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UK Licensing Site Requires MSIE Emulation, But Won't Work With MSIE
Anne Thwacks writes The British Government web site for applying for for a licence to be a security guard requires a plugin providing Internet Explorer emulation on Firefox to login and apply for a licence. It won't work with Firefox without the add-on, but it also wont work with Internet Explorer! (I tried Win XP and Win7 Professional). The error message says "You have more than one browser window open on the same internet connection," (I didn't) and "to avoid this problem, close your browser and reopen it." I did. No change.
I tried three different computers, with three different OSes. Still no change. I contacted their tech support and they said "Yes ... a lot of users complain about this. We have known about it since September, and are working on a fix! Meanwhile, we have instructions on how to use the "Fire IE" plugin to get round the problem." Eventually, I got this to work on Win7pro. (The plugin will not work on Linux). The instructions require a very old version of the plugin, and a bit of trial and error is needed to get it to work with the current one. How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"
I tried three different computers, with three different OSes. Still no change. I contacted their tech support and they said "Yes ... a lot of users complain about this. We have known about it since September, and are working on a fix! Meanwhile, we have instructions on how to use the "Fire IE" plugin to get round the problem." Eventually, I got this to work on Win7pro. (The plugin will not work on Linux). The instructions require a very old version of the plugin, and a bit of trial and error is needed to get it to work with the current one. How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"
Welcome to government procurement.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They've known about the problem since September and still haven't fixed it? If they were a private company they'd be out of business by now.
I expect that the people asking for this had no real idea about what they wanted and the specification was loaded with also sorts of silly guff and left out the serious needs and the developers did the quickest stupidest thing.
The people who developed the site are idiots... I was working with a client recently and discovered they had a problem with a web site they had to use. They were on IE11 and the web site only works with IE9 and I really do mean IE9 and nothing else. The service provider tech support said the solution was they would have to uninstall IE11 and then install IE9 Idiots, there is no other way of describing it, utter idiots. There is no good excuse for a website not to work in all major browsers, it really is that simple but then I'm just a guy who has to make sure the websites he develops work properly in order to get paid, these companies that provide websites for government departments at costs of millions or billions can get away with stupid shit like this because of the contracts they create.
Are you saying the civil service is bad and incompetent in the UK? I'm afraid it's the case in most European countries. This is a good test actually: do you disapprove their slowness, incompetence and laziness (to name a few)? If 'yes', then 1) you're normal 2) you're (probably) competent and 3) don't work there.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
If you can make it work, you passed!
On the other hand, you're a hacker and probably a terrorist. So you failed.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Silly rabbit, trix are for kids
Are you expecting anything done for and by the government to live up to your standards? shame on you?
Print or fetch the required from, fill it with the relevant information and bring it to the appropriate place (police in the UK?) with your ID card and couple of recent photos. Licensing is not something you can do easily and securely for quite a while, thanks to the marvels, volatility and bling of digital age.
Go contact support. Shit like this happens all the time. Welcome to the internet.
Cancelling is a right you have. Use it. And request a chargeback with the bank. If Vodaphone want to prove you owed them the money, they need to prove it, rather than let you wait while they keep your money.
The game like this was inspired by a bank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
Second, it's a great way to screen applicants. Only those who are truly adept and motivated will get through this barrier to entry.
I think this is the wave of the future. Employers can put up broken application sites and only look at the candidates that can figure it out. They don't even have to spend much to make it bad in the first place. Just outsource it to the lowest bidder, preferably in a country with a different language. Heck, have them do it in their native language and then apply some cheap ass internationalization package.
All this needs is a catchy name that sounds cool like "scrum" or "cloud scale" and it will become the next big thing. There will be certificate programs in whatever it's called and "Whatever it's called for Dummies". Wired and the Wall Street Journal will write articles. Hop on that bandwagon now and make those big bucks!
Why is Snark Required?
Home economy should be your one life's goal.
... are people who still use PCs from the 90s, most likely from Eastern Europe, so UKIP can continue complaining about foreigners stealing jobs away from the Brits.
http://www.doctorsonthegollc.c... - mobile doctor
Unfortunately government is out of the loop like many businesses when it comes to technology. Personally, I never understood how you can design such a web site
that caters only to such specifics in browsers these days when dealing with a public access site. I can still see some company sites requiring a certain browser for employee access type material. But banks, online retail, government and any other sites requiring public access should be browser neutral. In the end this person is probably dealing with a plugin that does not work with the browser as required because of updates, security patches or a bad digital signature. This is as bad as some governments switching to linux and open source document creator software and sending out documents people cannot open because they use Microsoft Office. I got a email from my Daughter's school with a power point done on a suite so old I could not find a way to open it properly. How difficult is it to just use formats that are generally considered default by the public?
Their just old.
My parents wouldn't be able to setup a website either, I make websites for a living, I am very good, they would never hire me for anything.
The government is much the same way, they want a web developer who is 70 years old otherwise they wouldn't trust them.
Likewise, they absolutely trust any company or name brand that will speak to them. They will not check for work quality because they do not understand the underlying code and architecture so they have no ability to judge.
We hear a whole lot about how 'generation blah blah' is lazy, terrible, stupid. This is not the case, we are agile, intelligent survivors of a difficult time period where we genuinely have troubles and are getting no empathy and little comfort. Truth is our government, and almost everyone else just plain old hates us, hates what we do, hates that we are having problems and wants a 'simpler time'.
None of this will change for about 40 years until we are 70, at which point you'll see the government website finally adopt a nodeJs and other technologies (hilariously too late).
There have been very rapid changes, and advancements, so fast that while things that are common to us are scary magic to old people. Thats why the VA cannot figure out how to use a computer, that's why obamaCare couldn't figure out how to use a computer, it's why hospitals cannot get their shit together and it is the why behind a million other things. They have the people sitting everywhere who can fix these issues, but their scared of us, so they hire their nephews (I've never seen nepotism on the scale that's happening lately, everyone is clutching their own close).
There is no solution, there is no fix or magic arrow, and all the bitching of the world won't make them die any faster.
Have you tried putting the site in question into IE's "Compatibility Settings" in the menu? The client string was switched to not-IE after IE9. Putting a site into the compatibility settings switches it back. I've had to do this to make several flavors of web-served VPNs serve the right DLLs when using IE. Not sure why the client string got switched, I think they changed some of the guts back to Netscape/Mozilla pieces in IE10+. Anyway, give it a try. Then tell the UK if it works.
Reads to me like someone just got rooted... by the gov't no less...
And I think this might be a reason to let kids learn to program in High School, not to make them programmers, but to let them learn about what is possible and what is not possible, so that they will not demand unrealistic features once they are in charge of these kinds of projects. I often want to give my customers an introduction course into computer science, just so they can learn how much work some small features require, and how impossible some feature requests are.
If a government site needs more than elinks to access it's broken. WTF could they possibly need a plugin for? Auth nope that is baseline. Forms again been here forever.
We need a deaf blind QA tester core if they can not easily use the site it's broken.
No sir I dont like it.
My son is applying for a computer science program at a fairly prestigious university. If you try to follow the links that ought to lead to the online application process, at least one of them is broken - it links to an internal server instead of to the public website. You can look at the URL and figure out what it ought to have been, based on other URLs on the site. Accident? Or pre-filtering their applicants?
But require IE? Worse, a Firefox emulation of IE? No, that's a different message. That's telling good applicants "you do not want to work here"...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
When I was recently laid off and applied for unemployment, I discovered that signing up for unemployment requires MSIE. Well, a lot of sites say that, so i tried it in Firefox. It didn't work, the workflow just went in circles. Then I tried it in MSIE and found the same thing. However, when i read very carefully, I noticed that it said that it had to be a specific, no longer supported version of MSIE. I set the compatibility level to that version, and then it worked. But I am sure everybody that has been laid off from work knows how to override the automatic updating of MSIE and set the compatibility level back to an older version.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I didn't realize that slashdot was the new bug tracker for the Internet. I guess I need to submit some "stories" for random bugs that I've found across the 'net.
Get rid of that fancy schmancy computer that you use with "modern" stuff or "Apple". Pick up a nice Vista machine that won't install any version of IE newer than IE9. Problem solved!
Because some stupid people.
Everything else is just a distraction
...you aren't dealing with educational software.
Nothing mentioned in this article surprises me - I doubt the person you spoke to has even the faintest idea why using an old version of the plug-in might be risky. Has anyone else felt that those working in customer service jobs simply don't keep up with technology and InfoSec risks?
The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.
You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with some versions of minor operating systems. It just has an issue on one version of an OS that few people use. I use OS X, so it might bug me, but that's quite different from "doesn't work at all, under any OS.
They are desperately trying to tell you that they don't want security guards. Get the hint already!
If I understand the situation this government site has the best security you can get: build web pages that can't be loaded. No security problems at all.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The error message says "You have more than one browser window open on the same internet connection," (I didn't) and "to avoid this problem, close your browser and reopen it." I did. No change.
Why do they care how many browser windows are open? On the same Internet connection? Why is this a "problem"? How would closing *your* browser fix the issue, if the other window(s) is/are open on another system sharing your "Internet connection"? (Perhaps you or someone upstream is using some sort of NAT.) And, finally, why do they care what browser you're using simply to logon?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And I think this might be a reason to let kids learn to program in High School
You mean *make* kids learn to program in high school? We already *let* them, they can learn it any time they like. If your goal is forcing them, don't mince words.
They appear to have fixed the problem by taking the entire application offline. Brill[i]ant!
This site is undergoing scheduled maintenance.
Our licensing site will be unavailable every weekend in March while we upgrade our systems. Affected services will include:
The online elements of our licence application process
The application status checker
The company licence checker
The batch application tracker
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
MSIE is notoriously incompatible between versions. If your version is too low, try a higher one (you'll need Win7 or higher to use IE9 or higher). If your version is too high, try emulation mode (within IE) of a lower version. It's hard to blame the techs when sites written for MSIE 8 completely break on MSIE11.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I had the adventure of installing XPsp2 from scratch once. That meant IE6. MSN(!!!!!) would crash IE6. I had to download Chrome. Just to download IE8 before I could update XP to sp3 (windows update wouldn't work at that point... had to be done through IE windows update site). Hard to blame the government if they had a perfectly designed site working for one version of the browser (IE6) and those versions of the browser stopped working even with the manufacturer's website. Imagine if they phones worked that way: " What? Your tried to call our call center, built more than 5 years ago? Why would you expect a modern phone to work with a 5-year-old call center?"
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
In my opinion governments should require that their sites are passing the HTML Validator and CSS validator tests.
Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?
This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.
Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)
The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.
In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.
For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Thats why the VA cannot figure out how to use a computer
Since when? The US Department of Veterans' Affairs was among the first to adopt an electronic health record system. In the late 1970s, it began to develop the MUMPS-powered VistA system now used by nearly half of all U.S. hospitals with electronic health records. And VistA is free software.
We need a deaf blind QA tester core if they can not easily use the site it's broken.
How would a site tell 100 deafblind testers behind the same NAT from a bot?
"How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"
Very funny.
When did a government department of any kind ever get anything right? Especially when it concerns computers. Triply when it concerns security. See for example:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
etc., etc. passim.
The truth of the matter is that politicians and civil servants tend to be highly non-technical, and very much focused on high-sounding (but misleading) talk. This is the exact opposite of the attitude you need to accomplish anything with computers. But they are also very arrogant, and committed to the belief that - since they don't understand computers - programming and the like must be extremely easy.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Greetings!
On behalf of Her Majesty's Special Security Services you have completed the level one security service selection process and you are hereby accepted as a level one Security Yeoman. You are here ordered to appear for further training and screening at a secret location code named 'The Village'. As per the software ELUA (you did read the EULA, didn't you?) you are hereby bound by both the public and classified sections of the official secrets act including section 4. You will be further briefed on your new assignment by courier only. Note that you are now travel restricted until such a time as we determine your proper role and clearance.
We are excited to have you as part of our team. If you have any questions do not reply to this email. Your contact will provide with suitable blind box drops for communications. If asked your cover will be that you will be attending a Windows 10 security 'boot camp' in Wales.
Regards,
Q.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
>"How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"
Sounds pretty secure to me.
Sounds like they're setting you up for an attack on your client machine from their server.
Their supported browser page tells they cope with IE 6, 7, 8 and Netscape 7.
That looks like a joke, but I have already seen recent websites carrying this kind of requirements. Is there a modern framework that produce that?
This is called taking the piss. A schoolboy with a basic grasp of PHP could write them a website that worked. Until your website works, and works reliably, all else is optional.
John_Chalisque
It's a screening process to get rid of those that don't really have it together.
Do you have what it takes to configure your PC System so that you can actually apply for the job?
Easy to stand up, difficult to maintain. The people who created this site probably were lowest-bidder IT contractors with little programming experience. The page template looks like it is doing a string comparison of the browser version against "6" to see if they need to load fixup code. This is probably just original boiler plate code provided by Microsoft; "10", "11", ... will cause this IE6 support code to get loaded which then makes things worse rather than better. The people who created this site are long gone and the people who work there probably are going through the processes of getting permission to hire a contractor to fix it which includes adding it to the next budget cycle. Clearly none of them have the ability to go in and delete 3 lines from the page template.
Developers didn't have time to wait for IE statup, so they used the firefox plugin.