By @edent · crime government politics · 4 comments · 400 words
The UK has what is known as a "Standard Scale" of fines for criminal acts. For example, breaking the law may incur "a fine not exceeding level 4 on the standard scale". Part of the reasoning behind this, so I understand, is to make it simpler for the Government to update the value of those […]
Continue reading →By @edent · government money · 8 comments · 400 words · read ~437 times.
One of those things that organisations love to do is issue identifiers. My credit card provider issues me with a Customer ID, a Billing ID, a Reference Number, and an online login ID. All of which are different. And none of which match the embossed plastic card they sent me. The state also issues identifiers. […]
Continue reading →By @edent · government justice podcast · 100 words
How do you modernise the technology of a huge organisation like the UK's Ministry of Justice? Kim Rowan has some bright ideas. Read Kim's post on the Application Modernisation Team For more technical posts, read the Just-Tech blog on Medium.
Continue reading →By @edent · FoI government personal · 500 words · read ~2,964 times.
(Disclaimer - I currently work for GDS, although I don't work on FOI. This is an opinion piece and doesn't represent the views on any of my employers - past, present, or future.) The Irish government recently complied with a Freedom of Information Act request from journalists at RTÉ. The journalists wanted copies of messages […]
Continue reading →By @edent · gov.uk government open standards · 3 comments · 600 words · read ~842 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 government security spam Unsecured State · 5 comments · 800 words · read ~5,133 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 ~1,946 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 · ban government phone police watch · 7 comments · 300 words · read ~10,075 times.
The BBC is reporting that the Government is so afraid of prisoners having access to concealed mobile phones, they want to introduce a ban. UK officials are considering banning the sale of small mobile phones designed to resemble car key fobs. A government spokesman told the BBC that it was discussing the issue with the […]
Continue reading →By @edent · censorship china government politics porn · 9 comments · 300 words · read ~695 times.
David Cameron wants to block certain "pornographic" search terms. He joins a long list of MPs who simply don't understand what they're talking about - like Claire Perry, Andy Burnham, and Helen Goodman. I've talked before about my time working as an "Adult Material Classifier" for Vodafone UK. In short, my team and I used […]
Continue reading →By @edent · data geeks government Open Data opentech · 4 comments · 1,800 words · read ~298 times.
Another year - another OpenTech! See blog posts from 2010 and 2011. It feels like every year the event gets bigger and better. It's still the same crowd of politically aware techies, and it still costs a ridiculously cheap fiver to come along, and the talks were of an abnormally high quality. Here are my […]
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