Why Britain’s new stamps are causing outrage and upset | Hacker News Reader

Why Britain’s new stamps are causing outrage and upset

theguardian.com

13 pointsbeardyw33 comments

I'm not too worried about stamps with barcodes, however making all the old stamps invalid from 1 February 2023 is going to cause several problems.

I asked in the Post Office about this, and they said old style stamps would be treated the same as unstamped mail from that date. In the UK that means the letter is delivered provided the recipient pays the postage, plus a fine (or a fee for the Post Office's trouble - whichever you prefer).

Why is this a problem? In the UK we've had for a long time, stamps just marked First Class or Second Class which are supposed to be valid indefinitely and typically people have a drawer at home with a pile of these. You'll be able to exchange these at the Post Office (tiresome!) for bar coded stamps, however that is going to be a problem for all the Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes in the world waiting for something to happen.

Here is a specific example which affects me. Radio Amateurs send each other QSL cards which are personalised post cards acknowledging a radio contact. These are usually sent via your local QSL bureau to save postage and eventually they arrive at the destination bureau where they are stuck into a self addressed stamped envelope (maybe once a quarter) and delivered to the destination. Radio amateurs in the UK typically send a years worth of envelopes at once, and on 1st February these are all going to become invalid.

In Sweden, you can buy a single-use code and hand-write it instead of placing a stamp.

https://www.postnord.se/om-oss/pressmeddelanden/2021/postnor...

(scroll down for example picture)

Poland's national postal service runs for a few years now the Internet-based postal platform Envelo, where you can send and receive personal correspondence and official letters, postal cards. Envelo allows their customers to customize and print, use postal stamps in same prices as physical ones, from home. The stamps come with small graphic, 12-digit code and data matrix code that contains all necessary information.

https://www.envelo.pl/znaczki-pocztowe/ (in Polish)

Tho, I like Sweden solution - it's way much simple; it seems they're using same 12-digit codes

They want the queen. The old stamp. Not a code I guess is the point.

People who complain (constantly) about how easily triggered people are these days a) have a point and b) are really easily triggered by trivial things.

There is a disturbingly large [or at least vocal enough to imply largeness] section of the British public which reacts apoplectically to any perceived slight upon their beloved royal family. So none of this surprises me. Personally, whenever I did use stamps 'back in the day' I always stuck them on upside-down. Take that, Lizzy!

There is also a disturbingly marginalized section of society who would like to move on from having to support the cult of a known war criminal. These people also put the stamps upside down.

Sorry. Your allusion has gone right over my head. Care to spell it out for me?

Elizabeth is a war criminal. Under her watchful gaze, much calamity and disaster has fallen upon the world, and it is with her sovereign secrecy powers that the war crimes committed in her name are protected, and real war criminals are still on the loose.

The 5-eyes quasi-legal structure depends on her to keep its secrets.

The thinking behind this seems odd. I'd have thought that the overlap between people who want something like barcode-esque links to digital info and improved online tracking and people who queue up at the post office to buy stick on stamps would be vanishingly small. I don't think I've bought a stamp in the past five years, possibly ten. Any time I need to post something, I just print the postage online. Much lees hassle*

*[apart from the obligatory half hour spent threatening my bastard Canon inkjet printer, to get it to actually print the damned thing]

EDIT: Forgot to mention: when you print postage online, it doesn't have any picture of the queen at all. Just the QRcode.

It's being marketed as good for the customer, but in reality the reason they're doing it is to reduce fraud and so that they can much more efficiently track the letters for their own purposes. One way this helps for example, is that once you've scanned the letter and figured out the address it is going to, from that point onwards you can just scan the QR code and look up the address from a database. I bet the equipment to scan the actual address is much less efficient than just scanning the QR code. Also it means they can track the exact route of letters from source to destination, rather than only seeing aggregate statistics.

[According to the article] It also removes the 'crime' whereby people would wash stamps and remove the postmark, so they could be used again. Not that I've ever tried that. Oh no siree. Not me.

It will also end the practice of occasionally receiving a letter, noticing it hasn't been postmarked properly and tearing the section with the stamp off, so you can re-use it again yourself. Now there's a fine old British past time we can all get behind!

but if a stamp hasn't been postmarked, how are you to tell if its been used or not? and why is there an issue in using it?

I always got the impression that royal mail weren't that bothered about this or else they would make sure every stamp was franked. ultimately its their responsibility to frank their mail, if they don't do that, thats their problem, soon to be ours.

“I suggested that the Queen’s head could be done without" -- David Gentleman

I think Henry VIII said the same thing a couple of times

And Morrissey

Seems like a good tradeoff to me: you have a machine readable part, but you keep the traditional stamp part.

It seems odd that they haven't solved the "machine readable" part in some other way decades ago.

You only need a handful of bits of data-- 12 bits would probably be enough to encompass all likely stamp denominations. You could overprint print a simple lined barcode for 12 bits of data in, say, UV-flourescent ink and not mess with the existing visible design. This could have been silently done 20 years ago, so by now, only a tiny selection of really ancient stamps were unusable.

There's no reason for the big chunky barcode unless they're trying to track use of individual stamps (which seems a bit Orwellian), or as some sort of convoluted anti-counterfeit device (compare Euro banknotes, which include embedded check digits in the serial number, so not all numbers are valid).

The other drawback I could see would that it changes the footprint. On something like a postcard or a tightly designed marketing flyer, you might want to use every available square millimetre.

In Denmark, we can now pay postage online and simply print the code (a string of letters, of all things?!) to the envelope instead of buying and sticking a stamp.

On the face of it, this seems like progress, but I do not like it, it feels off, it feels unofficial illegitimate. Like, what happens if someone takes a picture of my envelope and decides to use my code to send a letter? Whoever gets scanned first wins and the other gets rejected I guess.

In the US, the Postal Service has been scanning the address on envelopes for years and rewriting it along the bottom as a barcode which they print at the post office. They use their own code rather than the address you wrote to actually route the mail.

It seems like this British version just moves the barcode to the stamp. When the address is optically scanned, the code number is associated with the address and can be used for physical routing going forward.

That means the system is for their convenience, not the user's. It may reduce the amount of OCR scanning that's necessary, it removes the printing step, and it allows tracking and routing even before the OCR takes place.

> The rectangular codes – which look like QR codes but are apparently not QR codes, which are a particular, and trademarked, kind of code – are designed are designed to stop counterfeiting

Never change, Grauniad.

I'm an avid letter writer and when pandemic hit I looked into online stamps. In Poland you can order stamps (to print at home) and even include your own graphics on them. I had a lot of fun with that and did people who got letters from me.

https://fuse.pl/beton/images/druku/druku.jpg

Stamps in Oz have had barcodes for donkeys years. This is a very anglocentric storm in a teacup.

British tea cup could be big.

It's an article in a British newspaper about a story of interest to British people. Why would it be anything but British-centric (not anglocentric, which refers to the English).

Many problems of concern to the British are global concerns. This is not one of them. I've yet to see evidence of concern from the other British nations btw

> I've yet to see evidence of concern from the other British nations btw

Have you looked? Here is just one example of many.

https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/royal-mail-scrap-traditio...

What the post office should do is do a themed one without the barcode. “other themed special stamps …” is still valid forever.

Perforate a line between the stamp and "QR" code. That way purists can just remove the code from the stamp

That's exactly what it has.

Amazing. The solution already exists!

tldr: each stamp has a unique code. I didn't really believe it until I hit the single mention of "unique" in the text.

I wonder how traceable they are?

this is the exact and very obvious point missing from the article, which makes me very skeptical as to the intentions of the writer.

since all mail will now have a unique tracker on it, all the issuer need do is log who purchases which stamps and you can now track who sends mail.

this could have a chilling effect on many areas of society who communicate via items or letters sent in the post, as the anonymity and neutrality of mail is eroded.

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