Every time I hear about a big government IT fuck-up it seems to be caused by EDS. Yet the government keep awarding them contracts. Why?
I suspect that it's something along the lines of "better the devil you know". Also, ObBlackadder, they've screwed up in exactly the same way seventeen times before, they can't possibly be stupid enough to make the same mistake again. The words "old boy network" also spring to mind, although that's unsupported cynicism.
I actually live in the UK, and I really don't see why everyone is making such a fuss about having a national ID card.
I also live in the UK. Full disclosure: I'm rationalising a knee-jerk "don't like it" response. This is going to be a bit one-sided.:)
The British government has never got an IT system in either on time or on budget. In this particular case, they're talking about spending £3bn, with no track record of being able to implement a working system. There will be cost overruns, so expect the figure to rise. One analysis I read (I forget where, sorry) suggested that £3bn was about right for cards+database, but didn't include money for readers, which would then presumably come out of the budgets of the Post Offices/hospitals/etc that needed to install them.
An ID card is a single point of failure. If I can forge one, or obtain one by bribing or threatening a civil servant, I have a bullet-proof fake identity.
The Home Office doesn't really know what they want an ID card for. When questioned, Blunkett acknowledges that there is no anti-terrorism value in the things, but on occasion pushes them as an anti-terrorist measure. They want it to combat benefit fraud. Department of Work and Pensions reckons ID-related benefit fraud costs them £50m a year. Assuming Blunkett's £3bn is correct, it'll take 60 years to repay itself on that.
They also seem to have an idea that it'll solve illegal immigration. The problem is that as soon as you connect the UK ID database to (say) the Nigerian database, you rely on the accuracy of the Nigerian database to work out whether or not you should issue a UK ID card. Problem unsolved...
As to your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", that's not quite true. If the Powers That Be trust the card implicitly and it is not actually perfectly unforgeable, you could find yourself in the position of having to prove that it wasn't your ID card used to "aid and abet criminal activity", but another card with exactly the same characteristics. If it turns out to be impossible to acquire a card illegally, I'll eat this computer.
I'd recommend this article on The Register. Their argument is that it's a waste of money that (even if it worked perfectly) wouldn't solve any of the problems the Home Office wants to solve.
Take a look at the statistics for assault in great britain. Guns simply shift power. Instead of the biggest, strongest, most aggressive, longest armed person, survival goes to the fastest, most accurate, most cool-headed person.
I disagree. Survival in a gunfight will not depend on cool headedness any more than survival in a fist-fight will. Clear thinking will always help you, but in both cases, survival depends upon your willingness to do damage to another human being. You may not be as willing as you think. Guns or no, most of the time the victory will go to the person more willing to kill or injure, assuming neither side runs away. Will that be you walking home from the pub, or the mugger who jumps you?
It means he thinks the concepts employed in the organisation (or lack thereof) of the campaign were good. Implementation was not so hot. The excerpt from the book suggests that there was much infighting within the campaign, and that Dean hadn't really understood that he was in with a chance until too late. A campaign arranged in a similar way, but with a slightly less eccentric candidate and better control of the "official" staff might well be a winner.
If I was using Debian in a commercial setting that required the use of one of the "bad" drivers... what would my choices be? Stop my business until the "evil" drivers magically become open source? No I tell you what I would do... I would switch distros or even worse jump to Windows where the damn things are supported and probably already work.
Very good point. Now what would you do if some asshole of a kernel developer decides that the drivers amount to a violation of the GPL on his code? The developer could sue one or more of the distros, and might get a restraining order on distribution of his code. What would your business do then? Move to Windows? Or Debian?
I am not remotely implying that kernel developers are assholes - but think how much damage a smart and hostile person (or company, I'm looking at you, MS) could do by this method if they could get a "sleeper" into the kernel dev team.
The first year physics undergrads at my university have short projects in the summer term. One of the cooler ones I've seen was a kind of musical instument. It was an upward-looking proximity detector (IR, I think). It played a tone when it detected an object. It believed in eight different distances, and played a different tone for each.
I'm not very musical. The best I could do was get a scale out of it by putting my hand close to the sensor, and then lifting my hand. The guys who'd made it had obviously practicing, because they were waving their hands in the air over the thing, making it play tunes (limited to whole tones in one octave, but tunes nontheless). It made me think of Glen A. Larson science fiction series, for some reason...
What bad economics and planning would that be? Creating a product and then selling it?
No - the bad planning is a failure to realise that what they are selling is fundamentally different from a material product. Material products are "exclusive" - while I have it, you can't use it, and there's no easy way to give you a copy of, say, my chair. Music, on the other hand, is information. I can copy it for you, and with digital copying you have a copy with equal quality.
Historically, the cost of copying music was prohibitive - I had to have a vinyl cutting machine to give you a copy, and it wouldn't have the original quality. Therefore, music companies could sell vinyl (literally), and charge you for it. With the advent of digital music, suddenly they have to face up to the fact that the plastic-and-foil of the CD is essentially worthless. We want the information, which can be copied.
The RIAA et al. seem to be reacting by trying to get laws passed that make it illegal to possess machinery for copying information. This has the intended effect, that they can sell CDs and we can't copy them, but the side-effects are terrifying.
A much smarter idea - which the grand-parent was alluding to - would be to acknowledge that music copying is unstoppable. Then decrease the sales cost until people feel that risking prosecution (and starving the artists) isn't worth twenty cents, or whatever. Or sell something that isn't copyable - signed CDs, or posters/artwork, whatever.
That's what the grand-parent means by poor planning.:)
An open source ninja squad attacks and departs silently, leaving only a trail of dead bodies, a copy of the GPL, and the address of an ftp site from which their attack plans can be downloaded, I presume.
These systems are a little smarter than this. Instead of just cutting the engine power, they simultaneously cut electrical and fuel power to the engine, disangage the clutch and force the brakes on full, all within a few seconds. There's no trouble with steering, as within a few moments there's no need to steer anywhere.
That should make life interesting if our terrorists are in a hurry (the government might shut them down any second) and cornering at any speed.
Nice. It's been said before here - the courts usually do the right thing, you just need the staying power (read: money) to get there.
I liked the quote at the end:
"We are examining the documents and devoting a large amount of time with our economists and attorneys to calculate the damages that we feel we are entitled to from Lexmark because of their serious misdeeds," SCC CEO Ed Swartz said about the ruling.
If Ian Clarke claims it is anything but research, then people will start to see it in a whole new light, perhaps claiming Ian (and other developers) be held resposible for its use.
A good point, in light of Sharman Networks' problems with Kazaa. Do you think "it was just a research project" would be a defence acceptable to the serious boys in the boring suits? If it's just a research project, they would say, then you should maintain lists of those using and experimenting with it. So they know who not to bother watching, of course...
This does damage SCO's case. Someone here once described a motion to dismiss in a court case as "even if you were correct, so what?" If SGI finds 200 lines of code that no-one uses because they're old and obsolete, and they were replaced ages ago anyway, I'd say that was a resounding "so what?"
Also, SGI's response is professional and effective. Not the action of an irresponsible pirate, which is how SCO likes to paint OSS developers.
Holograms are kind of like those 3-d Magic Eye pictures you get, although a fair chunk more sophisticated. Essentially you choose a flat surface infront of your object, and work out everything (phase, intensity) about the light that passes through this surface on its way to your eye. You record this on a photographic film and, hey presto, the eye is fooled into thinking there's an object there when light shines on the pattern.
Their viewing angle sucks because there's an assumption - light "on the way to the eye". Sure you can see tholograms off axis, but they get distorted really quickly. Not too bad for a picture of the starship Enterprise, but reading distorted text gets tiring really quickly.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
What a strangely appropriate sig you have...
I was trying to work out how you'd give a presentation on a 3d display. Probably wouldn't be worse than 2d - more variants on the evil "flying" methods (spinning is an obvious one) of making objects appear and 3d fonts are probably the worst you could do.
I hope I'm right, and not just lacking in imagination.;)
That store used to have a set of barcodes for each of the razors at the checkout. You asked for a pack of 5 mach-3s or whatever, they scanned the barcode, you paid, then you went to the customer service desk where they scribbled on your receipt and gave you your razors.
Incidentally, I once saw the guy who had been infront of me in the queue (buying razors, amongst other things) complaining to customer service about how irritating the checkout guy had been. Never saw that particular guy doing anything except collecting baskets the rest of the time I lived there...
I guess that coders who have a problem tend to try to fix it at source. That means writing to Congress. However, (striving for a computing metaphor here) not everyone is qualified to program on bare metal. Most of us use an OS.
Try convincing programmers that sometimes it's better to go through an intermediary. Geeks and 'liberal artists' saying the same will be heard by people who would otherwise dismiss geek concerns as the rantings of a bunch of weirdos.
Perhaps an O'Reilly 'Nutshell' book on lobbying would be a good idea.;)
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I suspect that it's something along the lines of "better the devil you know". Also, ObBlackadder, they've screwed up in exactly the same way seventeen times before, they can't possibly be stupid enough to make the same mistake again. The words "old boy network" also spring to mind, although that's unsupported cynicism.
I
I also live in the UK. Full disclosure: I'm rationalising a knee-jerk "don't like it" response. This is going to be a bit one-sided. :)
The British government has never got an IT system in either on time or on budget. In this particular case, they're talking about spending £3bn, with no track record of being able to implement a working system. There will be cost overruns, so expect the figure to rise. One analysis I read (I forget where, sorry) suggested that £3bn was about right for cards+database, but didn't include money for readers, which would then presumably come out of the budgets of the Post Offices/hospitals/etc that needed to install them.
An ID card is a single point of failure. If I can forge one, or obtain one by bribing or threatening a civil servant, I have a bullet-proof fake identity.
The Home Office doesn't really know what they want an ID card for. When questioned, Blunkett acknowledges that there is no anti-terrorism value in the things, but on occasion pushes them as an anti-terrorist measure. They want it to combat benefit fraud. Department of Work and Pensions reckons ID-related benefit fraud costs them £50m a year. Assuming Blunkett's £3bn is correct, it'll take 60 years to repay itself on that.
They also seem to have an idea that it'll solve illegal immigration. The problem is that as soon as you connect the UK ID database to (say) the Nigerian database, you rely on the accuracy of the Nigerian database to work out whether or not you should issue a UK ID card. Problem unsolved...
As to your "nothing to hide, nothing to fear", that's not quite true. If the Powers That Be trust the card implicitly and it is not actually perfectly unforgeable, you could find yourself in the position of having to prove that it wasn't your ID card used to "aid and abet criminal activity", but another card with exactly the same characteristics. If it turns out to be impossible to acquire a card illegally, I'll eat this computer.
I'd recommend this article on The Register. Their argument is that it's a waste of money that (even if it worked perfectly) wouldn't solve any of the problems the Home Office wants to solve.
Ibix
I disagree. Survival in a gunfight will not depend on cool headedness any more than survival in a fist-fight will. Clear thinking will always help you, but in both cases, survival depends upon your willingness to do damage to another human being. You may not be as willing as you think. Guns or no, most of the time the victory will go to the person more willing to kill or injure, assuming neither side runs away. Will that be you walking home from the pub, or the mugger who jumps you?
I
It means he thinks the concepts employed in the organisation (or lack thereof) of the campaign were good. Implementation was not so hot. The excerpt from the book suggests that there was much infighting within the campaign, and that Dean hadn't really understood that he was in with a chance until too late. A campaign arranged in a similar way, but with a slightly less eccentric candidate and better control of the "official" staff might well be a winner.
Ibix
Very good point. Now what would you do if some asshole of a kernel developer decides that the drivers amount to a violation of the GPL on his code? The developer could sue one or more of the distros, and might get a restraining order on distribution of his code. What would your business do then? Move to Windows? Or Debian?
I am not remotely implying that kernel developers are assholes - but think how much damage a smart and hostile person (or company, I'm looking at you, MS) could do by this method if they could get a "sleeper" into the kernel dev team.
Yours paranoidly,
I
The first year physics undergrads at my university have short projects in the summer term. One of the cooler ones I've seen was a kind of musical instument. It was an upward-looking proximity detector (IR, I think). It played a tone when it detected an object. It believed in eight different distances, and played a different tone for each.
I'm not very musical. The best I could do was get a scale out of it by putting my hand close to the sensor, and then lifting my hand. The guys who'd made it had obviously practicing, because they were waving their hands in the air over the thing, making it play tunes (limited to whole tones in one octave, but tunes nontheless). It made me think of Glen A. Larson science fiction series, for some reason...
I
What bad economics and planning would that be? Creating a product and then selling it?
No - the bad planning is a failure to realise that what they are selling is fundamentally different from a material product. Material products are "exclusive" - while I have it, you can't use it, and there's no easy way to give you a copy of, say, my chair. Music, on the other hand, is information. I can copy it for you, and with digital copying you have a copy with equal quality.
Historically, the cost of copying music was prohibitive - I had to have a vinyl cutting machine to give you a copy, and it wouldn't have the original quality. Therefore, music companies could sell vinyl (literally), and charge you for it. With the advent of digital music, suddenly they have to face up to the fact that the plastic-and-foil of the CD is essentially worthless. We want the information, which can be copied.
The RIAA et al. seem to be reacting by trying to get laws passed that make it illegal to possess machinery for copying information. This has the intended effect, that they can sell CDs and we can't copy them, but the side-effects are terrifying.
A much smarter idea - which the grand-parent was alluding to - would be to acknowledge that music copying is unstoppable. Then decrease the sales cost until people feel that risking prosecution (and starving the artists) isn't worth twenty cents, or whatever. Or sell something that isn't copyable - signed CDs, or posters/artwork, whatever.
That's what the grand-parent means by poor planning. :)
I
An open source ninja squad attacks and departs silently, leaving only a trail of dead bodies, a copy of the GPL, and the address of an ftp site from which their attack plans can be downloaded, I presume.
GNU/Ninjas, attack!
I
That should make life interesting if our terrorists are in a hurry (the government might shut them down any second) and cornering at any speed.
Yours pessimistically,
Ibix
D'oh! I even R'd TFA before posting.
I think the "need deep pockets to survive long enough for justice to take it's course" point still holds, anyway.I
Nice. It's been said before here - the courts usually do the right thing, you just need the staying power (read: money) to get there.
I liked the quote at the end:
I read that as "My turn now..."
I
On the other hand, they can't block caller ID (caller IP, I guess), so Spamhaus type outfits could be created for VoIP. Serious point, though...
Ibix
A good point, in light of Sharman Networks' problems with Kazaa. Do you think "it was just a research project" would be a defence acceptable to the serious boys in the boring suits? If it's just a research project, they would say, then you should maintain lists of those using and experimenting with it. So they know who not to bother watching, of course...
Paranoidly yours,
Ibix
This does damage SCO's case. Someone here once described a motion to dismiss in a court case as "even if you were correct, so what?" If SGI finds 200 lines of code that no-one uses because they're old and obsolete, and they were replaced ages ago anyway, I'd say that was a resounding "so what?"
Also, SGI's response is professional and effective. Not the action of an irresponsible pirate, which is how SCO likes to paint OSS developers.
I
Holograms are kind of like those 3-d Magic Eye pictures you get, although a fair chunk more sophisticated. Essentially you choose a flat surface infront of your object, and work out everything (phase, intensity) about the light that passes through this surface on its way to your eye. You record this on a photographic film and, hey presto, the eye is fooled into thinking there's an object there when light shines on the pattern.
Their viewing angle sucks because there's an assumption - light "on the way to the eye". Sure you can see tholograms off axis, but they get distorted really quickly. Not too bad for a picture of the starship Enterprise, but reading distorted text gets tiring really quickly.
I
What a strangely appropriate sig you have...
I was trying to work out how you'd give a presentation on a 3d display. Probably wouldn't be worse than 2d - more variants on the evil "flying" methods (spinning is an obvious one) of making objects appear and 3d fonts are probably the worst you could do.
I hope I'm right, and not just lacking in imagination. ;)
I
That store used to have a set of barcodes for each of the razors at the checkout. You asked for a pack of 5 mach-3s or whatever, they scanned the barcode, you paid, then you went to the customer service desk where they scribbled on your receipt and gave you your razors.
Incidentally, I once saw the guy who had been infront of me in the queue (buying razors, amongst other things) complaining to customer service about how irritating the checkout guy had been. Never saw that particular guy doing anything except collecting baskets the rest of the time I lived there...
I
Ann Coulter said:
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"
Thank God Christian Fundamentalists are nothing like those bastard Islamic ones...
Try convincing programmers that sometimes it's better to go through an intermediary. Geeks and 'liberal artists' saying the same will be heard by people who would otherwise dismiss geek concerns as the rantings of a bunch of weirdos.
Perhaps an O'Reilly 'Nutshell' book on lobbying would be a good idea. ;)