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Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

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Re: Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

#51

Post by jonathantf2 »

ta1243 wrote: post #38
jonathantf2 wrote: post #32

These things have never worked for me, the camera goes up and down like mad for a minute then I have to go and see a person. What a waste of time

The ones at Paris last year on Eurostar were so slow they were takeing at least 45, but with retries average of about 60 seconds to process someone. I think there were 5. There was only 1 train an hour leaving, but the trains had 900 seats. You can see the problem. With airports, I used to come in to Heathrow 50 times a year. There was a great system called Iris, you literally walked up and walked through, barely nee…

Last time I used them was at Gare du Nord, most of the people on our train had to go see the one guy to manually review the passport.

Re: Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

#52

Post by blibble »

PaulAJ wrote: post #42
blibble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the problem is the contract procurement rules, which are written so only large companies are capable of bidding a legacy of EU membership, but I doubt the government has any will to change it

During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.

clearly there's a middle ground

Re: Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

#54

Post by lozenge »

PaulAJ wrote: post #42
blibble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the problem is the contract procurement rules, which are written so only large companies are capable of bidding a legacy of EU membership, but I doubt the government has any will to change it

During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.

There have also been huge corruption scandals before and after COVID. Grift will find a way.

Re: Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

#56

Post by Nextgrid »

Isolus wrote: post #50
danpalmer wrote: post #17

No insight here, but I've always wondered if the e-gates are doing anything "clever" with the camera, or if they're just connecting you to some call-centre in Swindon where your face and passport details pop up in front of someone with a lot less training than traditional border security. It might be doing facial recognition, but it feels too reliable for the level of facial recognition I expect a consultancy could p…

I don't know anything about this particular case, but about these systems in general. They can work without any operator or network connection. They verify that you have a valid passport and that the taken image (face) matches the one stored in your passport. But for modern passports they use Extended Access Control which requires up to date terminal certificates to access the data (you have to update them in the ran…

> But for modern passports they use Extended Access Control which requires up to date terminal certificates to access the data (you have to update them in the range of days

Passports don't know the current time and thus can't tell whether the presented certificate is within its validity range (as in a malicious attacker could feed an expired certificate as well as a fake "current time" value to make it appear valid), so why are those certificates short-lived?

Re: Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

#57

Post by Isolus »

Nextgrid wrote: post #56
Isolus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about this particular case, but about these systems in general. They can work without any operator or network connection. They verify that you have a valid passport and that the taken image (face) matches the one stored in your passport. But for modern passports they use Extended Access Control which requires up to date terminal certificates to access the data (you have to update them in the ran…

> But for modern passports they use Extended Access Control which requires up to date terminal certificates to access the data (you have to update them in the range of days Passports don't know the current time and thus can't tell whether the presented certificate is within its validity range (as in a malicious attacker could feed an expired certificate as well as a fake "current time" value to make it appear valid),…

Whenever you present a certificate to the passport, its current time is updated by the "valid from" value if it's newer then the current time.

It's not perfect but if you started you trip in another country with such a system and where a more recent certificate was used, your passport will deny access.

Re: Ask HN: Cause of UK e-gates outage?

#58

Post by KronisLV »

PaulAJ wrote: post #42
blibble wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot of the problem is the contract procurement rules, which are written so only large companies are capable of bidding a legacy of EU membership, but I doubt the government has any will to change it

During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.

> During COVID the government tried skipping those procurement rules in the interests of expediency. The result was a huge corruption scandal.

I don't think that this is the guaranteed outcome for all governments and situations.

In Latvia, the COVID-19 contract tracing application "Apturi Covid" wasn't developed with a bunch of buraucracy beforehand, but as a voluntary community effort between both different orgs and people. As a consequence, it was developed reasonably quickly, actually worked and was helpful (even if the user numbers weren't as great as expected, but that's besides the point): https://lv-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Apturi_Covid?...

I know this because I was a part of the developer team (the website in particular: https://apturicovid.lv/#en before handing it over to govt. once my participation was concluded) and it was actually encouraging to see how well professionals with a common goal can work together, as opposed to some of the less successful processes I've seen. In particular, our e-health platform was once of those serious government projects with lots of bureaucracy, yet still didn't work after many millions in investments: https://www-lsm-lv.translate.goog/raksts/zinas/zinu-analize/...

(I've mentioned this previously, but the point still stands and the contrast is very apparent)

I don't see why a slightly more streamlined, iterative and goal oriented process couldn't work for commercial software projects, even in the public sector. Of course, if the clients don't know what they want and change their requirements whenever new people come into the office (new management), no particular process is going to save you. Nor will you be successful when people quite frankly don't care about shipping software that works and instead of answering your questions just throw a PDF with 200 pages at you, that doesn't provide the actual answer either.

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