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You still likely need a human bypass. "I was injured or disfigured so my face no longer anything for you to compare to. I do not now, and never shall again resemble the image in the system."

Similar things happen when you require fingerprints or retinal scans. "Well, I don't have a right hand anymore. It's in some hospital's incinerator."

And not having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.

> [N]ot having an override or bypass is a software issue. Designing a system that doesn't permit exceptions or overrides is bad software design.

I think his point is that the designers of the software would have been aware of this, but they weren't the designers of the system, who wanted software to do All the Things.

I don't follow.

You cite three meaningful changes in biometrics: disfigured, loss of fingerprint and retinal issues.

In all three cases surely the right and proper thing do to is to get your details updated on the system ? It may even be a legal requirement for you to do so in the case of official ID documents.

Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.

But for a permanent thing I just don't see why you would not just get stuff re-issued or updated.

If a person off on holiday just had their face burned off by one of those tabletop fire pits and is on their way home due to just getting their face burned off, something tells me the last thing on their mind is swinging by the embassy to get their biometrics updated.

The real world is messy.

> If a person off on holiday just had their face burned off

I suggest you actually read my post, because its clear you did not.

If you had read it, you would have seen the phrase "Of course, if you have a temporary mismatch due to being injured on holiday that's different.".

I quite clearly excluded holiday injury.

Why would disfigurement be temporary? You are still injecting spin to dismiss legit concerns that are not optional for any production system. The system should always have a human override available with a manual check.

Yeah, absolutely horrible situation to put people in, let bugs stay unfixed that leads people to being stranded in foreign countries with no clear resolution in hours, and on top of that neither parties seem to be interested in just fuzzing up and fixing the fucking problem.

> Monique Hawkins, the acting chief executive of the immigration campaign group the3million, said it had seen previous cases similar to Webb’s, adding that it highlighted vulnerabilities in the system and it was “crucial that people have a genuinely stable means by which to prove their status”.

> She told Politico the eVisa rollout had been “rushed”, adding: “We regularly see people not only denied boarding, but also compensation, as carriers and the Home Office play a blame game shifting responsibility between each other.”

I'm hearing echoes of half the engineers and product people I've worked with in my career in tech:

"Oh, that's an edge case. 0.1% of users will encounter it. P2 bug, not a ship blocker."

The point is, they aren't wrong. You will never get rid of all such edge cases... and even if you could, you couldn't afford to do so. The responsibility to make the larger process resilient to those types of bugs must exist somewhere, and at a higher level than engineering.

What's described here is not an engineering failure, but a process failure.

It's an engineering failure if the designers did not fight for it. In my career as an electronics engineer and later as a software developer it was clearly part of my job to interrogate the specification documents and almost always the customer to discover what the system really needed to do and what edge cases the customer had ignored, forgotten, or was simply unaware of.

Yes it's a process failure but just like health and safety it is everyone's responsibility.

Agreed, but we are lucky when we have that kind of voice, in the larger picture.

It's both. "Bugs are inevitable and unavoidable" is a defeatist attitude in software, albeit one that is accepted strongly and broadly.

This is like a belief in karma. It's irrational, and it's completely untrue as far as anyone can tell, but we are all arguably better off by pretending that things really do work that way.

There will always be bugs. The larger process and organization needs to be setup to deal with that.

This is also a big problem at companies.

Previous company had full payments/accounts team, a few QAs, a couple accountants and SRE working on the automation of a specific payment edge case that was normally handled through support, and was taking 5-10 mins to handle per case. Whole thing took four-five months.

In the first year, less than 100 people used it, out of a few million. It was B2C, so after taxes, that amount was maybe enough to cover a couple days of lunch for the people who worked on it.

This is why you need to diligently track escalations/exceptions, and add more software support as the business case to automate or streamline supports it.

I mostly agree but I think the bar for the software still has to be unusually high when the failure mode is "you are not allowed to enter the country you legally live in"... The human fallback is essential, but it shouldn't become the thing that makes a fundamentally unreliable system acceptable

Tbh, I suspect this failure mode is far less than the old mode - which is paper based and your passport goes missing in transit at the embassy (or doesn't come back in time).

Yeah the article makes it unclear but this doesn't sound like she was "stranded" for long:

> “I had no idea the issue had been corrected until I was allowed to board my flight home,” Webb said. “Had I not spent hours on the phone trying to resolve the matter, I have no idea how long I could have remained stranded abroad.”

Sounds like there were indeed channels to escalate this.

unfortunately this has become typical in Britain, no one can be trusted to have any responsibility or agency. its all systems with room for the real world

>its all systems with room for the real world

The vision that it evokes is terrifying!

> This is not a software issue (not directly).

What's really stupid is not being allowed to get on the flight at all.

Like: she's not labelled as a "terrorist", so just let her on the flight as she's not likely to make the plane explode, and let the customs folks take her as a one-off to be dealt with on home soil. Why is it necessary to be pre-approved to even get on the flight?

Generally if you get turned away at the destination then the airline is liable for taking you away, so they won't let you fly unless they're sure that you will be accepted at the destination country.

Under UK legislation as the owners, agents or operators of a ship or aircraft you may become liable for a charge of £2,000 for every passenger arriving in the UK without:

- a valid “immigration document” which satisfactorily establishes identity and nationality or citizenship.

- and, if the person requires a visa, a visa of the required kind or other permission to travel. This visa, or permission, may now be in either physical form, or a digital e- Visa; or

- a valid Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), if the person requires one.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/document-checks-a...

What I don't understand is why this isn't already the case. Every single EU(and UK!) airport I've ever been to has a fallback to agents sitting at nearby gates if the eGate fails to recognize you for any reason. It just says "please proceed to agent" and you get back in the queue for families with kids and non-EU citizens etc.

Why can't the same system work here?

> What is broken here is that it is possible to get stuck in an airport with no possibility of escalating sensibly to a chain of human beings with agency to resolve it

This is another instance of the usual hubris of management in thinking that automation has solved all the problems without creating any of its own, therefore all the humans are now made redundant.

“In the rare cases where errors are identified, the majority of cases are resolved within 24 hours.” The Home Office indicated the problem Webb encountered had since been fixed and that staff would contact her directly.

so yes, they can and do override the system.

Also the person wasn't stuck in the airport, they were denied boarding of the plane because there was an issue with their identification documentation.

It's not good, its a travesty that you even need an ID to fly between two european countries, let alone a visa, but the picture you paint is at odds with reality.

The backend company many financial institutions use to verify a person’s identity has details of my life mixed up with my son’s. When I do verification I have to be mindful of this, and often have to call him to make sure I don’t fail. There is no one to call. It’ll be like this forever.

Which goes to show what a smart idea "smart contracts" and "code is law" is. (Hint: not at all.)

>and have staff at hand which could solve any solvable remaining issues like this one. They call the Home Office internal hotline, explain the issue, resolve it by manually interfering on the spot (and have a bug filed), and everyone carries on.

This may be possible some 15+ years ago. Home Office today is very different. Without a prober procedure written down I doubt this could be solved manually. Nor would anyone want to solve it manually.

You have a written procedure. And after a long list of known/common things the procedure has an escalation clause that routes to an official with agency. You update the procedure as needed to manage the escalation rate.

This is extremely common

I wish that was the case. Not something I have experienced personally.

It seemed pretty standard at B2B tech providers. You have Sr support engineers who are the final line, and can often setup a reproduction in a test environment and file a good bug. Then you just count up the rate of tickets that hit that bug and require a manual fix. At some point it’s time to fix the bug.

Keep forgetting to reply.

>It seemed pretty standard at B2B tech providers.

It is, but I was referring specifically to Home Office in UK Gov.

If the no human path is good enough for trillion dollar big tech companies ... why not for government.

I don't think it is good enough for either, but I also think we should practice, and run our companies, as we preach.

Because companies can choose their customers, and can choose not to serve some customers because they are too difficult/expensive, while a government can't ethically make the same choice. A government (at least a liberal democratic and republican government of, by, and for The People) serves all their citizens, it's kinda the point, whereas a company definitely maintains types of customers they are not interested in.

This is a fundamental problem with "running government like a business," one of several that point to the fundamental flaws of the entire idea (profit motive, unitary unit of execution, etc.).

> while a government can't ethically make the same choice

I'm glad you said "ethically" because the current US administration is openly admitting that they're making decisions on things like school funding, disaster relief based on whether that state went for Trump or not.

Welcome to the modern world.

I seem to recall a time when you could ring up, get through to a human that could actually solve your problem.

Now humans are just front ends for software, and there's noone to take responsibility.

I would put the blame more of systems and cost saving. They don't want humans to have any responsibility, or pay them for that.