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- Hacker News
- How did we let something as basic as money and travel become so controlled?
Laws against persona; freedoms should be called out as unethical.
by Razengan - I've seen more and more instances of this. Sometimes it's a feature in disguise - humans are easier to spoof than software - but mostly it's laziness or cost cutting.
For example, I went to the bank down the road and tried to withdraw a few thousand dollars. This isn't atypical for me - I do this every few months. I had my ID and knew my account number, but I didn't have my debit card. They essentially told me "system says no" and that there wasn't anything they could do. This is a feature for the bank - a human teller might be talked into pressing the wrong button by fraud. Instead, I had to go home and get my debit card. By presenting that bit of plastic, system said yes, and I was good to go with my cash.
For another example, I was recently at an airport listening to a family struggling to get on a flight. They were checked in with seats assigned (confirmed by the gate agent) but the system refused to give the green "ok to board" light for them. Rather than just put them on the flight and file a ticket to fix the record after the fact, the agent just stood there churning for a while until a supervisor was able to sprint over from the other end of the airport. The supervisor didn't use their superior access level to override the broken system. Instead, they used their superior knowledge on how to push the system through its bug. They kicked the family off the flight, unassigned their seats, put them on standby, approved them for (random) empty seats, and then let them board... but now they weren't sitting together in the seats they had before. I ended up missing that (extremely delayed) flight for boring reasons related to ongoing engine problems and upcoming connections so I don't know how it worked out but I hope they got to sit together in the end!
by aftbit - The terrible part to me is them saying "the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours", this should be like a 15-minute delay at most when you can present your passport with its number which also matches your biometrics (as would be the case with twins).
I myself recently had a 10-minute or so delay due to a visa issue. I was departing from Johannesburg and was going to use my Italian passport for entry into New Zealand. I had acquired an NZeTA visa about 15 months before but didn't think to consider until checking in that it was against my previous passport number which I had since renewed.
When the agent said they were just having to double check my visa (while my wife's and children' were fine), the fact the passport had been renewed occurred to me and I told the agent about it which probably saved a couple of minutes of them having to work out this was the issue. They phoned New Zealand, explained the situation and within about 10 minutes the New Zealand side updated their system and I was able to complete my check-in.
- The problem is there used to be a separate physical card (BRP), but the Home Office got rid of it and moved to this all digital system. In other words there is no backup method available to ground staff.by rwmj
- I have identical twin boys - when signing up for a bank account app and while completing all the associated hoops for ID, the second to do it got the rather dystopian error message 'an account has already been registered with this face'by feintruled
- Anyone have any idea how this can happen? Surely the boys have different first names, so how can the system mix them up?by ginko
- What is strange is that even the best face recognition algorithms have false positive. So surely they must have planned for two unrelated customers resolving to the same embeddings.by cm2187
- One kid needs a goatie: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...by netsharc
- I wonder how it's possible they didn't think about this problem. Considering everyone involved in building this feature, not a single person thought about the possibility of twins or simply people who are very alike? Also, can't people open multiple accounts?by glimshe
- “Webb said Home Office staff promised her over the phone the problem would be fixed, though a confirmation email was then sent to her sister instead of to her.”
Comedy gold.
by leephillips - My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.
I was losing my sanity over all the refusals (app refusing the photos).
by rkuska - > My favorite part of the UK’s eVisa was taking a portrait photo of my 1.5y old.
I have had to take photos of each of my two kids at six months old for passports. That was not a lot of fun (though it's nice to look at the baby photo for the older one now).
- I am a UK citizen, born in Scotland, before 1983, to Scottish parents. We moved to Australia when I was young and I traveled on my mother's passport.
Now I live in the US.
The UK government has decided that to travel to the UK, a UK citizen MUST use a UK passport. They also, helpfully, don't offer passport services at their US embassies and consulates.
So the process is this: I begin the process on gov.uk, and validate my identity to them, to their satisfaction, using questions only I should know (where did my parents marry, born where and to whom, what time of the day). Once I have done that, I get to upload a passport photo of myself... and then I have to find, and nominate another UK citizen who -does- have a passport, -who is not related to me-, who "has known me for two years", and "has the risk of loss if they were to make a false statement", to go through the same process themselves, validate their identity, and then state that the photo they have seen is of me, that they have known me for two years or more, what the nature of our relationship is, and more.
Then the UK will issue my passport.
Fun story of the app refusals though, id.me, as used by the IRS:
"Scan the front and back of your Driver's License."
[upload scan of front of DL @ 200DPI]
"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of front of DL @ 300DPI]
"Unable to find a face in the image you uploaded."
Huh. Maybe I'll try with a lower resolution.
[upload scan of front of DL @ 72DPI]
"Thank you, now please upload the back of your Driver's License."
Hmm, 72DPI worked for the front, so...
[upload scan of back of DL @ 72DPI]
"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of back of DL @ 200DPI]
"Unable to read a barcode in the image you uploaded."
[upload scan of back of DL @ 300DPI]
"Thank you for verifying your Driver's License".
by FireBeyond - I suspect this case has origins less to do with the programming itself, and more to do with UK bureaucracy just not giving a shit, as with the post office scandal where authorities, including the legal system, blindly believing in the outsourced systems led to hundreds of false prosecutions and thirteen suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal).by crooked-v
- The Home Office does manage to be both cruel and incompetent, which is the worst possible combination.by rwmj
- It'd be lovely if articles like this named the people responsible for actually building the systems. It's almost certainly never a government department.
They'll have paid one the many software/technology companies to build this thing. Who will be hiding their shoddy crap behind their client (the government department that paid for it). There are some patterns that I'm sure would start to arise from naming the consultancies that are churning out crap.
by chainier - Would it make any difference? Fujitsu wrote software so buggy that innocent people got fined and put in prison. They still get contracts even today.by Steve16384
- All software is going to have edge cases, no matter how good the contractor is. The decision to not have contingencies to manually handle reasonable edge cases is entirely on the government.by jjk166
- Actually this was developed by the government, in a meaningful sense, but it seems like it's Entrust (more or less inevitably) and Accenture who are the outsourced parts.
So basically both US multinationals (Accenture have a Dublin HQ as a fig leaf)
by dofm - Unfortunately there are more and more cases where "The computer says no" and then there is no human to talk to, and you are bounced back from one automated system to another...
I had recently a case where my title (Mr) ended up as my middle name in the system of the operating airline (it was perfectly correct in the system of the airline that I booked the ticket through). Two hours of talking to those two airlines did not help me. I had to buy another ticket...
I think this starts to remind me the movie Brazil...
by sega_sai - > A Home Office spokesperson said: “Over 10 million people have already successfully used eVisas to prove their immigration status. ..."
So how many people did not successfully use it? Could be 100 million for all we know. Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
by poizan42 - Why do you have to ask? Because you don't have easy access to the data. Whether or not your nation has a culture of honesty, big scale communication is always going to be dumbed down.by threatofrain
- What was the failure rate on the earlier system, the mean time to resolution, and the maximum time to resolution, and how does that compare with the current system.by iso1631
- It only launched in the middle of April (edit: middle of February was the switchover at the border where no other fallback would have been possible)
It sounds to me like this number indicates broad success.
The rough estimate seems to be that only about two per cent of border crossings use an eVisa anyway (British passport holders don't and non-immigrating visitors don't).
Even over summer that would probably only mean maybe 2.5 million border crossings, so the other uses are not at the border — they will instead be employment/landlord/benefit/healthcare checks using the online systems.
So for example, renting a new property, starting a new job, applying for a new benefit, or needing non-emergency healthcare etc.
by dofm - Without the total number of attempts, number of failures and ideally how those failures are distributed, it tells us almost nothingby MarceliusK
- > Do they think just throwing out a large number without anything to compare it to is somehow proving something?
Welcome to the last 20 years of UK public policy communications. Politicians know that people do not question big numbers or have the skills to put them in context.
I remember the May government shouting that "more children go to schools rated good+ by Ofsted than ever before". Me and you would say, well, there's more children alive than ever before, so it's hardly an achievement.
by walthamstow - Look, I'm robbing you but you have to consider that 99.9% of people never get robbed so really it's not something anyone should care about.
- I would say what we do care about is the number of people who were not able to use the system successfully through no fault of their own. Even 0.001% failure rate is too high when is affects more than a few people per year. Especially so when there is no easy way to rectify the problem.by citrin_ru
- I've had issues with this e-visa implementation and was told I could not board flights.
As a someone in tech, I feel this a classic case study of how NOT to roll out a release and develop a solution.
The release was chaotic, none of the airlines staff were trained on how to use this. So they still insisted on the expired cards and then picked on the expiry dates.
Next, almost everyone makes you generate a verification share code in front of them by logging into the e-visa website even if the rules say I can print it out and just use the code. It takes a few minute to get on the website and generate one.
This solution assumed that everyone has access to a smart phone and a good wifi connection to make this work.
Whoever built this didn't test it on the ground.
by zabil - How did they roll it out embassy without having at least some old systemd or a human in the loop backup working?