3 posts tagged “fail”

"The Home Office is to spend over £500,000 this year on a marketing campaign for the identity card which features cartoon fingerprints" : News from Kable about the Home Office starting it's "public information campaign" in the north west.

...because of course the government aren't swimming in debt and have cash to throw at all sorts of white elephants.

Oh dear, having a clue about "Technical Stuff" in Political, and especially parliamentary, circles is marginally rarer than hen's teeth.

Vince Cable has said that Patents should be enforced by the police (link to el reg) and infringement made a criminal offense because he was "blinded by science" by Trevor 'OneGoodIdea' Bayliss.

Needless to say, there is a huge difference between somebody nicking your car stereo and independantly discovering the same solution to a problem as you (which is what 99.999% of patent infringement is), also when people nick your car stereo you no longer have a car stereo - that's why it's called theft!

You can't "steal" an idea, and most idea's aren't worth copying, of the many idea's Bayliss has had, only 1 was turned into something useful and that was after the hard bit that patents protect - i.e. turning an idea into a working solution.

It's pretty clear that Vince doesn't understand "Intellectual Property" if he thinks patent infringement should be brought into line with copyright infringmenet (it's not theft either), when any logic would dictate the reverse - counterfeiting is already covered by criminal laws, copyright infringement is a civil matter - the clue is in the name - "copy rights" : rights to license, distribute, etc your intellectual/creative works as you see fit, and it's a civil matter determined by how you give that license to others.

*sigh*

I've said countless times that our party lacks any technical clue at a high level, and this demonstrates why we need a working group, rather than ill-informed MPs making judgements on things they neither understand nor appreciate.

Now for the other problem - yet another uk government website hacked due to being utterly insecure on many levels - from users like a "Senior Web Producer" using "spiderman" as their password, to other user's passwords being their username, to php errors on the pages, to .. and this is the worst : sql injections in the URI - probably the stupidist, most idiotic newbie mistake imaginable - utterly negligent and inexcusable. Looks like London's trendy Reading Room web agency were involved, I wouldn't be surprised as I was unimpressed when I came accross them a decade ago - although this would be a major slide downhill even for them. 

So it seems that a large chunk of people on the newly formed mailing list for lib dem bloggers don't understand such complex things as what a "thread" is, how to filter emails so they don't all just pile up in your inbox, or how to follow simple instructions on how to unsubscribe from a list in under 2 days.

How very 21st century.. not.

With so many technophobes, it's no surprise that our party is so weak on any technical issues, which are regarded by some as no more important than paperclips and pencils.

When will the party realise that IT and Communications matter a lot, to the tune of billions of pounds of whitehall spending, and millions more in local government, the armed and emergancy services, and everywhere else.

For example : Issues like software patents can cripple and already threaten the entire UK software and IT services industry, and Nominet who control the UK TLD has been hijacked by domain spammers, and used by crooks to base .co.uk websites in china because they don't even bother to apply the simple rule that justifies their existence. These are issues that matter, not just some wiring and stationary that isn't important.

Can anybody remember the last time we had a meeting of the ICT working group in the party.. no it's basically a dead parrot nailed to it's perch, pining for the fjords.

[updated]
I'm not having a go at average members here, the problem is that nobody takes IT or IT literacy at all seriously at all in the party - hence Nick Clegg won't ever reply to an email (even when he campaigned for leadership), ministers don't aren't adequately briefed, local councils fail to project manage projects like airports, and mailing list users don't know basic email functionality beyond hitting reply, paste and send.

It's natural for a party, particularly a democratic one like the lib dems to reflect the membership, but it should make an effort to improve it's weaknesses - and it's not just the small budget, it's the almost complete lack of interest in something that is critical to whitehall, parliament and all infrastructure - IT and Comminications Technology is almost as important as our road and rail systems, possibly more so in some cases, yet it has no minister, no working group, no policies, no spokesperson and the general technophobia and sidelining of anything that smells of 'scary technical stuff' is sidelined, ignored and patronised.

And then the likes of Jennie Rigg and Jonathon Calder call me a 'patronising arse' for suggesting somebody google for a tutorial on how to do something simple. right, because Jennie made such an effort to read my last blog post on this subject and wasn't at all condescending and hostile in her response.

p.s. Thanks to Andrew Hickey who charmingly called me functionally illiterate: I've made the penultimate paragraph a bit clearer, but it's not an article for the guardian so I won't be hiring a sub-editor for my facebook updates any day soon.