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United Kingdom Firefox Government Internet Explorer Security The Internet Your Rights Online

UK Licensing Site Requires MSIE Emulation, But Won't Work With MSIE 158

Anne Thwacks writes The British Government web site for applying for for a licence to be a security guard requires a plugin providing Internet Explorer emulation on Firefox to login and apply for a licence. It won't work with Firefox without the add-on, but it also wont work with Internet Explorer! (I tried Win XP and Win7 Professional). The error message says "You have more than one browser window open on the same internet connection," (I didn't) and "to avoid this problem, close your browser and reopen it." I did. No change.

I tried three different computers, with three different OSes. Still no change. I contacted their tech support and they said "Yes ... a lot of users complain about this. We have known about it since September, and are working on a fix! Meanwhile, we have instructions on how to use the "Fire IE" plugin to get round the problem." Eventually, I got this to work on Win7pro. (The plugin will not work on Linux). The instructions require a very old version of the plugin, and a bit of trial and error is needed to get it to work with the current one. How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"
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UK Licensing Site Requires MSIE Emulation, But Won't Work With MSIE

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  • by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @03:25AM (#49360037) Homepage Journal

    Welcome to government procurement.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      "Welcome to government procurement."

      If you think this is bad, you'd be horrified at the systems in many banks.

      • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

        In my opinion governments should require that their sites are passing the HTML Validator [w3.org] and CSS validator [w3.org] tests.

        Of course - it won't help for JavaScript dependencies (or the horror vbscript that's entirely IE specific).

        • In my opinion governments should require that their sites are passing the HTML Validator and CSS validator tests.

          Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?

          This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.

          Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? I

          • Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up.

            Were you doing websites 10 or 15 years ago? I was. Browser compatibility today is phenomenal in comparison. No, it's not perfect, or even wonderful... except when you compare to then.

            HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.

            I agree. Please remind Congress about this in re: the U.S. Constitution.

            Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...

            If it breaks my JS or CSS, I won't use it unless the stakeholder absolutely insists. And then I'll try to talk them out of it.

            • Were you doing websites 10 or 15 years ago? I was. Browser compatibility today is phenomenal in comparison.

              Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

              An example of useful

              • Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects

                Correct. That's why you don't use newer features until they're absorbed by the standard.

                But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise.

                What I meant was: if they don't validate. I didn't mean "break" in the sense that they don't work.

                You may not care for the practice, but nothing leaves my hands into production until it validates, except when the stakeholder insists on using something that won't.

                • That's why you don't use newer features until they're absorbed by the standard.

                  Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the

                  • Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

                    Please explain what this has to do with validation, which I thought was the topic under discussion?

                    But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

                    Exactly what it is supposed to do: assurance that it will work as built across all major browsers.

                    Believe it or not, a majority of big-name sites are still using Flash, along with open-source JS players.

                    It seems to me you're complaining that using new features that aren't yet standardized, aren't yet standardized. I can sympathize with your frustration, but then if you don't like it, don't use them.

                    Br

                    • Believe it or not, a majority of big-name sites are still using Flash, along with open-source JS players.

                      Exactly. Sites now have to provide the same functionality twice, because the browsers have made such a mess of standardisation that you can't rely on a single implementation to actually work portably.

                      It seems to me you're complaining that using new features that aren't yet standardized, aren't yet standardized. I can sympathize with your frustration, but then if you don't like it, don't use them.

                      Unfortunately, in the real world, that is often not an option. If your client wants multimedia elements on their site, you're going to need HTML5 multimedia elements despite the fact that numerous aspects of how they work aren't standardised. And just to be clear, this is stuff that has been available in browse

  • They've known about the problem since September and still haven't fixed it? If they were a private company they'd be out of business by now.

    • by DamonHD ( 794830 ) <d@hd.org> on Saturday March 28, 2015 @03:45AM (#49360099) Homepage

      Uh no, sadly.

      For example, Vodafone's "Mobile Broadband" dongles have apparently failed to work with OS X Yosemite (ie the current version) for a similar length of time for me and many others (the software crashes immediately) and Vodafone's 3rd-line tech support admits there is no fix (the person I spoke to is a Mac user himself and was rather embarrassed), but apparently Vodafone is happy to go on charging for the service and deflecting efforts to get a resolution.

      eg http://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5... [vodafone.co.uk]

      So, although I have been a generally happy customer for most of Vodafone's existence I think, in this aspect they share all the aspects of incompetence that certain people assume to be the sole preserve of government.

      I cancelled service and a refund is very very slowly happening. (Vodafone gives you a credit but somehow fails to apply it to the account, as a matter of routine, so goes on taking new money.)

      Rgds

      Damon

      • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28, 2015 @04:31AM (#49360189)

        This government is evil perspective is just an effect of brainless propaganda mostly from the land of the free. In reality the bigger the organisation the bigger its problems with efficiency. This does not mean there are no well done government projects nor daoes it mean all private enterprise is perfect. This seems to be a general problem with black and white vision not only techie weirdos have. I like simple b&w approach too, it makes life 'easier'.

        • by Anonymous Coward

          The government is not intentionally evil, but it is more susceptible to inefficiency / incompetence. Coupled with the fact that large organizations without proper oversight measures tend to be sociopathic / idiopathic (however unintentionally), and we have a real problem on our hands.

          • by Anonymous Coward

            No, its not different. Study history and learn about religion. Study economics and learn about big business. Oh hell, just use windows ME....how's that for a case study of big business making a terrible product?

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The difference between government and big business is that if a business doesn't meet your needs you can go to a competitor that does, but if the government doesn't meet your needs you still have to keep giving them your money.

          The business provides an service that you can choose whether or not to take, while the government will rob you of your freedom and your possessions if you fail to pay them for their services.

          It's not brainless propaganda, any organisation that threatens to do you harm if you refuse to

        • It's the monkeysphere [cracked.com] in action. The right will complain about the "evil" government, while the left make the same complaints about "evil" big business. Whether govt or big business, they'll all just groups of people like us. And as you say the bigger they are, the harder they are to manage, and therefore require more internal processes to maintain order, the side effect of which is roadblocks to efficiency.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Cancelling is a right you have. Use it. And request a chargeback with the bank. If Vodaphone want to prove you owed them the money, they need to prove it, rather than let you wait while they keep your money.

      • It's 2015, and the same still goes for a lot of equipment with built in web interfaces. Web cams, printers, routers, stuff like that. Try and access them with anything other than IE, and they won't work.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        Yep, this is normal service in the UK. My broadband has been buggered since October, still no date for a fix. The government is no worse than, say, the average bank.

        • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          Have you tried ofcom/adjudicator, they sorted out my beef with Virgin Media pretty quickly (couple of months total).

          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

            I think that's the next step now. They can't seem to fix this problem by themselves, they need to be forced.

      • The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.

        You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with so

      • BT's one bill website won't allow you to download the bill (a zip file) unless you use IE. All it has is a list of all your bills, but for some reason they use some fucked up JavaScript to start the download via a link, rather than using the actual href. Idiots.

    • It's fun to wallow in bottomless pits of money.

    • The game like this was inspired by a bank
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • They've known about the problem since September and still haven't fixed it? If they were a private company they'd be out of business by now.

      Also, only since September? Maybe they mean September 2009 or something?

  • I expect that the people asking for this had no real idea about what they wanted and the specification was loaded with also sorts of silly guff and left out the serious needs and the developers did the quickest stupidest thing.

  • by Malfuros the Wizard ( 3429185 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @03:37AM (#49360075)
    The people who developed the site are idiots... I was working with a client recently and discovered they had a problem with a web site they had to use. They were on IE11 and the web site only works with IE9 and I really do mean IE9 and nothing else. The service provider tech support said the solution was they would have to uninstall IE11 and then install IE9 Idiots, there is no other way of describing it, utter idiots. There is no good excuse for a website not to work in all major browsers, it really is that simple but then I'm just a guy who has to make sure the websites he develops work properly in order to get paid, these companies that provide websites for government departments at costs of millions or billions can get away with stupid shit like this because of the contracts they create.
    • Apologies for the wall of text btw, Slashdot mangles my posts for some reason even though I type them out with line breaks.
      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The br html tag inserts breaks.
        Like that (single tag).

        Or this (double tag).
        • Though, this is really an arcane (read: 1995) way to write text posts. When I first started posting again on Slashdot I thought, "Wait, is this really the only way to post?"

          You'd think everyone would use Markdown or some variation of it by now. Well, everyone does except Slashdot. And I still frequent a web forum designed in 1999, and it supports forum markup.

          I wonder if they never changed because they think their system is better, or they just don't want to devote the resources. Or perhaps they like it
      • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Saturday March 28, 2015 @06:10AM (#49360401)

        "Apologies for the wall of text btw, Slashdot mangles my posts for some reason even though I type them out with line breaks."

        You need to use the IE emulation extension in Firefox for it to work.

      • html maybe?

        lib

    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @03:59AM (#49360121) Homepage Journal

      Even keeping Hanlon's razor in mind, there is a point where incompetence rises to such a level that it is indistinguishable from malice. It had to take a lot of work to create the incompatibilities described. Starting with even caring that more than one window is open. Even back in the stupid old days where Netscape users would actually get an error about a site being IE only, it generally would actually work if you simply impersonated IE in the client string.

      It can sometimes be hard to make a site look just so in all browsers, but it's equally hard to make it not work at all except in a single browser. Harder still to add a requirement for a particular version of a plugin. I wonder how many tens of percent less work it would have been to do it right or at least passably.

      • by swb ( 14022 )

        "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

        Sounds almost like a corollary to Clark's third law.

        • by dbIII ( 701233 )
          Or a frequent Lem plot based on a thinly disguised cold war Eastern Europe.
          • I didn't know what "Lem" is so I did a search for it. The first link that came up was for a sausage stuffer. Somehow appropriate.
            • by dbIII ( 701233 )
              Stanisaw Lem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem)
              He was so prolific that in 1974 Phillip K. Dick wrote a letter to the FBI containing the following:

              For an Iron Curtain Party group - Lem is probably a composite committee rather than an individual, since he writes in several styles and sometimes reads foreign, to him, languages and sometimes does not - to gain monopoly positions of power from which they can control opinion through criticism and pedagogic essays is a threat to our whole field of s

      • Ah, Grey's Law [wikipedia.org]: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      The UK govt farms out just about all central govt development to US companies, particularly those that have a history of utter failures. You have to ask why UK officials are happy to repeatedly give UK work and projects to US corporations (who probably just use India cheapshit code factories). Isn't it about time there was an investigation into this? "Lobbying" is illegal in the UK, it's called accepting a bribe.

    • The people who developed the site are idiots... I was working with a client recently and discovered they had a problem with a web site they had to use. They were on IE11 and the web site only works with IE9 and I really do mean IE9 and nothing else. The service provider tech support said the solution was they would have to uninstall IE11 and then install IE9 Idiots, there is no other way of describing it, utter idiots. There is no good excuse for a website not to work in all major browsers, it really is that simple but then I'm just a guy who has to make sure the websites he develops work properly in order to get paid, these companies that provide websites for government departments at costs of millions or billions can get away with stupid shit like this because of the contracts they create.

      You hit the nail on the head..... Somebody is still paying these guys, even thou there work isn't! The power of the purse is the answer.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Hit f 12 and select IE 9 under emulation. You can also create a go in AD to put that site in IE 9 mode. That way you can keep IE 11

    • by snsh ( 968808 )

      The problem is apathy, not incompetence. The site (or more accurately, the middleware powering the site) was probably built for IE5/6, which was not at all uncommon ten years ago when "everyone" (not literally, but I know you know what I mean) had IE. The software did the job for so long that the people in government let it run and turned a deaf ear to the distress it caused for constituents. It's easier to tell constituents to go find IE9 than to upgrade the system. They also fall into the "the perfect

  • by hcs_$reboot ( 1536101 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @03:41AM (#49360085)
    Are you saying the civil service is bad and incompetent in the UK? I'm afraid it's the case in most European countries. This is a good test actually: do you disapprove their slowness, incompetence and laziness (to name a few)? If 'yes', then 1) you're normal 2) you're (probably) competent and 3) don't work there.
    • From the sound of it, I'd be more likely to bet that the government put out bids to private contractors and the low-bid (winning) contractor saved money by using the cheapest/easiest solution available to them at the time.

      • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

        From the sound of it, I'd be more likely to bet that the government put out bids to private contractors and the low-bid (winning) contractor saved money by using the cheapest/easiest solution available to them at the time.

        Isn't that kind of a no-win situation? If they choose a better contractor who does things right they're going to spend more. Then, if it comes out there was someone offering to do the job for less people will say the administration wasted taxpayer money, or accuse them of having some sort of kickback/backroom deal with the company that was given the contract, etc. They wont know that the one awarded the contract was the better choice (because the hacks were never given the opportunity to show their incompet

        • Yes, it is.

          But your solution is where the $500 hammers come from.

          There really IS no way to win.

          Although making an application dependent on any facet of Internet Explorer probably violates some standard of human decency, contract requirements or not.

  • by Hognoxious ( 631665 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @04:01AM (#49360123) Homepage Journal

    If you can make it work, you passed!

    On the other hand, you're a hacker and probably a terrorist. So you failed.

    • by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      Were it an application for an IT security role, in the style of those challenges Google and GCHQ have used, then you might have a point and they might have a rather lame excuse. Sadly, this is an application for security of the knuckle dragging variety, and to make matters worse the application process has also been shown to be completely unfit for purpose as just about anyone can successfully apply for a license, including those who should absolutely be prevented from doing so.

      When you've got a governm
  • by ruir ( 2709173 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @04:07AM (#49360137)
    Are you expecting anything done for and by the government to live up to your standards? shame on you?
  • by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @04:58AM (#49360245)
    First, they are applying security through obscurity. Since it's pre-broken, only those who can think out of the box will be able to apply.

    Second, it's a great way to screen applicants. Only those who are truly adept and motivated will get through this barrier to entry.

    I think this is the wave of the future. Employers can put up broken application sites and only look at the candidates that can figure it out. They don't even have to spend much to make it bad in the first place. Just outsource it to the lowest bidder, preferably in a country with a different language. Heck, have them do it in their native language and then apply some cheap ass internationalization package.

    All this needs is a catchy name that sounds cool like "scrum" or "cloud scale" and it will become the next big thing. There will be certificate programs in whatever it's called and "Whatever it's called for Dummies". Wired and the Wall Street Journal will write articles. Hop on that bandwagon now and make those big bucks!

    • ISIL have good techies, they will be able to get their candidates to jump through the hoops.

    • by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @08:32AM (#49360727) Homepage

      My son is applying for a computer science program at a fairly prestigious university. If you try to follow the links that ought to lead to the online application process, at least one of them is broken - it links to an internal server instead of to the public website. You can look at the URL and figure out what it ought to have been, based on other URLs on the site. Accident? Or pre-filtering their applicants?

      But require IE? Worse, a Firefox emulation of IE? No, that's a different message. That's telling good applicants "you do not want to work here"...

  • by ks9208661 ( 1862000 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @05:45AM (#49360347)
    ... are people who still use PCs from the 90s, most likely from Eastern Europe, so UKIP can continue complaining about foreigners stealing jobs away from the Brits.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Their just old.

    My parents wouldn't be able to setup a website either, I make websites for a living, I am very good, they would never hire me for anything.

    The government is much the same way, they want a web developer who is 70 years old otherwise they wouldn't trust them.

    Likewise, they absolutely trust any company or name brand that will speak to them. They will not check for work quality because they do not understand the underlying code and architecture so they have no ability to judge.

    We hear a whole lo

    • by fhage ( 596871 )

      Their just old.

      [... whine... whaaa ... ]

      There is no solution, there is no fix or magic arrow, and all the bitching of the world won't make them die any faster.

      Maybe, instead of focusing all your adolescent angst on your elders, take the time to attend public meetings and vote.
      Yeah, we know; you're too busy to do that. Please, stay focused on your little screen while we change the world.

    • Thats why the VA cannot figure out how to use a computer

      Since when? The US Department of Veterans' Affairs was among the first to adopt an electronic health record system. In the late 1970s, it began to develop the MUMPS-powered VistA system [wikipedia.org] now used by nearly half of all U.S. hospitals with electronic health records. And VistA is free software.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Have you tried putting the site in question into IE's "Compatibility Settings" in the menu? The client string was switched to not-IE after IE9. Putting a site into the compatibility settings switches it back. I've had to do this to make several flavors of web-served VPNs serve the right DLLs when using IE. Not sure why the client string got switched, I think they changed some of the guts back to Netscape/Mozilla pieces in IE10+. Anyway, give it a try. Then tell the UK if it works.

  • If a government site needs more than elinks to access it's broken. WTF could they possibly need a plugin for? Auth nope that is baseline. Forms again been here forever.

    We need a deaf blind QA tester core if they can not easily use the site it's broken.

    • We need a deaf blind QA tester core if they can not easily use the site it's broken.

      How would a site tell 100 deafblind testers behind the same NAT from a bot?

      • Common knowledge questions or basic math word problems off the top of my head. How many gov web sites need to allow psudo-anonymous comments?

        Computer not great as solving the classic:
        Johnny has a dozen apples, he eats one. Johnny has 10 class mates he is friends with 6 of them. He gives an apple to every classmate does he have any left for his teacher?

  • by tompaulco ( 629533 ) on Saturday March 28, 2015 @08:34AM (#49360737) Homepage Journal
    When I was recently laid off and applied for unemployment, I discovered that signing up for unemployment requires MSIE. Well, a lot of sites say that, so i tried it in Firefox. It didn't work, the workflow just went in circles. Then I tried it in MSIE and found the same thing. However, when i read very carefully, I noticed that it said that it had to be a specific, no longer supported version of MSIE. I set the compatibility level to that version, and then it worked. But I am sure everybody that has been laid off from work knows how to override the automatic updating of MSIE and set the compatibility level back to an older version.
  • Get rid of that fancy schmancy computer that you use with "modern" stuff or "Apple". Pick up a nice Vista machine that won't install any version of IE newer than IE9. Problem solved!
  • Everything else is just a distraction
  • ...you aren't dealing with educational software.

  • If I understand the situation this government site has the best security you can get: build web pages that can't be loaded. No security problems at all.
  • The error message says "You have more than one browser window open on the same internet connection," (I didn't) and "to avoid this problem, close your browser and reopen it." I did. No change.

    Why do they care how many browser windows are open? On the same Internet connection? Why is this a "problem"? How would closing *your* browser fix the issue, if the other window(s) is/are open on another system sharing your "Internet connection"? (Perhaps you or someone upstream is using some sort of NAT.) And, finally, why do they care what browser you're using simply to logon?

    • Perhaps you or someone upstream is using some sort of NAT.

      You mean everyone else in the same Security Guard training school? Surely there is a good chance of that being the case!

      why do they care what browser you're using simply to logon?

      If they actually cared there probably would not actually be a problem.

  • They appear to have fixed the problem [the-sia.org.uk] by taking the entire application offline. Brill[i]ant!

    This site is undergoing scheduled maintenance.

    Our licensing site will be unavailable every weekend in March while we upgrade our systems. Affected services will include:

    The online elements of our licence application process
    The application status checker
    The company licence checker
    The batch application tracker

    • by pbhj ( 607776 )

      Until very recently the trademark search from the UK government had office hours, it was turned off on weekends .. UK gov really don't seem to get how the internet works do they. Unless it's down for security problems then it should be up, presumably taking it down is necessary as modifications to the site aren't staged?

  • MSIE is notoriously incompatible between versions. If your version is too low, try a higher one (you'll need Win7 or higher to use IE9 or higher). If your version is too high, try emulation mode (within IE) of a lower version. It's hard to blame the techs when sites written for MSIE 8 completely break on MSIE11.
  • I had the adventure of installing XPsp2 from scratch once. That meant IE6. MSN(!!!!!) would crash IE6. I had to download Chrome. Just to download IE8 before I could update XP to sp3 (windows update wouldn't work at that point... had to be done through IE windows update site). Hard to blame the government if they had a perfectly designed site working for one version of the browser (IE6) and those versions of the browser stopped working even with the manufacturer's website. Imagine if they phones worked
    • But I bet the system and paperwork was written in 2004.

      You saw how much of a pain it was to upgrade? Think of 10 years ago when a default system came with IE 6? It just worked if you targeted for that. Nothing wrong as 90% of the world used it and it was assumed by now 100% of the web would be using IE forever since Netscape was gone. Seems foolish today but back then it was foolish to think differently.

      There were no standards. Only IE unless you wanted to double development efforts for no reason?? So as wi

  • "How can a government department concerned with security not get this sort of thing right?"

    Very funny.

    When did a government department of any kind ever get anything right? Especially when it concerns computers. Triply when it concerns security. See for example:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]

    etc., etc. passim.

    The truth of the matter is that politicians and civil servants tend to be highly non-technical, and very much focused on high-sounding (but misleading) talk. This is t

    • When did a government department of any kind ever get anything right? Especially when it concerns computers. Triply when it concerns security.

      You obviously haven't heard of the NSA...

  • Greetings!
    On behalf of Her Majesty's Special Security Services you have completed the level one security service selection process and you are hereby accepted as a level one Security Yeoman. You are here ordered to appear for further training and screening at a secret location code named 'The Village'. As per the software ELUA (you did read the EULA, didn't you?) you are hereby bound by both the public and classified sections of the official secrets act including section 4. You will be further briefed on

  • Their supported browser page tells they cope with IE 6, 7, 8 and Netscape 7.

    That looks like a joke, but I have already seen recent websites carrying this kind of requirements. Is there a modern framework that produce that?

  • This is called taking the piss. A schoolboy with a basic grasp of PHP could write them a website that worked. Until your website works, and works reliably, all else is optional.
  • Easy to stand up, difficult to maintain. The people who created this site probably were lowest-bidder IT contractors with little programming experience. The page template looks like it is doing a string comparison of the browser version against "6" to see if they need to load fixup code. This is probably just original boiler plate code provided by Microsoft; "10", "11", ... will cause this IE6 support code to get loaded which then makes things worse rather than better. The people who created this site a

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