By @edent · career employment gov.uk WeekNotes · 13 comments · 1,400 words · read ~665 times.
I hate being introspective. But I'm told it's good for me. A few months ago, I handed in my notice to Cabinet Office. And now I'm no longer a Civil Servant. It's hard to sum up those 2,462 days. Every day brought new challenges. I saw my work presented to the highest offices in the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk logo · 1 comment · 500 words · read ~838 times.
When the NHS was launched in 1948, this leaflet was sent out to everyone. I wanted to recreate the coat of arms that was on top to print on a t-shirt. Sadly, the scan available is too low a resolution for most modern purposes. Wikipedia has vector logos of most of the coats of arms […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk security Unsecured State · 550 words · read ~490 times.
I don't particularly like picking on the security of Government websites. I do it a lot - but I always feel guilty about besmirching the good name of the many talented people who work in the Civil Service. Today's flaw, however, is a particularly basic mistake which simply shouldn't be allowed to happen by any […]
Continue reading →By @edent · data gov.uk NaBloPoMo · 5 comments · 1,100 words · read ~1,008 times.
Eight years after I published this blog post, I helped officially release all these domain names as open data! Funny how life works out, eh? Would you like to know every domain name the UK Government had registered? Of course you would! There could be all sorts of interesting tit-bits hidden in there (ProtectAndSurvive.gov.uk? EbolaOutbreak2017.nhs.uk? […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk government open standards · 1 comment · 600 words · read ~778 times.
Well, it's not often I get to completely influence the UK Government's approach to open standard. GOV.UK is adopting .ODF as their official document standard! All documentation will be also made available in HTML & PDF. Sweet! Yeah, yeah, so I only played a small part in the (no doubt) hideously complicated process - but […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk security spam Unsecured State · 6 comments · 1,150 words · read ~1,601 times.
This is part 5 of a series of blog posts looking at the security of the UK Government's web infrastructure. The primary cause of the vulnerabilities I've exposed over this series is abandonment. In a flurry of excitement a website is commissioned and created. Then, as time wears on, people begin to drift away from […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk government security spam Unsecured State · 5 comments · 800 words · read ~5,128 times.
This is part 4 of a series of blog posts looking at the security of the UK Government's web infrastructure. Over the last few days, I've shown that hundreds of websites run by branches of the UK state are in a perilous state of disrepair. There are multiple sites with hugely embarrassing XSS flaws, running […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk government security · 4 comments · 700 words · read ~1,941 times.
Cyber Security is of vital national importance. As the United Kingdom places more of its infrastructure onto the Internet, bugs and glitches go from minor inconveniences to full scale national emergencies. Suppose, for a moment, that a hacker were to interrupt payment processing for banks, or tamper with the UK's water supply, or cut off […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk statistics · 3 comments · 250 words · read ~154 times.
One of the great things about publicly blogging for the last 5 years, is that I can remind myself of what I was doing this time last year. Or several years ago. The Terence Eden of October 2009 was a busy chap! 22 blog posts! What a guy 🙂 One post which caught my eye […]
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