Get in there!

[RichardCranium]

It seems I am the only one who read this story and though of £ signs...

Who cares about civil liberties when there is cash to be made?! Am I the only real contractor on this board?

Give over. You won't make any money out of it.

EDS / IBM / Fujitsu / SCC / etc. will get the contract, or bits of it shared between them, and they will farm it out to India to do the work.

So it will be - just like every other large government IT project - truckloads of UK taxpayer's cash going to Merkin shareholders and a few vanloads to Indian software house owners and a few pennies to Indian graduates.

You'll get bugger all except all your personal data processed in India where it can be sold to the Russian mafia to clean out your accounts and there's nothing you can do about it because it happened outside the EU.

Not that that matters since the business case (not for public scrutiny of course) includes the income predicted from 'sharing' the data with reputable organisations such insurance companies, banks, credit-checking companies, the CIA and so on.

To be loging in pleese :__________

Natoinal Screwupitty Numberings pleese :____________

Be enterings password here pleese :__________

Please be holding while we emailing this informations in the plain
texts to the big computer.

[swamp]

It seems I am the only one who read this story and though of £ signs...

Who cares about civil liberties when there is cash to be made?! Am I the only real contractor on this board?

[threaded]

Outstanding comment from a poster on /.

Did anyone else think this was talking about the British Government reinstating a nationalized Geocities?

[NickFitz]

...the Times reported...

So we have The Telegraph reporting something that The Times reported that is possibly going to happen on Monday.

I remember when journalists reported what had happened, and didn't just copy it from another newspaper - well, not all the time

[thunderlizard]

Any decent private organisation providing disparate services would have done that ages ago (at least, tried to...I still don't know why I have separate gas and leccy accounts with the same provider). As long as they don't use it as an excuse for a data-grab.

The proof of the pudding's in the eating of course. And why are we still listening to the PM's announcements? Is he going to code the whole thing up himself from an opposition back bench?

[Board Game Geek]

Aye, an ID card to authenticate and login with a pin, much like the smartcards we use in the NHS for Choose and Book, etc.

Sounds like a clever way to sneak in ID Cards at a later date. Get the system rolled out, have a few "staged" horror stories, so the government says "Oh, sorry, we messed up. Here, smartcards will protect you all" and Sun readers will buy it.

The irony being, the whole path to ID cards was planned in the first place.

Hmm. What about citizens having problems logging in at home ?

Easy...call the Government IT Helpdesk, and they can direct you to a web page where they can start a remote session with your PC.

This whole idea sucks big donkey's wotsits.

[norrahe]

Bob will get more than a sniff though

too true

[HairyArsedBloke]

To access it you'll need to have and Id card.

Soon you'll not be able to access any of the services without going through the website, so the Id becomes de facto compulsory.

[threaded]

There is only one company I know of that has done this successfully,

they're based in Denmark

did the system for the Danish government

and might be one of the more esteemed posters plan Bs.

[Zippy]

Bob will get more than a sniff though

[swamp]

Everyone in the country is to be given a personalised webpage for accessing Government services within a year as part of a plan to save billions of pounds by putting all public services online, Gordon Brown is to announce.

The Prime Minister has previously hailed the potential for the internet to slash the costs of delivering services by reducing paper forms, face-to-face contact with officials, postage, phone calls and building costs.

He is now set to use a speech on Monday to unveil plans to give every voter a unique identifier allowing them to apply for school places, book GP appointments, claim benefits, get a new passport, pay council tax or register a car.

Within another three years, the Times reported, the secure site would include a Facebook-style interactive service allowing people to ask medical advice of their doctor or consult their children's teachers.

The move could see the closure of job centres and physical offices dealing with tax, vehicle licensing, passports and housing benefit within 10 years as services were offered through a single digital ''gateway'', Downing Street sources told the newspaper.

Private firms such as Amazon could be involved in a bid to make the processes as simple as possible, it said.

But the proposals came under fire from union leaders who complained that thousands of public sector workers would be made jobless and pointed to the Government's poor record of handling personal data.

Questions have also been raised about the impact on some older people unable to use the internet.

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said: ''Cutting public services is not only bad for the public who use services but also the economy as we are pushing people who provide valuable services on the dole.''

Among the Prime Minister's advisers on the drive to put services online is world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

''I don't want to go to a government office to do a government thing. It should all be online. That saves time for people and it saves money for the Government - the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many times more than it costs to process something electronically,'' he told the newspaper.

''There will come a point where you don't need all the physical offices any more.''

The Tories are also exploring ways to switch services to the web.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...l-webpage.html

----

So long as Bob doesn't get a sniff then there is some serious KERCHING! to be had here. Especially for those of us with SC