The Weekly Round-Up: 28.11.08

The national ID card scheme has had its detractors. Quite a few, actually. In fact, the only people who aren't detractors are the ministers promoting it - but they hardly count when you consider they'll be moved to a different department within a year and have some other deeply unpopular policy initiative to worry about.

Just read any article on ID cards on silicon.com about the scheme, you'll see. The list of reader comments about the scheme is very long, and very short on people who think the cards are a smart idea.

And for good reason: it's a terrible idea (almost as bad as doing this) that has been pushed ahead with little thought of the consequences of spending hundreds of millions of pounds on something that is unlikely to work.

Need evidence? No problem. Consider the latest news on the scheme this week.

The first UK ID cards will be of limited use because the government has yet to reveal a timetable for the deployment of scanners capable of reading the clever high-tech biometric data. That would be a problem but where there's a problem there's a solution. In fact there are two but neither of them are very good.

It's quite simple really. You look at the card and then look at the person and if they look like the kind of person described on the card then they're probably the same people. Brilliant, eh?

But that's not all. Hell no, there's another way you can check if the card is genuine - you just give it a flick.

That's according to Phil Booth national co-ordinator of ID card pressure group NO2ID who told silicon.com that employers who doubted the authenticity of the card had been told to flick it to check for a distinctive sound.

"This is the mechanism by which employers are supposed to be checking a worker's identity - it is farcical," he said. And who's the Round-Up to argue?

What the 'distinctive sound' might be is a mystery to the Round-Up - a hollow sounding ring for fraudulent cards, perhaps? Or if it's a genuine card it could chime out the opening chords to 'Rule Britannia'.

Booth seethed: "It makes a lie of all these grandiose claims about biometrics if there is not the infrastructure to back it up."

You can stop right there, Phil. You had the Round-Up at 'farcical'...

Grey-suited denizens of Whitehall are confused enough as it is, flicking ID cards against their ears, without adding software upgrades into the mix.

MPs, peers and civil servants are having a hell of a time getting by with Microsoft Word. So what's new, you might ask. Tuning forks as it happens but that gag is just sooo last section.

The civil servants in question are struggling to deal with compatibility between documents produced in Word 2003 and 2007 formats. Much in the same way the rest of the country is confused about policy initiatives launched over the same period.

Happily, Microsoft is working with Westminster tech chiefs after politicians and peers complained of being unable to open the latest Word documents. And presumably they were not talking about the paper clip, which seems to be working fine:

"Looks like you're trying to write an ill-thought-out technology-based policy initiative on a national security scheme. Would you like help:

1. Generating enough snake oil?
2. Finding someone to blame when it all goes wrong?
3. Over-inflating budgets?"

There is a solution - a fix can be downloaded - but as Lord Methuen writes in an annual committee report: "A program can be downloaded to read the documents but obviously not everybody knows how to do this." Followed by a stream of random wingdings characters and 200 blank pages, the Round-Up likes to imagine.

It also transpires that politicos have gone mad for IT with a long list of outrageous requests. Happily for them they'll soon be able to download said patch from anywhere they choose.

Not content with having email accounts of Herculean proportions and wi-fi in every nook and crevice of Whitehall, MPs are also lobbying to be able to place clips of themselves in the House of Commons on YouTube. In addition, members and peers want to embed official Parliamentary video on their personal websites. Hark at them.

It's encouraging to see our government embracing technology with such gusto, but as a wise man* once said: "With great power comes great responsibility."

(*Spider-Man's Uncle Ben)

We're just a year on from the HMRC missing CDs debacle (the department is still happy to receive those CDs if you do find them) so maybe things have changed. Maybe government employees can be trusted with all the high tech kit and privileges.

Wait. What's that? Yet more big government data breaches on the way? Well that's something to look forward to in the new year.

Plus ça change...

Apple has already been told off by the Advertising Standards Agency once this year over its iPhone advertising.

Back in August the company's ad about the iPhone accessing 'all the internet' was banned after it was pointed out that the device is incompatible with Flash content. Bad Apple.

This week the company has again had its knuckles rapped over claims that the iPhone's 3G web browsing speeds are "really fast". Once is unfortunate, twice is just careless.

The complaints are aimed at the apparent speed with which the iPhone downloads web content over third-generation networks in an advert. Almost instantaneous, in case you are wondering. This, apparently, is misrepresenting the product's browsing speed. As an iPhone 3G owner the Round-Up can concur.

Apple argued that the ads were meant to demonstrate the improvement in speed of the iPhone 3G over its Edge predecessor but the complaint fell on deaf ears. The company has been ordered to pull the offending advert.

This sets a worrying precedent for advertising creative types. Are advertisers really going to have to avoid all hyperbole and flights of whimsy from now on? After all, we had Microsoft Vista and its big ‘Wow'…

In other news this week.

Feeling lucky? Fancy a chance at winning a third-generation iPod Nano? Have a crack at the fantastic competition silicon.com is running - answer seven questions about silicon.com for your chance to win one of three 4GB third-generation iPod Nanos. Find out more about the competition here.

Read about one man's journey of discovery as he leaves behind Firefox and hurls himself headlong into the brave new world offered by Google Chrome.

Not that the search giant's entry into the increasingly crowded browser market will make much difference as someone else thinks Microsoft Internet Explorer holds one trump card in the browser wars.

Until next week, you can prove yourself funnier than the next man or woman by entering our caption competition. What have you got to lose? Dignity? Pah!