ID Cards.
I don't know if you feel strongly about them or not.
I completely understand the theoretical benefits to a unified compulsory ID system, however, the proposed implementation of ID cards is both highly flawed, and unlikely to realise any of those benefits in my opinion, and be very costly to the taxpayer.
Regardless of your opinion on the issue, I imagine that most of you think it is important to have a coherent and open public debate over the issue.
The government would probably like you to think it is supporting an open debate on the issue, it recently launched the 'debate forum' mylifemyid.org. Have a look over it, have a look at the information provided, and then have a close look at the forums.
It essentially amounts to propaganda. Every single government employee (the admins and mods) are towing the party line, supporting the ID cards plans 100%. Posts disagreeing with them are being edited, or even completely deleted, without a trace.
To register on the site, you are forced to give them personal information. You have to fork over your age, gender, location and current employment status. Which is one good way of scaring off privacy concious individuals.
Once you have registered, even if you uncheck every box regarding whether or not they can send you emails, your inbox will be bombarded with unsolicited, illegal, emails.
In addition to this, the government are using mine and your tax money to provide (what I hope is) free marketing to the following brands: Super Mario
Finding Nemo
Dilbert
Powerpuff Girls
Sonic the Hedgehog
and Batman
I don't care how kickass these brands may or may not be, my tax money should not be used to market them.
The forum code is terrible, up until a few minutes ago they were ordering posts with the oldest at the top. It frequently shows signatures twice, and the post ordering is in no way conducive to debate. The whole operation is geared towards being as spinable as possible. This government can't even put together a stable forum but they want us to trust them with a centralised database of our sensitive personal information?
I urge you to register and undermine it as much as possible.
If nothing else, this patronising drivel should not be the face of Britains youth:
The Government does not understand the internet
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9 comments:
I signed up to do my patriotic duty last night. The sheer dishonesty of the questions and posts was appalling - no, you lying tossers, being asked to prove your age is not the same as having to prove your identity, and you damn well know it. Also, even if you tick the box asking them not to spam you, it actually tells you that they're going to ignore it. What the hell?
I haven't had a chance to check the site today, but hopefully I'll have an excuse to copy and paste from the online Gutenberg edition of 1984 this evening... I must admit, from what I've seen so far the response from the site's target audience has been pretty good, with lots of pointing, laughing, and debunking of bullshit.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt
Anyone out there want to build a bot to spam the forum with passages from this novel?
Someone like /b/ should fuck this forum up.
That sounds like a good idea.
I dun reuploaded their YouTube clip with comments enabled. Thought it was tad ridiculous them unenabling comments for a video apparently meant to promote discussion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJsGpsmB8c
Good Call.
As a government employee (yes, your money does go towards paying me. Thank you all) I have to say that this site is pretty typical.
Maybe not with the biased information, I think within the civil service you'll find we're split on how well the government are doing.
In fact "split" is too kind, most believe they're a bunch of galloping morons, hooting around in their ivory towers (actually, '60s office blocks) making decisions when they flat out can't relate to the average person.
This government can't even put together a stable forum but they want us to trust them with a centralised database of our sensitive personal information?
I think, with the recent incidents regarding dataloss in the media limelight, which, trust me, just because it's come to the media's attention now doesn't mean it hasn't happened before a number of times, that this was already pretty much common knowledge.
Their computer systems are old fashioned and cobbled together as cheap as possible. Systems we use crash or are unvailable on a regular basis.
In general I'd say that not only does the government not understand the internet, it doesn't understand technology.
Article about this on the Times website
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/student/article4513723.ece
They've mentioned the reuploaded video I dun. Hurray.
Oh nice, fairly good read.
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