough.
A cynic might say that a bunch of highly-paid people on short-term contracts have spun out an opportunity for on the job-learning and self-congratulatory networking to make sure their next gig is even better paid.
That ignores the fact that at their next interview, they might get quizzed on what they actually delivered, rather than what they promised or experimented with.
And, with all the debris they have strewn and folks they've pissed off, they can forget working in government again.
The article places too much emphasis on the idea of Facebook as an identity provider -- from what I've seen of the scheme (at a few conferences, and before it was "revealed" in June, 2011), it seems to be a pretty good thing. The government won't be required to create a national database to store user's identity, and there will be a free market for identity providers. Facebook is the example that always seems to be raised, but I imagine other people will want in on the scheme. I believe Logica (or Capita, can't remember which, and maybe both) are selling a platform that can be repackaged by companies wishing to act as identity providers (think Tesco, banks etc.).
I imagine a lot of these providers will make money not from a subscription fee for the scheme, but by using aggregate data for marketing purposes. For the more security conscious (like me), this model creates a great opportunity for somebody to step-up and offer a subscription-based service that guarantees to not resell your data, individually or in aggregate.
It just seems like a government IT project that is well thought through, providing single sign-in authentication without ceding more control to central government (ala New Labour).
"For the more security conscious (like me), this model creates a great opportunity for somebody to step-up and offer a subscription-based service that guarantees to not resell your data, individually or in aggregate."
[IANAL] but as I understand it the problem is that when a commercial company goes bust, its remaining assets [such as a database of identies] are flogged off and the purchaser is not bound by any guarantees or assurances the original company gave with respect to the database. So the guarantee is only as good as the solvency of the company!
Let's see how he untangles that. Who will he ask first? Where can he go to find where his 'on-line' identity is used? If I get his benefits redirected to my account and new address and make a fraudulent claim how on earth will that be sorted out? Probably as Peter himself defrauding the system.
One identity for everything is really bad news. (I'm a bit miffed that Peter has a Facebook account in another name as I can't get that - Yet.)
... I demand the control to go with it, thanks.
This more or less implies doing away with the notion of identity providers as a separate class, as otherwise the rest ends up second class.
It's not impossible, in fact it's possible, but none of the existing solutions is up to the task. And so far the government wouldn't even understand how it could possibly work at all, and neither do its "advisors".
... you consent to allowing your personal information, friends list, likes, favourite activities, blood group, dna sample and any other piece of crap we can get out of you to be spread far and wide to anyone we deem might want to get a look at it, preferably in return for a few tidy back-handers, whether or not you want them to see it...
You can have my FB page, three photos from a year ago and a rant about someone cutting me up at a traffic light just after Xmas! As for the mobile number that was required, it's a shitty PAYG card that's in the car for emergencies and last used properly about 18 months ago!
As it should be, my FB has nothing to do with my life just a way for my extended family to find me and invite me to meals once a month!
I've got a unique ID already... my national insurance number. Isn't that managed by the govt? Don't we employ a doughnut full of security experts that could implement some uncrackable authentication mechanism?
I'm assuming we'd have to pay someone to knock this up, why not pay our own civil servants to do it?
Or is it going to be a legal requirement to have a valid, genuine, your-name-here facebook account?
b-o-n-k-e-r-s
wasn't there a story a while back about duplicates creeping into the system ?
Back in the 90s, a friend was denied unemployment benefit, because the DHSS claimed they hadn't paid their NI. After being confronted with 2 years worth of payslips proving she had, it turned out her contributions had been credited to another account, with the same name. And incredibly, there was nothing they could do.
So you get rid of one web site that you don't like and the replacement is just as bad - in fact it turns out to be largely the same as the old one.
Why is this such a surprise? Considering it's being organised by politicians that's exactly what we should expect - like everything else they do.
My guess is that the civil servants and web designers are largely the same and just getting paid for doing the job a second time. Again, no surprise there. It's the same in most policy areas.
In our democracy, you're just voting to change the front man, not the way the country is actually run. To change that, you need to step outside the box and do a bit of protesting, preferably in a way that the politicians really hate.
"My guess is that the civil servants and web designers are largely the same and just getting paid for doing the job a second time. Again, no surprise there. It's the same in most policy areas."
That would almost make sense. In fact, it's another lot, so we're paying twice. And, we've been here before: before gov.uk, ditectgov; before directgov, ukonline. And let's know forget DotP.
I would love to know how many tens of millions have been spunked on government supersites and failed attempt to centralise government web sites. As far as I know it's:
Directgov - £126 million over 7 years
www.gov.uk beta - £4.5 million so far
DotP - £35 million
ukonline - don't have any idea, sadly
Anyway, even that undoubtedly incomplete picture adds up to £165.5 million, which is a lot for running a website. And that doesn't include the costs of the un-assimilated government websites
So, www.gov.uk - 3rd or 4th time lucky? Don't bet on it
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