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In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

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Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#161

Post by Hallucinaut »

lostlogin wrote: post #119
jussij wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why most governments struggle with big IT projects. Governments by their nature tend to approach everything from a legal perspective. This then means the requirements of these big IT project end up being a mass of legal documents which try to describe what is being delivered by whom. Then when the whole thing falls apart it ends up in the courts and the court then decides who promised what based on those ori…

I was in a pub with a relative, and we got chatting to another random patron. The relative was asked about his CS job, and at some point details were being discussed. The relative said something like “we have made what was asked for but because we have run out of time, that’s what the customer is getting. We know what they actually want and need, but that’s not in the contract”. The person we were talking to was the…

Sounds like a good way to get sued for breach of confidentiality clauses

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#162

Post by ToFab123 »

Reminds me the old "war" between AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger. I think I recall that one the same day there was around 50 updates to those programs. Each update breaking something from the other and then one blinked and the stream of updates stopped and the 2 apps no longer spoke to each other.

https://www.istartedsomething.com/20140420/msn-messenger-and...

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#163

Post by marvin »

trhway wrote: post #2

>The city's local government, spent 1 billion Swedish crowns (100 million dollars) over 7 years to build a massive do-everything school IT platform, which students, teachers and parents are forced to use. And their app is awful. Slow, buggy, almost unusable. One parent managed to access other people's private data, leading to @Stockholmsstad being fined for bad security. where is juicy details like who did it? Oracle…

In Scandinavia, contracting agencies are king. We've brewed up many local varieties of these, that are much smaller, probably a bit more skilled and generally don't deliberately take money from customers that clearly don't know what they're doing.

Directly employing most of one's required software engineers is largely a very new phenomenon, and not yet widespread.

In Norway, you'd have e.g. Evry, Itera, Bouvet, Miles, Computas as well as international companies like Steria, Accenture and CapGemini. They contract out developers at ~$125 an hour and pay a regular middle-class salary. A large portion of software engineers are employed at a company like this.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#164

Post by NalNezumi »

gambiting wrote: post #129
bjoli wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unrelated, but how in the world can he be held in such high regard in the US? Over here (Europe) he was widely regarded as a clown during his presidency, and the whole Iran/contra deal, together with the pardons by Bush senior, didn't really do his legacy any favours. Just a week ago a friend of mine (who does not share my views, and is generally positive of Reaganomics) said something along the lines of: "no…

It's really simple - Americans approach politics as if it's a football game. If a guy is from their "team" then he gets support since being on the "correct" side is more important than the actual merits. So there's a LOT of people in US who have respect for someone like Reagan or Bush purely because they were on the "correct" team.

Funny comparison. When I watch sports (mostly e-sports but) I'm always asked "which team are you rooting for?" and I always answer "I'm rooting for a good game.". Wonder if there's a parallel between that attitude and "moderate/centrist" learning in politics.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#165

Post by Lionga »

lampe3 wrote: post #148

Germans: what? you guys have an app? Believe me its way worse here in Germany. I would consider this a luxury problem...

What? You guys build airports withouth 14 years of delay and 500% of the planned cost?

German government is the european leader in corruption , even covid was used by many of them to get kickbacks for masks for elders and wasted 2 Billion € there.

And like the corrupt "Flintenuschi" Ursula von der Leyen they get promoted to President of the European Commission for that if they manage to delete all evidence from their phone after beeing caught.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#166

Post by urvader »

utrechtsouth wrote: post #113
urvader wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did. We have a regex to catch all variants of spellings. But since our code is open they can easily select another variant. We could load our script dynamically but have chosen not to of security reasons. (And transparency). (I’m the founder of this initiative)

urvader, While there is a technical issue here, there is also a legal issue and a PR issue. Government institutions have a duty of care and a duty to help to private individuals. Since they are apparently working _against_ people in this case, they are probably in breach of the law. Description of relevant rules here (in Swedish). https://www.mfd.se/verktyg/lagar-och-regler-om-tillganglighe... I strongly suggest that…

Thanks! Yes, we are investigating our legal options.

We just recently filed an appeal regarding getting access to the API documentation.

We have gotten a lot of PR in Sweden from the major news papers and tech press. So I think the pressure is building but if it is one thing Swedes are worried about is the appearance internationally. So help us getting this story to Wired, TechCrunch etc - that will make them crazy. We still live on the front page of Newsweek from 2000 - the capital of Internet. That might be true for the tech scene but definitely not the public sector.

We would rather concentrate our limited time and resources on making the product better instead of this crap but we have an amazing community that are helping us with both legal advice, artwork, communication, UX etc so we will continue the fight and will keep you updated here in Hacker News.

Thanks for all support so far!

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#167

Post by bjoli »

odiroot wrote: post #140
bjoli wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is unrelated, but how in the world can he be held in such high regard in the US? Over here (Europe) he was widely regarded as a clown during his presidency, and the whole Iran/contra deal, together with the pardons by Bush senior, didn't really do his legacy any favours. Just a week ago a friend of mine (who does not share my views, and is generally positive of Reaganomics) said something along the lines of: "no…

> Over here (Europe) he was widely regarded as a clown during his presidency Over here in Europe he is praised for liberating us from communism.

Apart from supporting Solidarity (and then help the economic bullying to make sure they didn't get any chance what so ever to have their own economic policies), I don't think much was achieved that the Soviet Union wouldn't have managed without US "support".

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#168

Post by wizzwizz4 »

urvader wrote: post #74
mwidell wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Öppna Skolplattformen should just change their code to identify the token by its contents, no matter the parameter name?

We did. We have a regex to catch all variants of spellings. But since our code is open they can easily select another variant. We could load our script dynamically but have chosen not to of security reasons. (And transparency). (I’m the founder of this initiative)

Have you tried letting users extract the token themselves, when your code can't find it?

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#169

Post by bborud »

globular-toast wrote: post #141
jordanbeiber wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Projects are necessary for things that are built to last and not change much during their lifetime: - a bridge - airplanes - most houses - etc Hardware comes to mind - it’s all hardware on the list, basically. Software (outside certain realms ofc) like this? I’ve been, like many others here, doing this software thing for 20+ years now. Big and small, I’ve basically never seen anything spawned from a project-driven or…

The trick is to make your projects tiny, not big. Instead of "build an all-encompassing system that does everything" you do "solve this very specific business problem". You could call these little projects sprints or something.

Oh, be careful.

At my previous employer there was the concept of the "90 day sprint". Top management use the term without irony. All they have done is substitute "sprint" anywhere you would say "quarter". So now they are agile. I wish I was making this up.

Re: In Stockholm there's currently an IT battle underway

#170

Post by zdkl »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #168
urvader wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did. We have a regex to catch all variants of spellings. But since our code is open they can easily select another variant. We could load our script dynamically but have chosen not to of security reasons. (And transparency). (I’m the founder of this initiative)

Have you tried letting users extract the token themselves, when your code can't find it?

It's my (uneducated) understanding that legally, this makes you cross a boundary. You're no longer ~"circumventing security measures" on your own, you're inciting and enabling an end user to. One could easily argue it's on the darker side of the grey area.
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