'My life was ruined by a typo' | Hacker News Reader

'My life was ruined by a typo'

bbc.co.uk

389 pointspetercooper232 comments

I was recently hospitlized. The EMT took my id card and entered my name incorrectly (YUEK as opposed to YEUK). I told the nurse and she said there is nothing she can do about it until I check out the hospital.

I waited until I checked out the hospital, and the nurse took my information down. For my situation, I have to follow up with specialist. The clinic received my medical information and the referral from the hospital. The clinic also got the typo from the hospital, plus the wrong insurance information, as well as the wrong cell phone number. I was amazed at the wrong insurance (hospital gave them my dental insurance, but I received a notice from my health insurance regarding my hospital admission before I visited the clinic). How funny. When I went back to confirm my appointment a few days later, the clinic said no one correct my name (wtf?).

What a joke. While I was getting admitted into the hospital for a few nights, the nurses had to pair up in order to figure out how to enter data into the system. The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in some cases you leave it out. The nurses kept saying "oh I remember you have to do this to get around this issue, oh I think you can ignore this option."

When I met with the nurse practitioner the next day, he couldn't log into his system. I told him I work as a DevOps and he was curious about my role. Then he said he has to call the IT support (managed solution) somewhere in Tennessee and all the vendor would say is try again later). Yeah, after meeting 30 minutes he was able to login.

Here is the thing - typo can ruin life, typo can take away money and time for fixing error, can cause divorce and all sorts of other bad things. Insurance, Social Security, government IDs, Diploma, etc.

There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital to run so inefficient, relying on systems built by incompetent people, product dedicated by policy makers or administrators who really are out of touch with real life (they don't use the system).

You know, I am angry, I want to reform hospital software system.

I've seen all of these situations thousands of times, and I don't even work in a hospital (yet). There has not existed a single EMR I've ever seen that makes any sense whatsoever to the individuals using it. I understand it from the bigger picture, but when things are directly impacting patient care, something needs to be done.

I've likewise been extremely interested in reforming EMRs. It's a precarious field to get into, but I am definitely very interested in pursuing it (perhaps after medical school, though).

I have some ideas, hit me up on my email if you want. Most of the information repeat every time you visit a doctor or a hospital, it doesn't need to be that me.

Part of the issue in healthcare is the "who gets to decide what software to buy".

The culture seems to be that individual departments get to decide their own software, based only on their needs. Interoperability is not on their list.

So radiology buys what they want, admissions buys what they want, and so forth.

Then, the department that has the least clout and direct funding (IT) has to tie it all together.

There are some actual standards like HL7, and some generally accepted non-standards like Orsos, but they are all too loose to solve the problem completely.

Changing a name is hard partially because it is one of the identifiers that tie the mess together.

You 100% hit the nail on the head. It's really, really amazing to see how absolutely disconnected the buyers and the users are.

I was doing training at one hospital where, when they admitted a patient to the floor from the ED, had to print out the entire EMR, because the EMR in the ED and the floor was not compatible. Insanity.

That kind of thing's not so rare though. Hospitals have lots of systems and paper works quite well.

> The culture seems to be that individual departments get to decide their own software, based only on their needs.

I think that's a good thing by itself, various parts of a hospital are incredibly specialized and a one size fits all solution will never work. The alternative is some much higher level of management deciding what everyone buys.

HL7 needs to be scrapped though, it does nothing to achieve inter-operability, it's just there to make hospital managers think that it exists and keep smaller players out of the market.

I probably should have expanded on that a bit. In many cases the individual departments don't even communicate purchase intent to IT.

So things like "optional" integration modules go unpurchased. Contract terms don't address basic integration needs, etc.

Or, a specialized department has a software bake off, finds 3 solutions of equal value to them, and picks one at random. Not knowing it's the one least likely to fit in the larger picture.

Or, crossover software that serves more than one department is purchased by only one, with no discussion.

Basically, for whatever reason, healthcare is just more territorial and segregated than most other companies I've worked in.

The solution, obviously, is for everyone to be a stakeholder and everyone to get a formal veto on the matter.

By all stakeholders I mean:

  * The department needing the software.
  * The department integrating the software (usually IT).
  * The department(s) consuming the data.
  * Any other departments that interact with the above dataflow (IE does it contradict things they are/plan to do?).
  * Whoever signs off on the check.

The formal veto would include written problems with the proposal "this is not a good idea as proposed because Z" and/or "for this to work we need X as a requirement, but it isn't in the proposed spec".

I don't know that there's any particular formula that works. Other environments I've been around are also territorial, just less so.

>There has not existed a single EMR I've ever seen that makes any sense whatsoever to the individuals using it.

There are some with good user feedback for GPs and individual doctors like Elation EMR http://www.softwareadvice.com/medical/elation-emr-profile/

but I haven't seen any people really like for hospitals. Epic is often the best reviewed and a lot of people hate it.

I went to a hackathon for nurses three months ago where they were complaining the hospital systems are crap and asking for fixes and thought oh I'll knock something up and have not got very far - in three months you can't even read what other people have tried really - there are over 300 emr systems listed on softwareadvice.com and I read elsewhere the average hospital uses about 80 separate systems. It's a complicated mess.

I've been working on an idea for something like Dropbox with a viewer to display the different formats, HL7&v2, FHIR etc with basic search as a step up from people having to print stuff out and fax it. Not really an EMR but a tool to view record which could maybe be extended. Dunno if that has legs or if anyone had done it already?

> I've been working on an idea for something like Dropbox with a viewer to display the different formats, HL7&v2, FHIR etc with basic search as a step up from people having to print stuff out and fax it. Not really an EMR but a tool to view record which could maybe be extended. Dunno if that has legs or if anyone had done it already?

Not sure what your intended market is, assuming internal for a hospital, but that doesn't sound like a usable idea to me. How does a typical enduser get the HL7 out to put in your dropbox? Most health systems won't let you just export a HL7 without paying the vendor through the nose for an interface.

There are so many inefficiencies in the typical hospital that there has to be ideas there, unfortunately there's usually some silly political issue or crazy Catch-22 type situation that stops common sense stuff from being able to be implemented.

Yeah I'm not quite sure of those details. I think there is something in HIPAA along the lines "If your practice maintains EHR, you must provide a copy of the medical record in at least one readable electronic format." Also some may want to cooperate - dunno.

There must be some way better than this stuff: https://www.quora.com/How-do-Medical-Records-go-from-institu...

I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered. I signed up with a new ISP a couple of years ago - one of the biggest ISPs in Australia, and during the phone conversation to set up my plan, the operator heard my first name wrong, substituting a 'v' with a 'b'. I didn't realise during the call (because, well, it IS hard to pick up that nuance audibly) until they sent me my sign on links which of course had the typo in my username. Billing information is also all wrong.

When I told them about it, their response was pretty much "Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life. You will have to shut down that account and create a new one", meaning I lose all the benefits I got from the promotional transfer.

So I just put up with a wrong first name whenever I sign on or ask for support from them. I still think it is strange that some second or third level support engineer can't just change that info in the database for me, after the proper authentication. I can't believe that something so easy to create over the phone can be so hard to change over the phone.

Immutability of names may be a perceived benefit and a feature, vs. simply poor UX.

Regulatory, perhaps?

Regulatory is a process, so if there's a process... we can correct name on a typo on our passport, why not in this case? Either the regulatory is really really stupid (we never thought of it!), or the company bought a bad system.

Amazing that in the age of git and Merkle trees it is still hard to change something plus keeping an immutable history of the changes for documentation/accountability purposes. This should be a basic requirement for any sane system nowadays.

It is how most databases, filesystems and distributed systems work, so we know how to build those things, we don't even need merkle trees.

And despite the fact that many real world problems can be better modeled with an append only log and a derived state, somehow 99% of software systems opt to store the derived state only.

Hard to imagine any situation whatever where someone's name would change so that definitely makes a lot of sense.

Marriage.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

Friendly suggestion: The italics didn’t help the sarcasm come across any easier.

So what do you suggest?

A trailing /s is the convention. Failing that, perhaps less subtlety? Text is poor at conveying tone.

Why don't I put a flashing red sign that says I am joking while I'm at it?

It's up to you; you're the one controlling the chances people will get the joke in your comment :P.

At this point I'm resigned to people taking even the most improbable interpretation of whatever I say if it gives them an opportunity to call me an idiot.

Much to my occasional regret, the principle of charity is far more often invoked here than adhered to.

Unfortunately, HN doesn't support blink tags.

Where can I make a feature request?

I thought it was pretty obvious and the italics made it more so.

People can be very wrong on the internet so it's hard to tell sometimes.

Also, Poe's Law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Don't use sarcasm on the internet (or at least not on HN), it usually ends with a bunch of responses which didn't pick up on the fact that it was sarcasm which lowers the quality of the conversation. Remember also that many HN readers are not native english speakers and are unlikely to pick up on the true meaning of a comment if you're not really clear. Even suffixes like /s are not clear IMHO (at least, I didn't know what it meant until I saw the other comment here suggesting it and I AM a native english speaker).

Jokes and such are frowned upon on HN and many people probably see sarcasm the same way, so you risk getting downvoted too.

In order to avoid adding noise (in the form of responses from people who didn't realise you weren't serious), I would suggest to refrain from sarcastic comments.

I will definitely cease using a useful rhetorical device in case a handful of people might misunderstand me.

That may be right in your culture but it is not universally true. For example in Taiwan the law allow one to change name twice[1]. I met someone whose mother was actively searching for a more lucky name before graduation (thus reducing expected paperwork).

In France too where there is some provisions to change its name. Someone in my town who was running a business did it. His family name was Hittler, which has you guess was quite heavy to handle, and change it for Hittier.

[1] http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2010/05/30/2...

It's actually not right in my culture at all; it's blindingly obviously wrong.

Of course there are a huge number of reasons why you would want to have the ability. I don't agree with the system requirements, I was trying to figure out why it may be that way.

What are you talking about?

Women usually take the surname of their husbands in western countries.

Edit: oh, sorry I thought you were being serious.

>lose all the benefits from promotional transfer

Were you not able to direct the person on the phone to recreate the account for you, and to include all benefits, and then some for the inconvenience?

I've always gotten what I wanted from US ISPs. Say what you want about their evil business practices, but it sure is easy to get whatever weird shit you're asking for with simple "ok, you can't give me this? Please escalate to your manager / please transfer me to retention."

I am curious your life experience that makes you assume fixing the errors is doable with a phone operator. I'm from California, and my assumption is no, the person on the phone wouldn't be able to recreate the account with benefits/promotion.

In my experience with phone staff in any large org, once an error is committed, it's generally a one-way street. Attempts to get the person to fix things lead to worse and worse problems, more damage, more problems.

My experience with T-Mobile seems typical: simply wanted to take monthly plans of myself and wife (both with TMbl) and combine into a single family plan. By the time the ordeal was done, I'd forfeit the remainder of my month's payment into the plan, had no functional phone, was being bounced between two different departments neither of whom could fix it, and both of whom insisted the other was the one to fix it.

In the end I just let the money go and moved my phone number onto a competitor. I have no faith the competitor will fare better if some error is made.

Anecdotally, I've had bad experiences with T-Mobile (similar issues with customer service reps messing up a plan transfer, and being unable to fix it), but I've found Verizon reps to be more able/willing to fix things.

Funny story:

My ISP actually closed my contract earlier this year. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from someone about "my cancellation". After some puzzled minutes the operator figured out that someone else with the same name cancelled their account but didn't state a customer ID or his address, so they went on to cancel mine. The operator told me he'd correct this, but a month later my internet access went down all the same.

After some back and forth to get it back up, the next supporter I had on the line said that they actually tried to cancel the cancellation, "but it was already too late for that" and the system didn't let them. That was surely one of the bigger WTF moments I had with support so far.

If the typo was in the name and you cancel because of it, then you should just tell them this isn't your name and thus the contract is invalid. If they claim it is, then tell them if that's the case, why do you refuse to correct an obvious error? And until they do, the contract is null and void.

> In the end I just let the money go

So, I've had pretty much your exact experience with T-Mobile, but I never did this. I just called and called and called. I'd stay on hold while I lifted or was driving around, it was no skin off my bones. When I had a person, I'd always repeat "this is exactly I want in no uncertain terms. Do you understand? Can you get me this? No? Please transfer me to your supervisor / retention." For some reason, they'd always transfer me up. I've almost never heard "no" to a transfer request. I've never not gotten what I wanted.

So maybe I'm just waaaaay more annoyingly persistent? :P I probably have notes raging at my dickishness on every account I hold.

Might be as simple as some genius designed database using usernames instead of ids for relations in tables.

Trust me - I seen things like this before (with huge companies where dev soft costed millions of USD). Probably same story here.

Or worse, someone designed the database correctly, but then added a (hidden to the user) unique identifier that's normalized in some way to make it short, unique, and limited on allowed characters.

Often /that/ doesn't get updated when they update the username, leading to mass confusing since external tooling will use that as the subject identifier instead of actually being given a proper internal identifier. (Offhand I can't recall if any particular standard happens to require that such an identifier start with a letter; at least one probably does.)

And this is why you should always use synthetic keys.

That reminds me of American Express. My firstname is Christopher, but it seems parts of their system have a very short length limit. So when they send letters and emails, they call me "Christophe". It is spelled correctly on my card, though

A high school classmate's name was Joseph Longname, which the attendance system displayed as "LONGNAME, Jose".

I'm also a Christopher. For the longest time, in the upper right corner of Amazon.com, there was a sign-out link that said, "Not Christ...?"

I've seen that too, "Welcome Christ..."

Heh, mine has always just been my first initial. "Welcome, R!". Also when I buy Kindle ebooks the default option is "Send to R's Kindle".

I have no idea where this info is stored as the details on my billing / shipping addresses have my correct (full) name.

Windows had this length limit all the up to and including Win8, my work login which included a 3 letter domain and backslash was too long for Windows, so they cut the last 3 letters of my name off so that I could be logged in. It's made logging in to to some work services difficult, I'm not always sure they are asking for full ID like email address, or the truncated version.

10 isn't much better if you're using a Microsoft account. My email follows the format "fmlastname@gmail.com" (and is coincidentally the exact same character count). My user directory gets shortened to "fmlas".

I also have a truncated first name thanks to Virgin Media in the UK. Mind you, the same bozos also limit password length to 8 or 10 characters, so they are generally hopeless.

I think that for letters it is to avoid names that overflow name tags

So it's better for them to send a mail to LongName LastName than to LongNameSomethingHere where the last name fell outside of the tag

And as your card shows, the full name is on the DB

Except you would expect that it's basic design to account for both very short names ("Li Pho") and reasonably long names ("Christopher Tannenbaum-Greenspan").

If your name tags don't work with slightly longer names, your name tags are broken, not the names.

OTOH these days I'm happy when receiving mail from the US if the address wasn't mutilated by converting Unicode to ASCII or using HTML escapes. Especially when ordering things to my company address, which has an ampersand in the company name and an umlaut in the city.

Your name tags are a function of the space allocated for the address on a letter (which is printed in bulk)

They're doing exactly what you mentioned in the first line, so big names are identifiable on letters with size limits for the address

Same thing for Hacker News - you can't change your username and keep your karma. I guess the designers just don't design for that. https://www.quora.com/Why-cant-I-change-my-username-on-Hacke...

I wouldn't want an HN user to be able to ditch her reputation while keeping her karma.

Perhaps not in that case, but regardless, this is the kind of thing should be designed in deliberately as a feature (with an option to bypass it under special circumstances), rather than some accidental/arbitrary technical limitation just because the dev team didn't bother to implement the ability to update the field for whatever reason.

Given your profile shows all your comments and submissions (and would likely still show them if only the name was changed), I'm not sure what the big deal is here.

You learn to recognize the names of active users that post in threads you're interested in. I shouldn't be able to ditch that recognition but keep my karma, and you shouldn't have to look through my history to see if I'm someone you previously recognized.

Eh, maybe I don't see it. I mean, I use a lot of internet forums running scripts like XenForo and IPB, and those let you change your 'display name' whenever the hell you like. Yet I still recognise everyone perfectly fine. There are people on my forums that change their display name, avatar and signature on a weekly basis. I still recognise them just fine.

Same works on Discord too. There you can change your name whenever the hell you feel like it. Again, doesn't stop most people recognising you.

The difference is that changing your username creates a completely new identity. It's not just correcting a typo.

The point is that it doesn't need to be that way. Why can't username be an editable field?

Because it creates a new identity. The only way anyone on HN can recognize you is your username. Changing it at will would allow anyone to shed their identity on HN at any time while keeping the karma and account privileges they've accumulated.

Perhaps that is something that's worth allowing, and iirc dang et al have made some vague statements that they may be interested in allowing that at some point, but the ramifications would be substantial. This isn't something that should be taken lightly, nor should it be expected/implicit that a social site will accommodate new identities on-demand.

> Because it creates a new identity.

And?

My anonymous (to everyone but the NSA) username will be a different anonymous username. The karma/privileges are entirely dependent on the quality of my posts, not some inherent value of the username. Also the posts that generated that karma would still be there under the new username.

I'm not too concerned either way , but I don't see why that would be a big deal.

Again, identity. You're not anonymous here, you're pseudonymous. Believe it or not, but I do actually recognize a lot of people here by their HN usernames, and I would mind if those were to randomly change all the time.

Anyway, I suspect that if you e-mail HN mods, they could be able to correct your username in no time. But making it any easier than that would, IMO, be harmful to community.

> but I don't see why that would be a big deal.

Yes, you don't. But forum managers have been aware of the issue for years

It's a feature that's very easily abused.

What is the abuse? Changing your meaningless identifier?

Despite your explanation, I still don't see any actual damage. I made up the identifier in the first place. Why should anyone care if I change it? All my posts will remain my posts.

The only thing is that maybe some people who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers? I would have thought they would have problems with people creating multiple new accounts and spamming, not changing the username of existing accounts.

Please explain, I'm honestly curious. Maybe I'm missing something?

> who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers?

Yes, because people will abuse it. If you keep track of violations (especially in moderated forums) it's important to know who did what. And while your primary key on the DB might still be the same, people don't know it, they know your nickname.

Some people would change it every time they comment just for the sake of it

New account creations have some kind of gatekeeping/email verification so it's not as efficient, and admins have ways of checking if this was done with the purpose of evading a ban for example

But if you want to change it because you made a typo or for a similar reason admins usually let you do it (they have to change it for you though)

That can be addressed within the UI. E.g. display the old name next to the new name for a few weeks. After that, just leave a symbol indicating that this username has a change history, which could be presented on click or hover.

HN encourages people to pick their real names as usernames (or a variant of such) for 'real identities', but ignores the reality that people change their names when they get married. Is getting married a completely new identity? Now the username doesn't actually identify the poster by the name people might recognize, if they gained their rep after getting married.

I don't know their policy, but I would guess that if someone has a reasonable explanation like this (or some other small change that doesn't materially affect the ability of readers to recognize the user), the HN team will try to be accommodating. They have always been responsive and gracious to me on the handful of occasions that I've contacted them, although I'm sure my questions were annoying.

I've asked before, they said no.

My guess: the underlying database uses usernames as a primary key and they don't want to update all the comments and submissions just to make a specific user happy. Especially because doing it once would set a precedent for others.

I doubt they'd use the username as the primary key, but either way, I agree the precedent is the biggest concern. They'd get inundated with name change requests if they started making exceptions for people.

HN encourages people to pick their real names as usernames

From what I've observed, HN encourages people to use consistent identities, not necessarily real names. 'dang has mentioned a number of times that pseudonymity is fine.

Workaround: Don't change your name when you get married. Less work, it makes genealogy research for your descendants easier. And the only downside is people guess the wrong name because of all the patriarchy.

There are always exceptions. I have a friend who had a bad history with her family, so she really wanted to take her husband's name. But I still believe that keeping your pre-married name is usually the best choice if you don't want your identity to be lost or subsumed.

That's incredibly dismissive of couples who decide to pick a shared family name. There are more downsides than people guessing wrong, but that's beside the point. You're basically arguing that the only reason people do it is patriarchy and giving up your native name is giving up your identity as if it were a form of oppression.

Eh, people choose oppression for themselves all the time. We have a right to determine our own identity, for sure. It's just unfortunate that people just happen to make the choice that supports patriarchy the most often, that you wonder what forces are really in play.

A brand new HN account is worthless, so typos don't matter because you can make a new account and redo your single post.

Changing a name that was correct is a totally different problem from a typo at ingest.

If this is the type of error you want to minimize, NATO phonetic alphabet [1] is worth learning. (Amateur radio is a good place to practice, though I'll admit I'm a bit rusty.)

I actually kinda enjoy these minor discrepancies, because it exposes who has sold my customer data and to whom -- though I've never gone as far as giving anyone intentionally incorrect data with this purpose in mind. I remember my parents also being amused with these copied mistakes, and with greater frequency. Seems plausible that the error rate goes down when most of my utilities/accounts were self-created online instead of typed in from a handwritten form or during an onboarding phonecall.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

Ironically (being a former pilot), I DID use radio phonetics when spelling out my name - I just wish ALL call centre staff used the same baseline too.. :)

Me: That's ABCD as in Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta. Them: So, that's Alpha, Burger, er, Charles, Diamond??

That's one of my pet peeves... There's an official phonetic letter system, why don't they train these people in call centers to use them?

My last job used radios for site communication, and everyone had to use the NATO phonetics, and was provided with a cheat sheet for learning. You'd think that would be something they could tape up in every cube in a call center...

Or better yet, upgrade our phone system to bleeding-edge high-fidelity CD quality with 44.1khz and 16 bits.

It's not a natural law that phone audio quality has to suck.

Even with a phonetic alphabet, you can still run into issues. Some people are just surprised when they hear it. "P for Papa" / "was that P as in Patrick?" Sigh... I'm seriously considering changing my surname to something that's trivial to understand in English.

Man, my surname is a basic color and people still get it wrong sometimes.

Well, #00ff00 could be difficult to dictate over the phone... :-)

Sorry, Gray with an "a" or Grey with an "e"?

(Teachers knew in high school for three or four years never quite figured out whether my surname was the Danish or the German variation of a common patronymic. I feel your pain.)

Try living with almand instead of almond.

My surname is Fox.

Its very hard for CS agents to spell correctly.

Hello Mr. Focks.

I once gave a phone number over the phone using Nine-er for 9. Operator thought I said "Nine Oh" (or 90).

"B for bacon and eggies. E for the egg in bacon and eggies. A..."

I once used NATO phonetics over the phone with a Blizzard representative, there's a Z in my name, so they guy called me Mr. Zulu since then.

I had a similar experience with an Australian ISP, although not with a typo.

When I moved house I had to make up a new username/email. They couldn't just change my address, they had to create a whole new account.

I'm looking at you, TPG. Truth be told, they have been a fine ISP, other than that WTF.

Similarly, my job lets me claim a part of the monthly internet bill as a work-from-home expense, but my ISP cost me 6 months expenses because they couldn't transfer the account to my name from my SO's. Same last name, same address. To start a new account they wanted a sign up fee equal to about 3 months of said expenses. Employer would not accept a copy of the bill in my SO's name (same surname, same address) citing tax fraud, which surely would have been our own breach of law if we both had been making the same claim on the same bill.

Bureaucracy won again. Until we got a different operator at the ISP who worked out that they could add my name as if the account was landlord & renter scenario, so there could be an owner and another who was responsible for payment.

My friend was trying to get an account with his ISP to his apartment. The ISP got data from the landlord, my friend noticed that he was in fact getting internet for another apartment completely.

He first told them to cancel the deal, then tried again, same wrong apartment number registered, he called the ISP and the response was, "yes we know it's the wrong one, but we've mapped that apartment to your apartment on our side, so all is good."

How would it play out legally if I sign a contract where delivery is to be made to X but I want it to Y, but they tell me to sign it anyways because they can fix it in their end. I mean, what I signed would not be what I wanted, how so I prove this if my wish is not fulfilled?

> Oh, too bad - once that username is created, it is there for life.

So what happens if you change your name, e.g. because of marriage?

Twitch.

> I am amazed that a lot of systems don't allow changing of information once entered.

For systems where cell-level change logging on the order of years is a requirement, this doesn't surprise me. Many providers would rather prohibit edits rather than risk having to greatly expand logging requirements.

Typos in ID codes are usually prevented by appending a checksum. But what about reforming names? We could append a checksum to them also :)

In some European countries, you could already just ask the user to insert his national ID smartcard into a reader and get a digital file with basic info (essentially what's printed on the front).

No reason you couldn't do something similar with licenses.

It is interesting to me that we don't have a national ID card in the USA. I don't appreciate strong arguments against them. Like on this list by the ACLU...

https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards

>> Reason #2: An ID card system will lead to a slippery slope of surveillance and monitoring of citizens.

I think "they" are already monitoring everything I do. Maybe this would have mattered more to me before I had a smartphone, passport, bank account, social media accounts, etc. If I wanted to live off the grid with no electricity & only using trained ninja squirrels to buy things with unmarked bills on my behalf, I would certainly not want to be forced to into having a national ID card. I'm not advocating monitoring. I just feel a national ID card wouldn't be much different than my current situation.

Especially when the SSN is used as a stand-in but has no security whatever.

I don't see most of these issues in European countries with ID cards. Anyway, you need to have a way to identify citizen for practical purpose anyway, if it's not an ID card, it's going to be something less reliable and prone to errors.

Yes, this cyclically comes up on HN and it's 100% American culture dependent.

There's no reason why ID cards would lead to more or less secure data collection than today.

Names need check digits, then?

"Hi I'm Travis Johnson42"

I got sued by a hospital because their systems couldn't distinguish between the dependent version of me (from my Parents health insurance 3 years prior) and the current version of me. (I share a name with my dad and had the same insurance plan)

They kept billing my defunct account, despite dozens of attempts to correct.

Counter sue for fraud.

They ultimately settled it and fixed it when I got my State Senator involved.

My small claims suit for my expenses was dismissed due to a binding arbritration clause. As a then 22 year old, that was about all I had the time to do.

This is surprising to me. At the hospital where I worked, everybody was assigned a medical record number. It was possible (in fact, I saw it done several times) to change the name of the patient, and even combine multiple patients into one (useful for drug seeking patients who claim to be multiple people on different visits). A common case was with newborn/pediatric patients. A newborn was listed with a system name of <Mother's last name>/Baby <Boy|Girl> with an optional A/B/C for twins/triplets/etc. If that patient was later admitted in follow-up (for example heart defects which required multiple surgeries over time to fix) their actual name was then used.

I guess the issue is that the future is not evenly distributed.

Out of curiousity, do you remember the vendor of the software at the hospital you worked?

35 years ago my name was entered incorrectly into a data base. I'm still getting mail with the incorrect spelling.

> I want to reform hospital software system.

Join the club:

https://angel.co/electronic-health-records-1

http://www.builtinnyc.com/blog/healthcare-startups-nyc

I am acutely familiar with hospital systems and in every one I have seen so far, you can modify demographic information.

Maybe the nurses didn't know how to do it, but it can definitely be done.

Not saying there aren't other glaring inefficiencies (outsourced useless IT helpdesk especially), but changing patient demographic info is not one of them.

As a UX guy "Maybe the nurses didn't know how to do it, but it can definitely be done." is absolutely no excuse.

It still screams 'poor design' and 'couldn't be bothered to test'.

As a UX guy, you would surely vomit or run away if you saw most of the health programs I've seen.

Please help fix them, there are so many examples of shocking UI in health. So many of them look like first year uni projects by middling level programmers.

Also, sometimes only particular people (probably Admissions Dept) would have the permissions/knowledge necessary to edit that info. So maybe the nurses couldn't fix it but surely there would have been people in that hospital that could have fixed an incorrect name, had they been notified. They were probably who made the error in the first place!

I had to stop handwriting the letter "u" in my name with a tail because it was being entered as an "n" too often.

Fancy is for the places they don't ask you to print for clarity... (which is everywhere except the 'signature' area).

The program looks like Excel except it isn't. In some cases you have to enter the data in a different column, in some cases you have to enter 0, in some cases you leave it out.

It could be SAP or some other old fashion ERP system. Or some old Java/C# application built for the hospital. These have usually in common a very crude old fashion UI and things like changing a record is overly complex.

Often also the workers don't know the program good enough. So they only know the standard use case. If you fall out of the 95% use case, you get into a lot of trouble because of their inexperience with the application. If they try new things put to mitigate the issue, it's better to ask for their boss or things can go worse.

Yes this sounds like SAP with insufficient training.

Clients have been asking for years to get browser-like functionalities, getting a form with only the fields they really need and nothing that can be determined automatically. But SAP has been improving for years, and now they are offering jQuery in disguise https://sapui5.hana.ondemand.com/

It's hard to blame bad UI on SAP when they are pushing for the opposite.

>There is no reason, in my funny but pretty frustrating anecdote, for hospital to run so inefficient,

There is one reason why it is so. When they make such error, you must take effort, time and money to fix it. So if hospital can spend "their" money on system that can fix and/or catch such errors (+staff that can efficiently use it), but on the other hand they can just "outscore" it to you, guess what choice they will make?

http://health.gnu.org/

just realize that the type or wrong cell phone number could have been an extra 0 in you medicine dosage that have killed patients before. The leading cause of death in hospitals is error not any actual disease. Doctors amputate the wrong limb, give the wrong medication, all sort of stupid mistakes that should be easily preventable

Classic Police.

Get the IP wrong. IP maps to one person's account. Arrest a different person at the same address. When asked, don't admit the reason for release until forced to do so many years later.

Mistakes happen, but this is brilliantly compounding incompetence.

Imagine a plane crash that goes: the left engine wasn't maintained, the pilot was drunk, and there was less fuel than there should have been.

If you look back at the event, you don't conclude that those things followed from each other. They're probably independent.

What that means is that less egregious failures are probably happening all the time.

In this case, it probably means that this police department routinely arrests the wrong person after finding out which account belongs to a suspect. It also means that they routinely deny information of their wrongdoing. And it probably unsurprisingly means that they typo things all the time.

I wonder what actions they took. It's not about firing people. It's about making sure policy doesn't lead to poor outcomes.

If they have to type the IP address by hand then he was probably not the only person who did time for a typo... Thank goodness they have ipv4 addresses, with ipv6 you would get more typos.

Overwhelming chances are that if you mistype an ipv6 address, it points to somewhere nonexistent. That sounds preferable.

I read this bracing myself for the usual kafkaesque story of somebody jailed for months or years on a groundless charge, going through endless sloppy trials, hysterical sentencing, and the predictable tragic consequences on career, relations, together with the trauma and abuse of being jailed.

But this case happened in the UK, not the US. After he was "arrested" this man appears to have spent a grand total of three weeks "living with his mother". After these three weeks, his laptop was returned to him by the police and he had been cleared from all charges. However, he laments that "because of what happened" he's suffering of PTSD and he's unable to go back to work. That during the three weeks he was away, his younger son would cry. That the £60k compensation he received from the police for the mistake it's not enough, since he "didn't even get two and a half years' wage". That he hasn't had his day in court, and he needs the world to know he's not a paedophile. The events happened six years ago.

I might be underestimating the impact on one's life and mental health of this kind of things. But this story smells of trying to get a better deal or of some deeper personal issue.

When you work with troubled youth, an accusation of child pornography is almost as bad as it can possibly be. Since the police didn't give him an explanation for the mistake up front, I'm sure he lived under a cloud of suspicion after that, hence the concern about being alone with young women.

For 3 weeks everyone around you assumes you're guilty. How do you prove the absence of pornography in your life when the police have all your equipment?

Yes, it could have been much worse. No, I'm not shocked that it was devastating.

(Update: forgot to add, I imagine there's a very real fear during those three weeks that you'll be permanently separated from your children.)

Ok, but the police cleared him of the charges. Then he hired a solicitor and thanks to him the mistake was made clear, and he got a totally justified, and very handsome, compensation. One would think that this should be enough to put at rest any possible suspicion. Three weeks are not such a long ordeal, especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.

What happened to him was terrible, but I tend to agree that he received adequate compensation. My armchair judge verdict: calls for further compensation should be strongly discouraged, but the lesson this story teaches of how devastating a sex crime charge, particularly a child sex crime charge, is, should be spread far and wide, and anyone who goes through ordeal similar to Nigel's should be similarly exonerated in a very public way.

I agree with no further direct monetary compensation... but I can see how this would literally 'break' him.

He is no longer the calm, re-assuring, blissfully ignorant individual he once was.

He should probably be re-evaluated for current aptitude and skills, receive refining education towards a promising related career field and live a reborn life. I don't know, does the UK actually do the right thing (unlike the US)?

He may subconsciously sabotage his own rehabilitation because doing so could net him even more compensation. I strongly believe that now that he's received compensation and full public exoneration, he should be expected to return to supporting himself. There are a lot of people who are in much more difficult circumstances than him. We cannot provide unlimited aid to every person who's been wronged or suffered trauma. It has to be proportionate and within society's ability ability to support.

If you pay any attention to the news, there's been numerous cases where innocent people spent years or even decades in jails before they were found not guilty.

I guess this is related to the thread where a bunch of HN users said they stopped reading news altogether.

> One would think that this should be enough to put at rest any possible suspicion.

But, it wasn't. People were still suspicious - and in his working with kids it doesn't make sense to "take a risk" on an allegedly exonerated pedophile.

What should happen and what did happen as a result of his three weeks of suspicion was starkly different. Certainly we don't need to blame anything or anyone in particular to understand how awful something like false charges can be regardless of how awful they ought to be.

> Three weeks are not such a long ordeal, especially when you know from the start it's all a mistake.

He didn't know it was three weeks at the time, he didn't know if he would be able to exonerate himself or if he was being framed or whatever - it's not like he's just sleeping it off when law enforcement already got one thing wrong enough to falsely arrest.

> People were still suspicious - and in his working with kids it doesn't make sense to "take a risk" on an allegedly exonerated pedophile.

England has a "Disclosure and Barring Service". People who work with children and vulnerable people will apply for a DBS. It will return information about arrests and convictions. Some people need an enhanced DBS, and that will sometimes return police intel.

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-b...

This is likely to affect his employment for some jobs until it got fixed.

> Ok, but the police cleared him of the charges.

To be clear -- the police exonerating him took three years ("5 April 2014 he received a letter from Hertfordshire constabulary"), which is rather a long ordeal, especially because he had no idea why he was targeted until then.

The "three weeks" just refers to how long it took for the police's forensics people to search his laptop and find nothing. After those three weeks the police was like "oh we can't find proof of those illegal images on your laptop, welp, gotta let you go", not "we typoed an IP address and kicked down the wrong door, you are completely innocent and utterly unconnected to this".

> For 3 weeks everyone around you assumes you're guilty

It sounds like it was worse than that. After 3 weeks they gave him back his laptop because they found no evidence on it, and stopped pursuing charges.

But the police never explained why they suspected him, nor did they uncover their own mistake regarding the IP address.

So, at the end of the 3 weeks he went from being actively under investigation for child pornography to no longer under active investigation for child pornography.

That's a small step forward - now not-quite-everyone around you assumes you're guilty.

It took years before his solicitor uncovered the error and there was enough information available to demonstrate that he should never have been a suspect and it was all due to a police screw-up.

Probably way worse.

I imagine it hit the news, and even if they didn't name him, //EVERYONE// that KNEW him then KNEW it was him.

Then, he shows up, as you say, no longer being actively investigated for X, but still not cleared of X.

Public Perception (most probably): 'Likely guilty, but they couldn't nail the bastard.'

Compounded by the other details everywhere else in the thread.

And even if cleared, everyone still thinks he's guilty.

Ask a random person on the Left about the Duke lacrosse players. Even though they were exonerated... not just found not guilty... and the prosecutor was put in jail, and the accuser is now in jail, most progressives still think something happened, and their lives are ruined.

> Lang was bailed, but under strict and devastating conditions. Social services had visited his partner at home while he was being interviewed to conduct a “safeguarding assessment”, and it was decided he could not live at the family home, visit his son there, or have any unsupervised contact with his son anywhere. “Not being able to look after my kid, it was heartbreaking,” Lang recalled.

> He also has a grandson who was 14 months old at the time and was due to undergo a major brain operation while Lang was on bail. He said he felt unable to help the boy’s mother due to the strict conditions. “It was a really fucked-up time. I couldn’t give them any support.”

> He was working as a drug recovery worker helping troubled teenagers at the time, and when he informed his employer what had happened, he was suspended immediately.

> Their son, meanwhile, suddenly saw his father as unreliable, Lang said, and would cry, not understanding why he had disappeared and couldn’t come home for three weeks. > He remembers his young son asking: “‘Why can’t Daddy come home?’ That brought me to fucking tears. I’m welling up now thinking about it.”

> Today, neither he nor his partner is working. Lang is effectively a full-time carer for his disabled mother, and in the years since his arrest his partner developed ME, something they blame on the stress caused by the whole ordeal.

He got his career torpedoed, got publicly accused of being a pedo, and had relationships with multiple members of one's family get fucked up, and his father died before he got exonerated.

Career and family and relationships with friends -- having all those sources of meaning in your life get instantly eviscerated (in a way that was impossible to predict and that is very difficult to find sympathy from others for) seems like it would induce pretty deep dysfunction in most anyone.

He spent a total of four hours in a police station. Four hours. Then three weeks (three weeks!) at his mother's waiting for his laptop to be scanned. And that's it. Daddy can't come home because he's on a holiday, or on a business trip, and he'll send you a postcard, and now off to bed. Employer, same thing: "horrible mistake, accusing me of something I haven't done, in three weeks I'll come clear" and that's exactly what happens, with excuses from the police. If this has impacts on your work, then you don't have great colleagues for sure.

He didn't know it would be three weeks.

Companies that tolerate an employee not showing up for three weeks, and especially because they're under suspicion for child pornography, are exceptionally rare!

Look at it from the flip side... nobody knows that this man is innocent. So while the law might be innocent until proven guilty, usually acquaintances aren't so kind. "Where there's smoke there's fire" and all that.

I don't know anything about your life so I won't judge but I had a shiver go down my spine when I read this story.

Yeah - it might not have affected me as much as this guy. Or maybe not.

I know people who've been punched and kicked in a fight and couldn't leave the house for 6 months from anxiety.

And I know people that think a fight down the pub is a good night out.

I don't know anything about your life but do you know anything about his?

Nope, I don't. But when I think that there's people living through the horror of wars, and then read about somebody who can't cope with three weeks at his mother's and his child crying because daddy isn't at home, and then, quite openly, asking for more money- well, I get some sort of bad reaction. Ah, and just to get some more downvotes- this guy is supposed to be helping troubled teenagers. But he doesn't seem to be able to cope with three weeks of fear and uncertainty.

Presumably the biggest damage is being made a social pariah because everyone you know thinks you're distributing child pornography.

Journalists also have a tendency to report on these things causing all kinds of damage and then rarely retract their statements. Even if they do retract them, the damage is done. The guy will always be known as a pedo by people who read the story, regardless of how untrue it was.

Even if they posted a front page story saying you were exonerated that cloud would probably hang over you forever.

Public support is a factor. No one tells the wrongly accused that they are heroes and thanks them for their enduring fight against injustice. Obversely, I know people who wear their military uniforms off duty when they're feeling under-appreciated and want a little recognition, most of whom have never been involved in combat. I've known guys who came home from Camp Buehring who described their biggest problem having to choose between steak and lobster each night. Do you think they correct anyone who thanks them for their service?

Control is another. Becoming known as a pedo because the police wrongly arrested you on suspicion of it is pretty out of one's hands. You don't just say, "Sorry, you have the wrong person, I'll be leaving now" and walk out, and you'd be lucky if the news spends the weeks following report of your exculpation saying anything similar to "where there's smoke there's not necessarily fire". And you could be locked up through your trial and beyond if the system fails and your family turn their backs on you. No one knows for certain how long something like that can last.

If you were in that circumstance, you'd have to weigh the very real possibility of never getting to watch your child grow up or play a part in their life, of having them suffer outside of their control because of you, and the possibility that they will grow up to have doubts about you because of how others responded. You might never get to know your child, and they might never get to know you, and they might decide they don't want to.

And troubled teens need someone they can trust and rely on, not someone they think is only trying to help them because they're secretly trying to take advantage. Think of all the people this guy might have helped or interacted with who suddenly got accused of being molested or having sex for help by other kids. Hurting the people you want to help is pretty close to a worst nightmare for someone in that position. Coming up with these points was a pretty basic exercise in empathy.

Stop posting dude. Just stop.

>there's people living through the horror of wars,

You serious? That's the "there's children starving in africa" argument.

You keep saying "three weeks" but the actual process of exoneration took years -- not "three weeks". It would behoove you to look up the details of this case before making grandiose claims about this case.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewchampion/this-mans-life-was-... for actual details about the timeframe has more details btw.

> He got his career torpedoed

It sounds like mental health issues torpedoed his career. He "felt unable to go back...[to] work" (emphasis mine) because he "became fearful of working with young females." This made him "paranoid". Nowhere does it say he was fired.

Mental health issues are serious, and I do not want to minimize the suffering Mr. Lang subjectively felt. While the police bear some blame for that suffering, they seem to have corrected their error as quickly as reasonably possible, exonerated him and paid him restitution. I think the restitution should have been higher, but that's a separate issue from saying they "torpedoed" his career.

That's not really as simple as mental health issues. False allegations of sexual misconduct are a significant risk for any man who works with underage females on a routine basis.

If a hostile addict (which, let's be honest, are probably not rare, since these programs are frequently court-ordered) learns that an employee's background may make him more susceptible to such allegations (e.g., a past accusation of pedophilia, justified or not), it could spell a lot of trouble for everyone involved.

If it becomes widely known, just the PR cost ("this rehab center employs pedophiles! Use ours instead!") would make his return infeasible. So while he wouldn't be technically barred from returning to work, practically speaking, it makes sense that he wouldn't be able to go back.

I agree, however, that the story appears to be a play to exert public pressure on the police force, perhaps to offer a larger compensatory package or settlement (to be honest, I didn't read far enough into the article to see if there is an active lawsuit ongoing).

The core issue is that our justice systems badly need some type of modernization. I understand how scary that is, but I think it's approaching time that we face the music. The world has changed at an unprecedented rate over the last 100 years, and it's time to shed some of the baggage we've carried over from centuries past.

While I agree I was expecting a more visual story from the synopsis, I strongly recommend the movie "The Hunt" with Mads Mikkelsen to get a feeling of what he may have gone through. It's a really good movie.

It's actually one of my favourite movies from the last few years. But that story is very different, at least because he's accused by the children themselves, whose parents happen to also be his closest friends. Anyway, really excellent movie.

I think you're severely undercutting the affect it can have when one is accused of being a pedophile. It can ruin your entire life even if it's discovered to not be true immediately. Once it's out there it's pretty much impossible to remove.

>can ruin your entire life

Thanks to the society that tears everyone suspected and doesn't mind reporting or judging on minor crime feelings. I see what Ubik tries to bring to this thread, but noticed years ago that cultural differences effectively disallow that sort of communication.

In simple words: Social justice over real justice. It is $subj's society that is wrong, not police officers.

Police CAN do mistakes and WILL do them and they can take LONG time to fix. That's because police does actually a lot of work instead of doing nothing. It is okay to spend few time in PD for everyone. It is okay to be suspected, because every crime has several suspects, filtered out by evidence collected over time. It is also okay to take a compensation for your time and inconvenience.

What is NOT okay: to live in stupid society that does ruin your life when you're charged.

Single data point, but pretty common in my country: I was locked for 4+ hours so many times in my life that I cannot remember the exact count. I was suspected at least in stealing things, threatening and robbing people (well, I did things, but nothing of that). Sometime you get half-day off because an investigator asks you out on a date. It is no big deal at work and many relatives make jokes on that.

But for $subj people I am probably a monster. Their laws and principles exist in theory, but do not actually work because of themselves, not because of database records.

Yes, you are underestimating the ravages that such calamity can do to one's life.

>That during the three weeks he was away, his younger son would cry.

You seem to conflate the story as retold by the journalist, with highlighted parts and observations for flourishing, with the impact such an allegation had on the person, his friendships, public standing, work relations, etc.

>I might be underestimating the impact on one's life and mental health of this kind of things. But this story smells of trying to get a better deal or of some deeper personal issue.

I find it hard to believe that if this happened to you, you wouldn't too have screamed bloody murder.

You don't understand. He was arrested for being a pedophile. All of his friends and family will know about it. Everywhere he goes people will be looking for suspicious behavior involving children.

Forever.

He had a career working with children that he had to abandon. If a single child or parent made a false accusation, it could confirm everyone's suspicions about him and his life would be over. His neighbors would demand he move. His wife would probably leave him. He would probably never see his kids again. Every day he has to live with knowing he did nothing wrong but that other people have the ability to destroy his life on a whim at any moment.

Sorry, but I think you're commenting the wrong story. He didn't have to leave his job, he chose to leave. While the idea of peadophilia might linger in the minds of his colleagues and acquaintances for some time, the mistake is clear enough for everybody to shake it off immediately. He got cleared of any charge, then it was even made clear that the mistake was due to a typo. What makes him different from any other random person walking the streets? Absolutely nothing. Get over it.

Then you wouldn't mind swapping places with him? I sure as hell would prefer to be the "any other random person".

I was supposed to start a one-year contract with a large financial company in London - went there for two weeks, just got back. They asked me if I had any problems ("any civil suit" or something like that) and I told them "yes, I had a copyright violation 15 years ago, it got settled out of court". That led to an immense scandal and my agency is still trying to convince them to accept me anyway, because their immediate reaction was "no hire". This despite the fact that they are desperate for people (seriously, they want eight more people besides me and can't find them) and despite the fact that everyone agrees that my experience is perfect for the role.

The reason they're so stubborn about it? "What if something happens and I am asked why I accepted him despite knowing he had problems? Then I'll lose my job". People love CYA.

> He didn't have to leave his job,

https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/disclosure-and-b...

> The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) helps employers make safer recruitment decisions and prevent unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups, including children. It replaces the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) and Independent Safeguarding Authority (ISA).

[...]

> Referrals are made to us when an employer or organisation, eg a regulatory body, has concerns that a person has caused harm, or poses a future risk of harm to vulnerable groups, including children.

> In these circumstances the employer must make a referral to the DBS, though this is not obligatory for regulatory bodies.

If he had an enhanced check:

> Standard (£26)

> This checks for spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and final warnings.

> Enhanced (£44)

> This includes the same as the standard check plus any additional information held by local police that’s reasonably considered relevant to the role being applied for.

It's likely this arrest would have prevented him from working with vulnerable young people.

The standard of life and suffering doesn't revolve around that of United States, just because you have an unimaginably fucked up _justice_ system doesn't discounts the struggle and suffering of others.

You are underestimating it. Being accused of something by authorities and not being believed is dreadful, even when you KNOW you are innocent. They double down on you even though they caused all the problems and are responsible.

This is currently happening to me with the Australian mental health system. For the last 10 months they have lied in writing and verbally, denied violating written policies and state law, and brought me to a point where I very nearly committed suicide. They continue to do so.

I have now been trying to get basic justice for 10 months. I finally might have them admit what they did to me was wrong. Once I have them admit it, I'm going to take the fuckers to court. The lawyers can keep all the money for all I care, my goal is to crap all over them and give them a taste of what it feels like to be powerless and humiliated.

My anger is enormous, and after they've said sorry I will make them say sorry for at least 10 months after. And I will make the fuckers pay.

Well whatever the exact impact it can't be that the police can't be bothered to validate the main evidence trail. Or not type shit by hand that is electronic in nature in the first place for crying out loud! There's just no excuse for such mistakes. What if they raid a wrong house because someone put in the GPS coordinates wrong!?

Reminds me of Tuttle/Buttle mishap in Terry Gilliam's Brazil movie. Life imitates (dystopian) art.

Ha I came here to say this when there was only 1 comment on the page, and you beat me to it. Great movie... too bad we're actually living in it?

I posted the scene to a discussion of this elsewhere. From the no-knock warrant to mistaken identity to the bureaucratic nightmare to the utterly inadequate redress, Gilliam hit this square on the head.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWbIxFKtTmE

you forgot war on terrorism. it had it all.

Terry Gilliam moved to England as an adult. England is knee deep in bureaucratic stuff ups and Brazil was practically a documentary. All he did was change the scenery.

To be fair, he also added in a level of tube-based technology that was beyond what was available to consumers of the day. ;)

Related story: The leak of John Podesta's (Hillary Clinton's campaign manager) emails was caused by their IT support person replying that a phishing email was 'legitimate' when intending to type 'illegitimate', a very serious typo!

It was also caused by:

1. Google not providing end-to-end, two-factor, encryption of email. Meaning access to the password was access to the entire corpus. ProtonMail and a few other startups (I've recently created a PM account, otherwise no affiliation) are offering at least E2E email crypto.

2. Google's identity protections failed to detect the phishing attempt and illicit access. This for an exceptionally high-profile account.

Data are liability.

"Who are you?" is the most expensive question in information technology. No matter how you get it wrong, you, or rather, we all, are fucked.

So they claim. I don't think he would have used illegitimate in that context. He probably just said it was a typo to save face.

Oh, I can totally believe it was a typo. People who work on campaigns are constantly overworked and sleep-deprived like you wouldn't believe. So they make screw-ups like this all the time.

It depends upon what the meaning of the word "was" was.

https://youtu.be/j4XT-l-_3y0

An interesting aspect of this story that nobody else picked up on:

> The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake.

So he himself wasn't even the owner of that account. He just happened to have been living in his partner's home. So, why specifically was he targeted even with the wrong IP?

Is this what law enforcement has become? Rounding up the first male of age in the vicinity of a crime? I'm just saying, not only did they have the wrong home but even then they had absolutely no basis even within that home (since obviously no evidence was found during the search), but his life was absolutely ruined.

This particular crime is overwhelmingly committed by men.

>South Yorkshire Police were informed by colleagues in Hertfordshire that they had identified an IP address from which more than 100 indecent images of children had been shared in April that year. The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake.

Here's the reason, for anyone else having difficulty to find it.

The story needlessly confuses the issue of the wrong IP address with the fact that his actual internet account was owned by his partner. The two have nothing to do with each other.

The real IP the police were after belonged to someone else living in a different house.

I believe he accused them of racism and sexism since he was raided by the police for being a suspected pedophile whereas his white female partner was not even investigated as a potential criminal.

I don't think there is any evidence of it being racist. It juts seems more like incompetence to me.

Him being male would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for men to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly.

Him being black would probably be more relevant, but it's far more likely for black people to commit this crime either way, so it's not reasonable to suspect him more highly.

This is why it's wrong to just blindly rely on statistics to tell you who to arrest. Prejudice has no place in law enforcement.

regardless it was a swing and a miss in that court system, dismissed oh well

Wrong IP address, wrong IP address resolved to the woman's account.

Arrested the man who worked with teenagers. WOAH SMOKING GUN RAID ALL THE THINGS

He received £60,000. Even adding one more zero wouldn't be enough in my opinion.

Hell yes. This makes my blood boil. Anything less than a £6m payout would be too small.

It might actually put the police on notice as well, i.e. properly incentivise them to do higher quality work.

The police don't care what the taxpayers have to shell out, it just means sitting through some angry lectures but basically they are no worse. I think compensation for victims of police misconduct should come out of police pensions.

If police officers are liable to pay the victims, would anyone want to be a police officer, given their relatively low wages? In order to make them liable for such things, you would have to increase their wages a lot. I think one of the problems is that we expect a lot from the police, which we should, but then they are not paid nearly enough for that level of responsibility.

Conversely, why would I want anyone to be a police officer that had a problem with this? True, a police officer could be innocent and run into some problems anyway - which is the situation faced by everyone else. I'd certainly be in favor of raising pay if it attracted a higher calibre of applicant, but the pay shouldn't be so high that it becomes economically attractive to take risks with others' life and liberty.

Lots of police officers are reasonable people trying to do a difficult job with integrity. but the job also attracts a lot of bad people who exploit their authority abuse or kill people, and there are types of politician and voter who support that kind of behavior and choose to advance it.

More importantly I'd want the responsible police officers to come out public in newspapers and tv with a c l e a r message that they have harmed an innocent man.

It doesn't need to be devastating to them but it needs to be clear and maybe it should intentionally be a bit embarrassing to them.

Still needs to be careful though as we don't want police to stop important investigations to avoid public shaming; we only want them to be very careful before going public in either way with such a case.

£60,000 after 6 years of battling them is outrageous. Punitive damages should have been in the millions.

England doesn't do punitive damages.

Don't forget that money is coming out of the public purse. When it comes to the police screwing up you're lucky to get anything (in fact if he'd gone to court I doubt he would have got anywhere near as much as he did).

I'm sorry to say, but this is absolutely disgusting. How horrifying for that poor man. Hope he gets his fight back, there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this. This is a totally different scenario but reminds me when police kill someone they think has a weapon but is just holding a toy, or when police kill someone that looks like a criminal they're looking for. The sad outcome is most of the time they get off scott free...

>there just needs to be more severe penalties for mistreatment like this.

So, what should these severe penalties be? When someone makes a data entry mistake that's corrected (as in this case), should they lose their job? Maybe be thrown in prison for a few years? I imagine dealing with programming errors like this would serve as some pretty effective encouragement for better practices. Of course, people might simply choose to avoid any actions that could result in errors.

In this case, the police refused to give him any information after the fact, forcing him to hire a lawyer. The police only apologised after a lawyer got involved, not after they realised that they had arrested the wrong man. Additionally only having an IP address to go on, they chose to arrest him (I'm assuming because he's a man) rather than the person whose name was on the account.

So, the penalty shouldn't be for a mistake. The penalty should be for trying to cover up the mistake over years, and for profiling him based on zero supporting evidence.

A double check before arrest someone could be enough.

This issue shouldn't be of "data entry", the IP should have been registered by software not someone typing it using a number pad; what this tells me is that they don't have the most basic safety checks in order to avoid mistakes; I bet part of the problem is that they are more likely to use their gov funds in new patrol cars than in proper TDD software.

Transfer of income pension rights to the affected party for the period in question. Mistakes are inevitable but unwillingness to correct a mistake should incur a stiff penalty. The fact that the police blew off his request with a dishonest excuse is itself criminal.

Of course people make mistakes, but there are two issues here, first is that the party that made the mistake did not own up to it (it took six years and a lawyer to get [partial] resolution). Second, is that when the result of one's actions have meaningful and potentially devastating consequences, there is a presumed higher expectation of accuracy.

"We're amputating his left leg today, or was it his right?"

In Poland there were many people killed, potentially due to a coma (,). A court process of the pacification of Wujek [1] was mainly whether a response to question "Should we shoot?" was "No, wait for orders" or "Don't wait for orders" (in Polish less difference "Nie, czekajcie na razkaz" vs. "Nie czekajcie na rozkaz"). This was really a ruining life of many just by one coma.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Wujek

I'm learning polish and every sentence is basically one letter away from disaster.

This is why Poland cannot into space.

Not sure if clever joke, or irony.

(The lower-case 'P' in Polish)

This seems to be a common running joke in some countries. The same story is also told in Estonia ("Hukata, mitte ellu jätta" vs "Hukata mitte, ellu jätta").

With the going rate of accountability for these things I think he made out ok with 60k and an apology. Not that I want the deal, but with prosecutorial immunity, and innocent people getting nothing after decades in prison it's all relative.

... and somewhere out there is a lucky pedophile thinking 'my life was saved by a typo'.

Errors don't always mean the bad guy wins, however:

http://staugustine.com/news/local-news/2011-09-10/elise-okan...

Reminds me of the story of a poor editor during Stalin's terror who was shot for omitting a letter : instead of 'commander in chief' he had a typo that read 'commander in shit' (главнокомандующий/гавнокомандующий)

Only reading the headline was enough to remind me of Brazil[1]. The movie, while being based on the very premise of a typo ruining lifes, also has the most telling lines in it - the one everybody trying to rectifiy such an issue is bound to get told[2]:

  Mistake? We don't make mistakes!

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

[2]: https://youtu.be/6OalIW1yL-k

What the article doesn't say (didn't watch any video, so kick me please if need be), is whether the police ever caught the guy they were actually looking for, at the actual IP address.

This is a very good point. There seems to be no coverage of whether the actual perpetrator was ever caught.

We employ and compensate the police, admins and fund the judicial system, at least partly in order to serve as a deterrent to criminals. If our system has a high percentage of false positives or punishes innocent people then that reduces the efficacy of the system as a deterrent.

I'm reminded of this exchange between a journalist and a British justice minister where the minister seems incapable of understanding that punishing people who turned out to be innocent isn't an effective system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU

In France we have a ISP (Numericable) who had a shitty system to map the IP to the user. Each time the system didn't found the person, he didn't return an error but, someone, always the same dude. Poor dude… https://www.cnil.fr/fr/avertissement-public-nc-numericable-p...

There are similar problems with geolocation databases:

http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansa...

Following Hertfordshire Police's admission, Nigel sought compensation for a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998, false imprisonment, police assault/battery, and trespass by police...In October 2016, Hertfordshire Police settled out of court. Nigel received damages of £60,000, plus legal costs..."It isn't enough money," Nigel says, "but after six years of fighting, you're tired."

That sucks, big time.

It is also true that combative lawsuits actually increase the problem, making it more and more unlikely that anybody will voluntarily admit mistakes. So if you're some police clerk and you mis-type an IP address and somebody's life gets ruined, best circle the wagons and keep your mouth shut. Maybe -- maybe -- you could help the poor schmuck get exonerated, but you'd have to be really careful about how you do it.

I hate that, but that is how large systems of people operate. It quite quickly becomes "us versus them"

There's another aspect to this story that I don't think people discuss enough: for many topics, both law enforcement and the general public are either completely disinterested or want to burn you at the stake. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground or nuance.

Have a picture of child porn on your computer? There are folks who argue that not only should you be imprisoned, but that you should never be released. Are you 20 and dating a 17-year-old? People say that's the same thing. Are you a a teenager and send a naked picture of yourself to a friend? You could very well be a child pornographer.

This, by any definition of the word, is insane.

And it's worse than that. Sexual harassment is such a bad thing that for many folks, there doesn't even have to be any evidence of it. As long as one person says that another person sexually harassed them? Somebody needs to be fired. Somebody should go to jail. There are even those folks that based on a story that one person types on the internet will say "This other person? They're a sexual predator" -- it's the grown-up version of kiddie porn. You're either completely innocent of everything or you're the fucking Evil One incarnate. Once again, insane.

I have no answers, but I do observe that when this type of over-reaction to any kind of perceived crime happens in a small village, it's not such a big deal. Some small social groups have social norms that vary quite a bit, and over time they influence one another. I am reminded that the Salem Witch trials ended when, in part, folks in the biggest nearby town asked something like "How could there be so many witches in Salem and none here? How does that make sense?"

What we're seeing now is a village-ization of the world. There are people who want only one social group, across the planet, and they want it to have the same norms. That's fantastically fucked up, but I don't think the people doing it have any idea of that. Folks like Nigel are just collateral damage in this mission of theirs.

I wonder where they got that IP address from.

Could this be another Freenet case?

I can relate: a good part of my morning was ruined by typing "RAILS_ENv" instead of "RAILS_ENV"...

Someone's life is ruined, and he is shamed in the most unjust way possible, and in your mind it merits a coding joke?

Sorry, I just don't understand.

You're right, it was in really poor taste. I'm sorry. The downvotes are entirely justified.

(As a poor attempt at mitigation, I had literally just made that typo, which cost me about two hours because I'd run a lengthy migration on the wrong database in a staging environment and then not understood why nothing I tested was working, when I read the BBC News article... and, yes, I thought, "Hey, yeah, me too.")

Thank you for your honesty and reflection.

So not NATted IP? Not sure I understand how a typo in the IP could point to someone at the same residence.

And without excusing police conduct or eliding his real distress, I'd also point out that his life was perhaps also ruined by having a peadophile for a partner...

The incorrect IP was assigned to his partner. The "correct" IP, presumably of the criminal, was someone else entirely apparently.

It appears you misinterpreted the case. His partner's IP address was the one that was mistakenly entered into a system when a typo was introduced. She had nothing to do with it, nor did he.

To be fair, the phrasing of the paragraph when this fact was introduced was hard to parse.

> The IP address passed on corresponded to an internet account held by Nigel's partner. But it had been typed incorrectly, with an extra digit added by mistake.

The typo resulted in a representation his partner's IP.

i.e.:

1.1.1.2 //intended target 1.1.1.12 //the partner's

Ah, thanks, that makes a lot more sense than what I understood.

Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would prevent things like this from happening.

It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent.

[edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]

> better auditing procedures and transparency

Or using "Copy and Paste" rather than manually typing something.

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