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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?

#21

Underpaid third-world slave working for whatever shitty consultancy got the contract pushed the wrong button. It's "too sensitive to discuss" because it would be inconvenient to admit that the people who have privileged access to this system aren't paid enough to give a shit and are very vulnerable to bribery.

> whatever consultancy pushed the wrong button.

So, the usual then?

https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/02/british_airways_data_...

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

#22
post #18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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A good Indian or Nigerian engineer is just as good as a Californian or British one. But there are outsourcing companies who put junior developers on difficult projects with almost no support and then overwork them. It’s not racism or colonialism to say such people won’t produce high quality systems. It’s the rich exploiting the poor, rather than one country exploiting another. I have no idea whether any of this is re…

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

#23

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 have a full answer but what I observed is that there is always someone that is nearby and "in control".

The base I think works like this:

- you scan the passport

- you look at the camera

- your passport details & photo are sent to the control room with your live feed

- a guy looks at everything those details plus your immigration history and other info

- same guy decides to let you in or send you to a desk

This was particularly obvious in the old Gibraltar border where you could easily be the only person going through and so the agent had to do the routine just to let you pass.

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

#24

Re: e-gates shambles Fujitsu's contract runs from 4 September 2021 to 2024 https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/09/fujitsu_border_crossi... https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/14/uk_border_upgrade_con... Re: Horizon disgrace Fujitsu has also, so far, escaped financial penalties, whereas the government has been forced to set aside £1bn to cover the costs of compensating victims of the scandal. Meanwhile, Fujitsu is con…

They honestly should be blacklisted after the Horizon scandal. Allowing them to get away with it sets a precedent that could encourage other companies to behave just as irresponsibly. As it stands, is yet another example of privatising profits while socialising the costs, just in this case, the costs weren't (entirely) financial.

A lot of UK government IT is like this and has been forever.

There was a short period under the coalition where GDS was set up and they created a consistent framework for people to work with and would open a portion of the market up to smaller players.

Now it's mostly large bodyshop middlemen like the prime minister's wife's company taking a 70% cut for the work of a cheap offshore developer.

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

#26

There was an issue with France’s system too at Dover. It wouldn’t be tin foil hat territory to suggest a coordinated cyber attack. I wonder who has snuck through the chaos. UK border control regularly fails when the systems up, god knows what about when they’re down

Could just be that both systems need to communicate to each other (when it comes to adjacent-country border control it's not a bad idea to share data about potential threats or intruders) and one system didn't properly handle failures to communicate with the other system.

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

#28

There was an issue with France’s system too at Dover. It wouldn’t be tin foil hat territory to suggest a coordinated cyber attack. I wonder who has snuck through the chaos. UK border control regularly fails when the systems up, god knows what about when they’re down

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

#29
I’m not sure if all the gates are by the same vendor, but at least one of them is vision-box[1]. My suspicion is there’s a backend system on the Home Office’s side that went down. The ICIBI did an assessment of the epassport gate system recently, detailed here [2].

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

[1] https://www.vision-box.com/

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

#30

I'm not sure why this should affect holidaymakers, if I remember correctly passports are checked on the way in, but not when going out of the UK correct?

Holidaymakers tend to return from holiday as much as they go. Outbound flights can be delayed too if people can’t disembark from planes because the terminal is over capacity in the arrivals side.

Yes but the bank holiday is the Monday, they would be returning on Monday, maybe Tuesday but not today
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