However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go plain HTML and common interoperable standards, simple authentication, and in will come a vipers nest of javascript calling home to monstrous tracking infrastructure, AWS containers, Cloudflare MITM, hooked into some hideous TPM module and mandatory smartphone camera garbage that scans my iris....
Somehow there is a stronghold of common sense and decency standing its ground within our government. I almost wish I could pay a little extra tax to fund them.
(I worked at GDS until two years ago.)
> a stronghold of common sense and decency
I get that OP was going for something else but…
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with those things when in the right hands.
I despise Google and what they became and so should you.
Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.
I hope someone reinvents the services we take for granted with a focus on privacy.
It's a bit laughable to talk about despising a company over this stuff. We're not talking about an evil regime, or even Nestle for what they did with breast milk in Africa. It's so over the top.
I think the answer is yes, and in my earlier post said I'd actually be happy to give more money for government projects that protect peoples' privacy better. For me the problem is not "well met by the private sector" because that solution imposes a hidden externality upon the public end-users. Part of the price we pay is leaking of our data to a non-national private company.
Well, it's a personal value judgement what is "better" of course, but for me being British, I see my government as having some legitimate interest in what I am doing, especially when transacting with them.
On the other hand, a gargantuan for-profit American corporation that enriches it's shareholders and was once run by Eric Schmidt, whose legendary face-palm gaffes buried "Don't be Evil" under a smoking heap of sulphurous brimstone....
"We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or
less know what you’re thinking about"
My government may be a sneaky bunch of bastards, but so far they've had the good manners not to openly show utter contempt for privacy.
I’d rather have my government doing web analytics than some faceless corporation from across the globe.
Might be of course different for people in totalitarian regimes - but as far as I am concerned I still can vote on ones in my country.
Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.
https://www.ft.com/content/74782def-1046-4ea5-b796-0802cfb90...
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/amazon-signs-deal-with-brit...
But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.
If you could tell, why did you leave?
Source? I've lived in Singapore all my life and have not heard of this. There was an outage on the 31st of March[1], and parliamentary discussion after that[2] doesn't mention any of what you said.
[1]: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/changi-airport-ter...
[2]: https://www.mha.gov.sg/mediaroom/parliamentary/oral-reply-to...
This is my only gripe. Every time I do self assessment or complete my tax returns as a contractor I had to find some arcane combination of government gateway ID, password, authentication app etc etc. It's so secure it stops you paying the government money.
The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.
There must be a massive cost-saving opportunity here.
"Welcome to tarantopermits.com"
"This domain name is parked for FREE by fasthosts.co.uk"
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=tarantope...
It's all on subdomains, e.g. https://wandsworth.tarantopermits.com
I mean, a nominal fee enough to correlate car registration with owners address, but not £210 like google told me it costs in Wandsworth. I bet about £10 of that goes to the council.
Yes, definitely.
I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google?
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/govuk-wins-design-of-the-...
Part of that involves really simple layouts, very high contrast text, legible fonts, compatibility across many devices, simple language etc.
It's certainly an added benefit that it gives an appearance of austerity, but that's more a byproduct of simplicity.
Governments generally don't have that requirement. So GDS doesn't need fancy branding and other concerns can take priority. It's remarkably refreshing.
It would have been so easy to just cargo-cult whatever is fashionable in the private sector. It's kinda miraculous they didn't. A mark of thoughtful, self-confident professionals. Bravo!
It's middle of the tree at best. I'm sure you can find people for whom it's well paying, but the recruiters from UK gov departments that regularly contact me keep trying to sell me on the benefits of jobs where the upper salary band is less than half of what I earn.
I should add she is late 50's and the prospect of finding work elsewhere in a comparable role would be very unlikely.
More generally for federal and state/local government opportunities to use your technology expertise to make a difference, these folks are excellent: https://techtalentproject.org/tech-talent/
I mean just look at the breakdown of who runs that “tech talent project” to see what I mean. In the industry, ideally, decisions are being made and executed by other technical people. It’s part of what has made Silicon Valley so uber successful.
Thankfully I've noticed more sites copying gov.uk, very few but still positive.
Meanwhile, at least in some EU countries, you can authenticate using your identity card and USB smartcard reader.
The GOV.uk team loves moving things forward and leaving an awful lot of guff behind.
I'll start why this really matters from the last item. Even after my move I kept my UK company for a while, I was making regular electronic VAT submissions until sometime in July 2021 I decided to deregister my company's VAT. I did that via HMRC's online form. In December I logged in to check to find out that any record of me doing that evaporated, and now I had an "estimated" VAT bill of around £5k. I submitted a zero return for the previous quarter I should've been deregister in and after I rang HMRC and 2 weeks later the balance "I owed" dropped to zero. I deregistered again and this time "it worked". However, I had no way whatsoever to prove I indeed deregistered before. The person I spoke to on the phone that day decided my story believable so I didn't get any fines. What if they had a worse day? Ability to reliably prove you submitted government documents when you say you did is extremely important. In the country I now live in(Poland) you get a cryptographically signed XML document you can use as proof. You get one from any level of government you submit stuff to online (taxes, local councils anything). There is an online service you can check the validity of such signature and the content is all readable with a text editor.
Then a way to electronically sign documents that is equivalent to your in person signature legally without any special equipment or software for free. And a way to authenticate oneself to government services(including national healthcare) Here any citizen (or a foreigner that registers) can do so with one "thing". There are few ways to authenticate, an app, an online bank account (all banks in the country support it), a national id with a nfc chip and a pin, or you go to a local council in person and they create an account for you with a usename/password +2FA(sms,or auth app). You can sign any document using an online service, there is a history of stuff you signed you can check and you have a "mailbox" you can use to receive documents instead of the post.
The system is mostly XML based and it uses ssl for signatures. I have no idea what they use in the backend (probably lots of java). One can also purchase certificates to use as a signature like in other EU countries. The government sites look reasonably modern with dynamic forms, but they deteriorate gracefully if all you want is to read them, but good luck getting forms to work without JS.
Personally I think they did a pretty good job with this system.
From what I saw, their legal and bureaucratic systems are geared to try to authenticate everything via physical means, be it signatures (that are supposed to be unique and not just an expression of intent), wet stamps, or (recently) digital signatures. On the contrary, UK works on trust and its legal systems, so you can (theoretically) sign a large money contract with a cross on a napkin, you can open a bank account with a letter from a "a person of good standing in their community" without ever holding a government issued ID, and you can sign contracts with a simple checkbox.
I really enjoy the latter. It's a bit messier, but also feels more humane.
love u gov.uk.