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On Wed, 2025-11-12 at 14:37 +0000, zleap via list wrote: > > I am not familar with this, but it souds like another thing we coud > cite with regard to objecting to digital id cards, when trying to > suggest the goverbment projects never work properly. The idea government projects never work properly is just unhelpful nihilism. I think it is fair to say that something like an ID card would be at a very large scale, and is exceptionally difficult due to that scale. Some government IT systems work reasonably well, where they deal with scale you want to make the common case simple and effective, so something like paying your car tax online is pretty painless aside from it being a tax (and too many letters being sent), but then it is a relatively simple task with few interactions with other systems, and the police and insurers incentivise you to complete it. The other problem with something like ID cards is it is poorly thought out, it isn't clear what list of tasks it is addressing, it will scale to everyone, and like "Brexit" will solve whatever ails each party involved as long as you don't look too closely. This is a disaster, whereas if they really wanted to identify people better they could build on driving licenses, passports, bank cards, or look at legislation to enable unifying government databases further. The disaster that was electronic passports I think captures it nicely, but the point is identity is hard (since there is usually an incentive to defraud, at least on some use cases), the use of cryptography at scale is hard, and the use of electronics at scale is tricky (as things move on, devices break). In reality lots of IT projects fails in lots of organisations, or at least would do if organisations stated clear success goals upfront, it is just that when it happens with the government it is more obvious. Whereas with private companies catastrophic IT failures often are an internal matter, at least till you stop making cars. There have been bits of government that have done the same project with multiple suppliers, and then rolled out the best of the provided solutions, but that is a hard sell to the bean counters and the tax payer, even if it is a well worn model for getting better systems, or getting more innovative ideas during development. Somehow government is expected to get it right first time, despite government employees being no different, and in most cases the exact same people, as private sector workers. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG FAQ: https://www.dcglug.org.uk/faq/