
Home Office tells man, 101, his parents must confirm ID - georgecmu
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/12/home-office-tells-man-101-his-parents-must-confirm-id
======
NauticalStu
This reminds me of my favorite bug at my first programming job.

I worked on a system that processed benefits. We generated a lot of reports,
one of which being the overage dependent report, listing all children that
were over the age limit for that insurance plan.

We had one case where a newborn was showing up on that report, and for end
users, there was no indication why. DOB was 20-something days ago, not
20-something years ago.

Lo and behold, the paperwork was somehow filed before the baby was born, and
our date calculation method was returning an unsigned int. So the logic was
resulting in an age of -1 (since DOB was prior coverage start date), which
wrapped around to 255, which was obviously higher than whatever the max
dependent age was.

It was a fun one to debug and explain.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> So the logic was resulting in an age of -1 (since DOB was prior coverage
> start date), which wrapped around to 255

I really look forward to human ages breaking your assumption that they fit in
8 bits.

~~~
OJFord
If the fix was to make it signed, that might not be so far off!

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rtkwe
As soon as it made the 1919=2019 mistake you know it's the ancient tale of 2
digit years being insufficient for dates. Wonder how systems determine if it
should be 19XX or 20XX? Does it just default to the most recent year?

~~~
verelo
Having worked in the OCR world pretty much non stop for about a decade, i'd
say its more just a case of there not being a lot of 101 yr olds, and there
being a lot of 1 year olds; the system is likely over-optimized for switching
the digits to 20 v's 19 as it's more probable that the individual is 1 than
101. Really, when the confidence is low, or the data seems exceptional, it
should be flagged for a manual review.

~~~
6510
There are many more 101 year olds than 1 year olds doing their own
administration.

~~~
verelo
I'm not sure what the user experience is, my assumption is that it could be
the individual or a parent scanning this data, so unless it was attached to a
parent profile before entering the data, it's hard to know who is doing the
administration. Having said that, if your assumption was correct ("The person
is doing their own administration"), i'd agree with you.

~~~
zenlot
It's not hard. In EU settlement scheme application you have to tick a box if
you're applying for yourself or someone else is doing that for you.

~~~
verelo
That makes sense, thanks for the context! I've been through Canadian
immigration processes (I'm from Australia), but have no idea how the UK/EU
process works.

------
jessaustin
Ugh, this isn't as bad as some dental software I use all the time. "1/1/48"
entered as birth date is displayed as "1/1/1948". Within minutes, that is
automatically updated to "1/1/2048". Yes, this patient we're treating today
will be born in 28 years...

------
roywiggins
> In what appears to be a computer glitch the Home Office thought he was a
> one-year-old child.

oh cool, another 2020 bug in the wild. previously:
[https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-
fix-20-y...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-years-
ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/)

------
piqufoh
I thought this part was interesting; > It then skipped the face recognition
section which is what it does with under-12s

I'm aware that the passport photo conditions for young children are more
relaxed (under 1 don't need their eyes open, under 6 don't need a 'neutral'
expression) but I didn't expec that they would just skip the whole under-12s
photo part.

~~~
jon-wood
Face recognition has difficulty with under 12s because they’re still
developing so quickly, given only a single reference photo from five years ago
the accuracy of facial recognition is going to be terrible.

~~~
retsibsi
This is a tangential question, but I'm curious how well it tends to do with
adults who undergo things like weight gain/loss, emergence or clearing of
acne, minor-to-moderate injuries -- the sorts of natural change that can
happen quickly and make a significant difference, but rarely fool humans.

------
Seb-C
I worked for some time in a bank in France. Some migrants does not know their
real birth date, so their civil status can officially contain a date with
zeroes, like `1999-00-00`. On the contrary, the social insurance system for
some reason decided to store this case as `1999-13-13`.

I discovered that in a very complex system that temporarily stored data in a
SQL Server's `DATETIME` field, which ended up with people having NULL birth
dates and made the whole system collapse.

The system is probably still running today by excluding those people from some
fraud detection procedures.

~~~
sobani
In Holland some government organizations use Jan 1st as 'unknown birthday' and
others use June 1st. Also provides hours of fun for the whole family!

~~~
poizan42
In Denmark we use Jan 1st too. That turned out to be a problem because our
personal identification numbers (CPR-numbers) contains the birthdate, and
suddenly we started running out of them for Jan 1st some years.

The solution was to remove the checksum requirement (it was a weighted modulo
11 checksum), which is still sometimes causing problems with software that
tries to verify it using the old rules. But for some reason that was thought
to be better than adding another digit, maybe because it "only" requires every
piece of software working with CPR-numbers in existence to be updated but not
the data storage...

~~~
sobani
Ah yes personal identification numbers (BSN in Holland) don't 'spark joy'
either.

In Holland every resident gets a unique BSN. So you can use it to uniquely
identify a person.

Except if you also have to deal with asylum seekers, because they get a
slightly different kind of number which will be _reused_ after the asylum
seeker is granted/denied residency.

------
masayoshis_son
It puzzles me why he never became a citizen. He moved to the UK in 1966,
that's 54 years now, and it was even before they joined the EEC sometime in
the 1970s.

~~~
jkaplowitz
Doing so before 1992 (or as late as 2001 if notification requirements were not
complied with) would have lost him his Italian citizenship, unless an
exception applied. I can understand being satisfied with a stable situation
for most of that time, and with not wanting to handle naturalization paperwork
in the last decades of life.

~~~
masayoshis_son
Good point. I somehow assumed EC citizens would be exempt from such laws but
that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case even now [1], and must have been
very different before the 1992 Maastricht treaty indeed.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Un...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Union#Summary_of_member_states'_nationality_laws)

------
nurettin
Ironically, this is exactly the absurd tragi-comic way a dystopian England
would try to wear out legal immigrants.

~~~
sevencolors
Would be a great setup for a Monty Python skit

------
kevin_thibedeau
He should apply to be an emancipated minor.

------
fennecfoxen
A user below, hkt, has a comment complaining about the culture at the Home
Office. It has been modded down, and fairly so, as this comment is not helpful
in its current form. Nevertheless I feel it has an important point, so allow
me to talk about the Home Office, which, after all, is the reason this
101-year-old was filing paperwork to begin with.

The Home Office presently maintains a "hostile environment" policy. Wikipedia
summarizes its goal: "to make staying in the United Kingdom as difficult as
possible for people without leave to remain". Here are some examples of how
this works in practice.

Once upon a time the BBC did a little investigative journalism and discovered
that some international students were faking their English proficiency exams
(the TOEIC). The Home Office, quite reasonably, said that they'd do something
about it. What they ended up doing specifically was make the environment as
hostile as possible; they:

\- looked at 58,458 test results

\- declared that 34,000 of them were obviously definitely cheaters

\- declared that 22,600 of them were probably cheaters

\- declared only about 2000 as probably legit

\- sent letters to the 34,000 students denouncing them as frauds and demanding
they leave the country

Needless to say these numbers are completely bunk. Nevertheless thousands of
the students were scared away, or detained, or deported.

Here is some coverage of the Toeic scandal: [https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
news/2019/apr/27/home-office-...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-
news/2019/apr/27/home-office-investigated-over-english-test-cheating-claims)

An astute reader will note that the coverage I have specifically linked
describes this as potentially "bigger than Windrush", a separate scandal in
which refugees were admitted to the UK, decades later various records of their
admission destroyed, and then the government demanded they demonstrate
evidence they were allowed to be present in the country.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windrush_scandal)

Now, personal anecdote time: I got a job in London the same day they voted for
Brexit. I later found out that as family of a European citizen, the form to
get a proper residence card was 97+ pages. This is basically as a way to make
the environment more hostile. (Rather than deal with that and the economic
uncertainties of Brexit, including its impact on the tech sector and general
political uncertainty from subsequent governments, I instead moved to New York
and literally doubled my salary, thanks in no small part to the low pound).

In summary: This particular story is just the latest insult in a parade of
injuries. Fear not, though! The behavior of the Home Office has not gone
unnoticed. For instance, the USCIS has recently been taking a page from the
same book:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-
administra...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-
administrations-kafkaesque-new-way-to-thwart-visa-
applications/2020/02/13/190a3862-4ea3-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html)

> The American Immigration Lawyers Association has collected [over 140]
> examples of allegedly "incomplete" forms: an 8-year-old child who listed
> "none" for employment history but left the dates of employment field blank.
> An applicant who entered names of three siblings, but the form has spaces
> for four.

Further links (with only minimal libertarian commentary) at
[https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-
no...](https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-nonsense-
rules-to-keep-out-immigrants/)

Thank you for your time.

~~~
toyg
Not to detract from the rest of the comment, which is broadly correct
(speaking as somebody who actually had to go through those 97 pages to get
indefinite leave to remain, pre-2016), but the description of Windrush as "
_refugees_ [who] were admitted to the UK" is just _wrong_.

The Windrush migrants were not refugees - they were explicitly _invited_ by
the UK government, through a policy that promoted migration from "old
colonies" (particularly the Caribbeans), in order to kickstart a postwar
British economy dramatically short of manpower. The policy was so lax that
there were no controls of any sort; on landing, people were barely handed a
piece of paper that certified they had disembarked from a certain ship on that
day. For all intents and purposes, these migrants were then treated like
British citizens, but were not issued passports or other documents unless they
demanded them (which was often a complex procedure). This was not seen as
unusual, in a country that famously has no national ID scheme and where
identification is still largely achieved through utility bills.

The Home Office kept a copy of the landing records for 50 years, which helped
whenever someone from the Windrush years had to make his or her position
official. In 2010, the HO decided these records took up too much space and
just _destroyed them_ , without even trying to digitize them. This happened a
few months after the Tory-LibDem coalition government was installed, in
October 2010, with Theresa May as Home Secretary. Anybody from Windrush
subsequently found themselves unable to prove their citizenship status,
resulting in deportations, lack of health assistance, and massive
discrimination.

For the record, Mrs. May was also the inventor of the "hostile environment"
policy, which was supposed to deliver on the Tory manifesto promise of pushing
net migration under 100,000 a year. That indicator was around 250,000 at the
time. After 10 years of "hostile environment", it's now around 280,000.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Thank you: a useful correction. I would edit the comment, if it were still
within the editing window.

------
ryanlol
Did I miss something, or did this journalist completely fail to mention that
the MRZ does not include the first two digits of your birth year?

Obviously this is going to happen.

> it was not a small mistake because the computer system “only recognised the
> last two digits of his year of birth”

This is bizarre, blame the passport for only having the last two digits and
not the computer reading it.

~~~
pmjordan
> This is bizarre, blame the passport for only having the last two digits and
> not the computer reading it.

I mean, the passport only showing 2 digits is worth mentioning. But I doubt
this 101-year-old got much choice in exactly what format his passport
contained his DOB - so the software needs to handle it. So if in doubt (e.g.
both possibilities yield an age younger than oldest person on the planet) the
software should be asking to confirm the century.

If you want to get really fancy, check the issue date first. If this is before
the supposed 20xx birth date, the birth date must actually be 19xx. People
aren't issued passports before they are born.

~~~
ryanlol
That’s clever, but still leaves a significant edge case. I’d hazard to guess
that 101-year-olds don’t travel very much and are therefore rather likely to
be forced to get new passports for this specific purpose. (But perhaps the
home office accepts expired passports?)

>But I doubt this 101-year-old got much choice in exactly what format his
passport contained his DOB

I’m sure he didn’t, this definitely isn’t his fault.

> so the software needs to handle it

Does it though? It’s a rare edge case that should be trivial to solve with
minor human intervention.

~~~
gshdg
Seems fair to guess most 1-year-olds don't travel much internationally either.

~~~
ryanlol
Sure, but I can’t see how that matters here.

------
cwkoss
He should bring an ouija board to the office.

------
b34r
Fuck international standards right? [eyeroll]

~~~
mjevans
Relevant XKCD for that:
[https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601](https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1179:_ISO_8601)

Title text: ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on
12/01/04.

"The title text provides a perfect example of the kind of ambiguity that can
arise when non-standard formats are used. The ISO standard was in fact
published on 1988-06-05 and amended on 2004-12-01. This is mentioned in the
title text in MM/DD/YY format; however, there is no way to naturally figure
this out, particularly with the second date. With the year truncated to two
digits and all three numbers at 12 or lower, the date referring to December 1,
2004 may well be interpreted as 12 January 2004, or as 2012-01-04."

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thepete2
tl;dr Write tests, people!

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overcast
Rules are rules :)

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bitwize
Well, Dana Carvey always did maintain there was little difference between a
baby and a 100-year-old man...

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louwrentius
Clearly the solution here is to make sure people don't become older than 99. A
slight prod will probably do the trick.

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hkt
The Home Office is a den of mad, evil bureaucracy. I'd honestly have believed
it even if it hadn't been anything to do with a computer. The people who work
there are especially twisted, the culture needs flushing down a toilet.

