From: IFADU@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Gordon Burns
Sent: 28 November 2008 19:09
To: IFADU@googlegroup
Subject: [IFADU] Friday and You could not make it stuff..
I receive a weekly newsletter on IT stuff which is always funny and
satirical.
A round of the weeks IT news.
I thought I would share it with you this week,. It is not entirely off
topic as it is a acerbic comment on our leaders and governments management
abilities.
I think some of the comments here were a little unfair, some public service
employees do a great job in difficult and stressfull circumstances. Working
in the embassy n the Congo might qualify. We must not judge all public
servants by the common experience we share and even then it is with the very
senior management who set policy that we have the problems.
So to end the week some humour...
Have a good weekend.
ID Card Scheme
Consider the latest news on the scheme this week.
The first UK ID cards will be of limited use because the government has yet
to reveal a timetable for the deployment of scanners capable of reading the
clever high-tech biometric data. That would be a problem but where there's a
problem there's a solution. In fact there are two but neither of them are
very good.
It's quite simple really. You look at the card and then look at the person
and if they look like the kind of person on the card then they're probably
the same people. Brilliant, eh?
But that's not all. Hell no, there's another way you can check if the card
is genuine - you just give it a flick.
That's according to Phil Booth national co-ordinator of ID card pressure
group NO2ID who told silicon.com that employers who doubt the authenticity
of the card had been told to flick it to check for a distinctive sound.
"This is the mechanism by which employers are supposed to be checking a
worker's identity - it is farcical," he said. And who's the Round-Up to
argue?
What the 'distinctive sound' might be is a mystery to the Round-Up
- a hollow sounding ring for fraudulent cards, perhaps? Or if it's a genuine
card it could chime out the opening chords to 'Rule Britannia'.
Booth seethed: "It makes a lie of all these grandiose claims about
biometrics if there is not the infrastructure to back it up."
You can stop right there, Phil. You had the Round-Up at 'farcical'...
Whitehall....
The grey-suited denizens of Whitehall are confused enough as it is, flicking
ID cards against their ears, without adding software upgrades into the mix.
MPs, peers and civil servants are having a hell of a time getting by with
Microsoft Word. So what's new, you might ask. Tuning forks as it happens but
that gag is just sooo last section.
The civil servants in question are struggling to deal with compatibility
between documents produced in Word 2003 and 2007 formats. Much in the same
way the rest of the country is confused about policy initiatives launched
over the same period.
Happily, Microsoft is working with Westminster tech chiefs after politicians
and peers complained of being unable to open the latest Word documents. And
presumably they were not talking about the paper clip, which seems to be
working fine:
"Looks like you're trying to write an ill-thought-out technology-based
policy initiative on a national security scheme.
Would you like help:
Generating enough snake oil?
Finding someone to blame when it all goes wrong?
Over-inflating budgets?"
There is a solution - a fix can be downloaded - but as Lord Methuen
writes in an annual committee report: "A program can be downloaded
to read the documents but obviously not everybody knows how to do
this." Followed by a stream of random wingdings characters and 200
blank pages, the Round-Up likes to imagine.
It also transpires that politicos have gone mad for IT with a long
list of outrageous requests. Happily for them they'll soon be able
to download said patch from anywhere they choose.
Not content with having email accounts of Herculean proportions and
wi-fi in every nook and crevice of Whitehall, MPs are also lobbying
to be able to place clips of themselves in the House of Commons on
YouTube. In addition, members and peers want to embed official
Parliamentary video on their personal websites. Hark at them.
It's encouraging to see our government embracing technology with
such gusto, but as a wise man* once said: "With great power comes
great responsibility."
(*Spider-Man's Uncle Ben)
We're just a year on from the HMRC missing CDs debacle (the
department is still happy to receive those CDs if you do find them)
so maybe things have changed. Maybe government employees can be
trusted with all the high tech kit and privileges.
Wait. What's that? Yet more big government data breaches on the
way? Well that's something to look forward to in the new year.
Plus ça change...
Regards
Gordon
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