When I moved to the UK, one of the surprising things was how well the GOV.UK ecosystem worked. My original country uses a mishmash of Java applets, ajax-based websites, and a mixture of mildly broken, outdated web technologies, served from a variety of domains. GOV.UK was a breath of fresh air with its simple, consistent UI, served as static HTML. This is how internet services should look like.
Hoorah to that! We are lucky to have wonderful .gov services; highly
available, accessible, frictionless, simple, informative, well written
and bullshit-free. Maybe the best online central government services
in the world - though I hear Estonia are a contender too.
However I live in perpetual fear that at any moment some corrupt
minister will do a deal with Microsoft and the Devil. Out will go
plain HTML and common interoperable standards, simple authentication,
and in will come a vipers nest of javascript calling home to monstrous
tracking infrastructure, AWS containers, Cloudflare MITM, hooked into
some hideous TPM module and mandatory smartphone camera garbage that
scans my iris....
Somehow there is a stronghold of common sense and decency standing its
ground within our government. I almost wish I could pay a little extra
tax to fund them.
Yes, this is the point and the reason it's so good. Centralization and standardization. I'm so glad that my country (Turkey) has made big leaps in centralization of digital services in the recent years with E-Government platform. I even recently wrote the Presidency Public Communcations Center, suggesting every citizen should have a government-issued email address and that an email account must be a right. E-mail is a necessity at this point and it's unacceptable that anyone can lose access to their email account just because Google's ML models decided he's a bot. The government could easily verify every real citizen.
Indeed, but everything still works for me even though much of that
stuff is blackholed here. These are common efficiencies (mistakes on
my opinion fwiw) and hopefully we can further improve data-leakage and
bring even more things properly back in-house.
Not to be too gushing or naive, I am quite aware that in the UK we
recently "sold" big chunks of GCHQ to Amazon, so I'm not all wide eyed
that parts of our government IT aren't idiots.
Some but not all of it run-of-the-mill corruption from the usual
suspects like Priti Patel. There's not much of Britain left to sell to
private equity and Big Tech, but they're always working on finding new
"markets".
I despise Google and what they became and so should you.
Maybe my 10 visits a day webpage is an anomaly, and I’m truly the only one not using Google analytics - Still, don’t pretend Google analytics is used by everyone.
For our podcast we specifically set up Plausible to exclude Google
analytics. Rather little of value to be gained or lost either way, but
it's a matter of conscience and politeness to our users. Sadly we
had to put in links to other big-tech application platforms, but those
are links to click out of choice if you're a user of those services.
This is always the problem when interacting with the corporate internet. I have a Shopify store on my website where my readers can buy mugs and t-shirts to support me(not that anyone is lol). Lord knows what goes on in there.
I hope someone reinvents the services we take for granted with a focus on privacy.
> I despise Google and what they became and so should you
It's a bit laughable to talk about despising a company over this stuff. We're not talking about an evil regime, or even Nestle for what they did with breast milk in Africa. It's so over the top.
Should they instead invest time and public money into solving simple product problems (“how many times was this thing looked at?”) in a way that can be understood by the average desk worker? When that problem is well met by the private sector?
> Should they instead invest time and public money into solving simple
product problems ... when that problem is well met by the private
sector?
I think the answer is yes, and in my earlier post said I'd actually be
happy to give more money for government projects that protect peoples'
privacy better. For me the problem is not "well met by the private
sector" because that solution imposes a hidden externality upon the
public end-users. Part of the price we pay is leaking of our data to
a non-national private company.
I'm not sure using Google Analytics qualifies as an "externality" but even if it does the UK government has proven time and time again it doesn't give a damn about anyone's privacy, so what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for privacy? Because it would certainly be worse from a technical standpoint.
> what makes you think any in-house version would be any better for
privacy?
Well, it's a personal value judgement what is "better" of course, but
for me being British, I see my government as having some legitimate
interest in what I am doing, especially when transacting with them.
On the other hand, a gargantuan for-profit American corporation that
enriches it's shareholders and was once run by Eric Schmidt, whose
legendary face-palm gaffes buried "Don't be Evil" under a smoking heap
of sulphurous brimstone....
"We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or
less know what you’re thinking about"
No thanks!
My government may be a sneaky bunch of bastards, but so far they've
had the good manners not to openly show utter contempt for privacy.
Yes, we should. In fact, I believe every unit of governance of human society (read: nation) should be as independent as possible in every area necessary for its functioning. This means every nation should be completely independent in all of the technology it uses. This is obviously impossible. Not every nation even has the required raw resources, energy input or workforce. So no point in even trying. Luckily, all of this unfathomable monument and mess of concrete and asphalt and silicon which is called global human civilization has not even 50 years left to its total collapse. But oh, wait a minute, let me open the door... This must be your new FPV drone from China, son! Came fast, isn't it? It has only been one week...
A lot of people use google analytics for no logical reason what soever though.
Typical use case for a small to medium website seems to be a list of most visited pages.
That's a perfectly logical reason to use GA. As long as HTTP servers don't have a built-in UI for analytics, people will continue to use GA (with server side Measurement Protocol for counting hits from people with adblockers) for that use case.
GA and external CDNs require cookie banner/consent under GDPR (which is still valid in UK AFAIK). So that alone should be reason enough to avoid it.
But you can never be sure: very recently, I'm seeing (unnecessary) popups coming up informing me about the site not using cookies! To make up for the phantom pain of not having one in EU where "real" sites do have cookie dialogs? The web and its self-referential UI idioms have become a strange place indeed.
IDK if those are, in themselves, indicators. The idea is not purity. The idea is for technical common sense to win over sales/consultant-led architecture.
I wonder what technology they are using to wrangle these forms... I remember reading an article a few days ago concerning vuejs project to do something similar.
Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process and the results are cameras that don’t work to the point of the officials needing to manually adjust them, forms that don’t contain consistent data across pages, and my favorite “save a photo of the confirm just in case lah.” The old system just worked, the new system insists upon APPs.
> Singapore recently did a deal with a company no one has heard of for their immigration process
Source? I've lived in Singapore all my life and have not heard of this. There was an outage on the 31st of March[1], and parliamentary discussion after that[2] doesn't mention any of what you said.
“Recently” is admittedly subjective but I was just there (2 times in 3 weeks) and can confirm it’s a new system to 4 years ago when the foreign passes were all paper. I think it’s called Tacent. It was so bad a local woman couldn’t even get in and they had to have her wait in the foreign line. You can simply visit the existing immigration website, as it’s public, to view the inconsistent data-the same forms that are displayed on their iPads in the reception hall. This wasn’t an outage, just poor technology implementation.
This is my only gripe. Every time I do self assessment or complete my tax returns as a contractor I had to find some arcane combination of government gateway ID, password, authentication app etc etc. It's so secure it stops you paying the government money.
Entirely off-topic, but why do some comments on HN have manual line breaks but most just soft-wrap? On my phone (Hacki app) each line is soft-wrapped, then hard-wrapped after 1 or 2 words, which looks quite off
I applied for a UK visa from South-Africa about a year ago. To start my application I had to submit a form on this domain. The navigation to the form was obscured by a giant banner about the Ukraine invasion and a message about how service levels might be reduced due to refugees... no matter how I resized my browser window I couldn't get to the part of the page behind the banner. Eventually I opened up the Dev Tools and added some CSS to hide the banner. The link was revealed and I could continue with my application
The flip side of this is local government technology. Truly some of the worst crimes against web development have been committed by local councils, or rather their outsourcing partners.
The service that takes that crown in my experience is tarantopermits.com, a parking permit management system that fills me with rage just thinking about it.
Well, they probably want to be able to update them as things change without waiting so many weeks on a ticket to central IT. I can't imagine they're doing anything unique though, so the best of both worlds could be central IT providing tools and managed hosting.
It takes the piss that you have to pay to park outside your own house anyway.
I mean, a nominal fee enough to correlate car registration with owners address, but not £210 like google told me it costs in Wandsworth. I bet about £10 of that goes to the council.
I've called UX designers out a couple times on the aesthetical complexity of their designs: if you award GOV.UK's quality a prize [0], why don't you mimic them instead of Google?
The GOVUK deliberately bare branding serves a purpose similar to the old Tesco Value branding: to make it look austere. If it looked luxurious people would be more likely to complain about taxpayer's money being wasted.
Companies need branding because they're trying to stand out from the crowd. To be distinctive and memorable, so you think of them and trust them when making buying decisions.
Governments generally don't have that requirement. So GDS doesn't need fancy branding and other concerns can take priority. It's remarkably refreshing.
It would have been so easy to just cargo-cult whatever is fashionable in the private sector. It's kinda miraculous they didn't. A mark of thoughtful, self-confident professionals. Bravo!
There was actually a lot of pushback against the austere aesthetic by government ministers - they wanted fancy looking photo banners and pretty things. This was pushed back on in the name of making something functional the prioritizes users.
I moved there from the US (and since then I've moved back). The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying and considered a very nice and challenging job that great programmers coveted. At least that was my impression when a very good systems engineer workmate left my company to start working for gov.uk. I do wish there was a similar system in the US as I would find public service a rewarding field to work in in general.
As someone from the UK, with friends who work as programmers in both the public and private sectors, I'm not sure what you're saying is true. It's definitely not highly paying to work for the government, although "relatively" may be doing the heavy lifting in that sentence.
I'm going off what I was told when I expressed surprise that such a good engineer would go for government work. Looking online it looks like they pay about median for a software engineer in London. And yeah, relatively here is basically meaning I was surprised you didn't have to take a pay cut to work for the government.
Unfortunately this is not true at all (at least for the past decade or more). There are definitely some really high quality people working for GDS, but for the life of me I have no idea how they keep them. Civil Service salaries are extremely low compared to industry rates, and the perks (such as pensions) aren't nearly as good as they used to be.
I have a friend who is a civil servant (ONS). She would be the first to concede that salaries are low but there are other benefits that compensate. Working from home 3 days a week, generous time off in lieu for the odd extra hours worked and so on.
I should add she is late 50's and the prospect of finding work elsewhere in a comparable role would be very unlikely.
That's the same in Spain, the key is that public employees generally speaking can't be fired for performance reasons. That is the ultimate workplace in a country of 20%+ unemployment.
More generally for federal and state/local government opportunities to use your technology expertise to make a difference, these folks are excellent: https://techtalentproject.org/tech-talent/
The problem with working in the government/nonprofit sphere is that you will always be treated as second fiddle/grunt work to the real movers and shakers.
I mean just look at the breakdown of who runs that “tech talent project” to see what I mean. In the industry, ideally, decisions are being made and executed by other technical people. It’s part of what has made Silicon Valley so uber successful.
This is definitely not true. Developers are better off in the private sector and I've never heard of any developer regard working for the government as coveted or prestigious.
> The main surprise was learning that working for the government is relatively high paying
It's middle of the tree at best. I'm sure you can find people for whom it's well paying, but the recruiters from UK gov departments that regularly contact me keep trying to sell me on the benefits of jobs where the upper salary band is less than half of what I earn.
I would say that this is true for the breed of programmers that like to help other people, who I respect over anyone who goes for higher paying work. Gov.uk has some real stars associated with it
Proving your id: passport or ID card, 'new' driving license, domestic bill.
There's a lot of ex-pats don't have the last two.
Repeatedly being told to log in to the site is a pain if its impossible.
Extremely well designed, though.
I’m guessing that’s similar to what we have in Canada - which is essentially sign on through a banking provider? A couple provinces have their own sign on system with their services card now too - BC included.
Australia's somewhat similar too. I wouldn't call our government services optimal nor "simple", but it's clear they're all operating on the same design principles. At the very least it inspires confidence that they're operating on roughly the same guidelines at federal and state levels.
If you stay around long enough you'll accumulate a few different log-in id's and find yourself redirected to legacy pages with no way of finding your way back.
The GOV.uk team loves moving things forward and leaving an awful lot of guff behind.
When I was living in the UK I thought so to, but when I moved to another country (Poland) I realised 3 huge shortcoming of the UK's online gov system (perhaps they fixed it by now, I moved 6 years ago). These were: a unified way to authenticate oneself to all gov services, a way to sign electronic forms/documents in a legally binding way without having to buy a personal certificate and a establishing a standard "document submission receipt" that proves what and when you submitted.
I'll start why this really matters from the last item. Even after my move I kept my UK company for a while, I was making regular electronic VAT submissions until sometime in July 2021 I decided to deregister my company's VAT. I did that via HMRC's online form. In December I logged in to check to find out that any record of me doing that evaporated, and now I had an "estimated" VAT bill of around £5k. I submitted a zero return for the previous quarter I should've been deregister in and after I rang HMRC and 2 weeks later the balance "I owed" dropped to zero. I deregistered again and this time "it worked". However, I had no way whatsoever to prove I indeed deregistered before. The person I spoke to on the phone that day decided my story believable so I didn't get any fines. What if they had a worse day? Ability to reliably prove you submitted government documents when you say you did is extremely important. In the country I now live in(Poland) you get a cryptographically signed XML document you can use as proof. You get one from any level of government you submit stuff to online (taxes, local councils anything). There is an online service you can check the validity of such signature and the content is all readable with a text editor.
Then a way to electronically sign documents that is equivalent to your in person signature legally without any special equipment or software for free. And a way to authenticate oneself to government services(including national healthcare) Here any citizen (or a foreigner that registers) can do so with one "thing". There are few ways to authenticate, an app, an online bank account (all banks in the country support it), a national id with a nfc chip and a pin, or you go to a local council in person and they create an account for you with a usename/password +2FA(sms,or auth app). You can sign any document using an online service, there is a history of stuff you signed you can check and you have a "mailbox" you can use to receive documents instead of the post.
The system is mostly XML based and it uses ssl for signatures. I have no idea what they use in the backend (probably lots of java). One can also purchase certificates to use as a signature like in other EU countries. The government sites look reasonably modern with dynamic forms, but they deteriorate gracefully if all you want is to read them, but good luck getting forms to work without JS.
Personally I think they did a pretty good job with this system.
The digital signature thing is an extension of the overall document culture prevalent at least in Germany and Eastern Europe (or maybe continental Europe overall?).
From what I saw, their legal and bureaucratic systems are geared to try to authenticate everything via physical means, be it signatures (that are supposed to be unique and not just an expression of intent), wet stamps, or (recently) digital signatures. On the contrary, UK works on trust and its legal systems, so you can (theoretically) sign a large money contract with a cross on a napkin, you can open a bank account with a letter from a "a person of good standing in their community" without ever holding a government issued ID, and you can sign contracts with a simple checkbox.
I really enjoy the latter. It's a bit messier, but also feels more humane.
