9 ms·

Home Office tells man, 101, his parents must confirm ID

248 points by georgecmu 7y ago

ForzaBlu 7y ago
For some reason I first read that as "Home DEPOT tells man,..."
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Yeah, I mashed up “Home Depot” and “Office Depot” in my head, too.
overcast 7y ago
Rules are rules :)
rtkwe 7y ago
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?
- roywiggins 7y ago
  They kicked the can 20 years in 1999: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-years-ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-y...
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Haha I should have known it would be even simpler than trying to estimate which date is reasonable. Interestingly Oracle just treats all XX as 20XX from my brief testing when doing to_date with 'YYMMDD' as the format.
    - trollied 7y ago
      This is how it works in Oracle: If you use the TO_DATE function with the YY datetime format element, then the year returned always has the same first 2 digits as the current year. If you use the RR datetime format element instead, then the century of the return value varies according to the specified two-digit year and the last two digits of the current year. That is: If the specified two-digit year is 00 to 49, then: * If the last two digits of the current year are 00 to 49, then the returned year has the same first two digits as the current year. * If the last two digits of the current year are 50 to 99, then the first 2 digits of the returned year are 1 greater than the first 2 digits of the current year. If the specified two-digit year is 50 to 99, then: * If the last two digits of the current year are 00 to 49, then the first 2 digits of the returned year are 1 less than the first 2 digits of the current year. * If the last two digits of the current year are 50 to 99, then the returned year has the same first two digits as the current year.
      - rtkwe 7y ago
        Interesting I've never had to dig into that, started working well after Y2K and the company I work at, as far as I see, properly converted any legacy XX years ages ago. Is the switch date for RR fixed? Seems like there will be some weird breakage around 2050 as random places that have been skating by on using RR for old 2 digit years will be in trouble.
  - koboll 7y ago
    >WWE 2K20, a professional wrestling video game, also stopped working at midnight on 1 January 2020. Within 24 hours, the game’s developers, 2K, issued a downloadable fix. An almost poetic irony
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      I had heard that that was actually an ISO year issue. For example 2019-12-30 becomes 2020-12-30 if you mistakenly use IYYY-MM-DD instead of YYYY-MM-DD (which kind of makes sense IYYY shows up first in documentation).
- verelo 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    There are many more 101 year olds than 1 year olds doing their own administration.
    - verelo 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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 7y ago
        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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - baddox 7y ago
      I bet not that many more.
- jackcodes 7y ago
  Storage is that cheap that I’m not far off using a BigDecimal for my years
- kozziollek 7y ago
  Recently I was fixing bug in some perl app, because since January 1st 2020, year 2070 is closer than 1970 and suddenly our dates were from the future.
ryanlol 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
  - magduf 7y ago
    I'm wondering if this is a case of idiotic government regulations meeting contractor requirements: The government stupidly decides to only put 2 digits on the passport. They sign a contract with a company to write OCR software for reading passports. The contractor points out "hey! There's only 2 digits here!", but the customer doesn't have an answer because that's some other department and it's already done. So the contractor just implements the software as specified, assuming that being older than 100 is impossible, because the customer couldn't come up with a solution for this problem.
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      > I'm wondering if this is a case of idiotic government regulations The MRZ is an ICAO standard so you’ll need to blame the UN for this. > The government stupidly decides to only put 2 digits on the passport. This passport was issued by a foreign government though. > because the customer couldn't come up with a solution for this problem. The app schedules an appointment with a human, presumably that human will be able to differentiate between a 1-year-old and a 101-year-old. Perhaps the problem never existed? The home office phone rep fixed this in 30(!) minutes.
roywiggins 7y ago
> 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-years-ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-y...
louwrentius 7y ago
Clearly the solution here is to make sure people don't become older than 99. A slight prod will probably do the trick.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hkt 7y ago
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.
bitwize 7y ago
Well, Dana Carvey always did maintain there was little difference between a baby and a 100-year-old man...
piqufoh 7y ago
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.
- cbhl 7y ago
  I was under the impression that most airlines require you to be at least 12 to do "unaccompanied minor"; anyone younger than that should be with both parents or they warrant special checks at the border anyway (such as letters of permission from the parents).
  - 77pt77 7y ago
    Is this new? Because I've seen children under 12 traveling as unaccompanied minors.
    - authoritarian 7y ago
      It's incorrect, not new
      - lazyasciiart 7y ago
        I think it's a mismatch in terminology. My brother sent his three kids to us for a holiday. The 11 year old had to be "accompanied" by a stewardess. The 13 and 16 year olds were able to travel "unaccompanied", as in not under the supervision of the airline.
  - Symbiote 7y ago
    The US says children must be 5 to travel "unaccompanied" (i.e. supervised by airport staff to the plane etc). From around 12-14 they can go alone, depending on the airline. I don't think there's a European policy, and European airlines seem mixed in whether they allow unaccompanied children: https://www.opodo.co.uk/blog/which-airlines-allow-unaccompanied-minors-to-fly-alone/ https://www.opodo.co.uk/blog/which-airlines-allow-unaccompan...
masayoshis_son 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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_Union#Summary_of_member_states'_nationality_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Un...
- MandieD 7y ago
  It's possible to like living somewhere and be comfortable with permanent residency, but to have compelling reasons to retain the citizenship of your birth country. Many countries require that you give up the old citizenship when you get a new one. In my case, Germany requires citizenship applicants to show proof that they have attempted to give up their original citizenship, unless it's another EU country, and that's only because the EU high court ruled that they have to let EU citizens retain their EU citizenships. I love living in Germany, have learned the language, contribute a lot to it and will probably live here the rest of my life, but I'm an American and have no intention of giving that up.
jessaustin 7y ago
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...
NauticalStu 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
  - NauticalStu 7y ago
    0.001K ought to be enough for anyone.
  - OJFord 7y ago
    If the fix was to make it signed, that might not be so far off!
- kube-system 7y ago
  I spent some time debugging insurance systems, and bugs exactly like that were everywhere. There are lots of date comparisons in those kinds of systems, and the order in which those events happen are almost always described to happen in a certain order, but there's tons of exceptions for every case.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
He should apply to be an emancipated minor.
fennecfoxen 7y ago
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-investigated-over-english-test-cheating-claims https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/27/home-office-... 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-administrations-kafkaesque-new-way-to-thwart-visa-applications/2020/02/13/190a3862-4ea3-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administra... > 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-nonsense-rules-to-keep-out-immigrants/ https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-no... Thank you for your time.
b34r 7y ago
Fuck international standards right? [eyeroll]
- mjevans 7y ago
  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."
thepete2 7y ago
tl;dr Write tests, people!
cwkoss 7y ago
He should bring an ouija board to the office.
Seb-C 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.
nurettin 7y ago
Ironically, this is exactly the absurd tragi-comic way a dystopian England would try to wear out legal immigrants.
- sevencolors 7y ago
  Would be a great setup for a Monty Python skit
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

248 points by georgecmu 7y ago

ForzaBlu 7y ago

For some reason I first read that as "Home DEPOT tells man,..."

saagarjha 7y ago
Yeah, I mashed up “Home Depot” and “Office Depot” in my head, too.

overcast 7y ago

Rules are rules :)

rtkwe 7y ago

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?

roywiggins 7y ago
They kicked the can 20 years in 1999: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-years-ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-y...
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Haha I should have known it would be even simpler than trying to estimate which date is reasonable. Interestingly Oracle just treats all XX as 20XX from my brief testing when doing to_date with 'YYMMDD' as the format.
  - trollied 7y ago
    This is how it works in Oracle: If you use the TO_DATE function with the YY datetime format element, then the year returned always has the same first 2 digits as the current year. If you use the RR datetime format element instead, then the century of the return value varies according to the specified two-digit year and the last two digits of the current year. That is: If the specified two-digit year is 00 to 49, then: * If the last two digits of the current year are 00 to 49, then the returned year has the same first two digits as the current year. * If the last two digits of the current year are 50 to 99, then the first 2 digits of the returned year are 1 greater than the first 2 digits of the current year. If the specified two-digit year is 50 to 99, then: * If the last two digits of the current year are 00 to 49, then the first 2 digits of the returned year are 1 less than the first 2 digits of the current year. * If the last two digits of the current year are 50 to 99, then the returned year has the same first two digits as the current year.
    - rtkwe 7y ago
      Interesting I've never had to dig into that, started working well after Y2K and the company I work at, as far as I see, properly converted any legacy XX years ages ago. Is the switch date for RR fixed? Seems like there will be some weird breakage around 2050 as random places that have been skating by on using RR for old 2 digit years will be in trouble.
- koboll 7y ago
  >WWE 2K20, a professional wrestling video game, also stopped working at midnight on 1 January 2020. Within 24 hours, the game’s developers, 2K, issued a downloadable fix. An almost poetic irony
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    I had heard that that was actually an ISO year issue. For example 2019-12-30 becomes 2020-12-30 if you mistakenly use IYYY-MM-DD instead of YYYY-MM-DD (which kind of makes sense IYYY shows up first in documentation).
verelo 7y ago
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 7y ago
  There are many more 101 year olds than 1 year olds doing their own administration.
  - verelo 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - baddox 7y ago
    I bet not that many more.
jackcodes 7y ago
Storage is that cheap that I’m not far off using a BigDecimal for my years
kozziollek 7y ago
Recently I was fixing bug in some perl app, because since January 1st 2020, year 2070 is closer than 1970 and suddenly our dates were from the future.

ryanlol 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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.
- magduf 7y ago
  I'm wondering if this is a case of idiotic government regulations meeting contractor requirements: The government stupidly decides to only put 2 digits on the passport. They sign a contract with a company to write OCR software for reading passports. The contractor points out "hey! There's only 2 digits here!", but the customer doesn't have an answer because that's some other department and it's already done. So the contractor just implements the software as specified, assuming that being older than 100 is impossible, because the customer couldn't come up with a solution for this problem.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    > I'm wondering if this is a case of idiotic government regulations The MRZ is an ICAO standard so you’ll need to blame the UN for this. > The government stupidly decides to only put 2 digits on the passport. This passport was issued by a foreign government though. > because the customer couldn't come up with a solution for this problem. The app schedules an appointment with a human, presumably that human will be able to differentiate between a 1-year-old and a 101-year-old. Perhaps the problem never existed? The home office phone rep fixed this in 30(!) minutes.

roywiggins 7y ago

> 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-years-ago-means-the-y2k-bug-is-taking-down-computers-now/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2229238-a-lazy-fix-20-y...

louwrentius 7y ago

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

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hkt 7y ago

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.

bitwize 7y ago

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

piqufoh 7y ago

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.

cbhl 7y ago
I was under the impression that most airlines require you to be at least 12 to do "unaccompanied minor"; anyone younger than that should be with both parents or they warrant special checks at the border anyway (such as letters of permission from the parents).
- 77pt77 7y ago
  Is this new? Because I've seen children under 12 traveling as unaccompanied minors.
  - authoritarian 7y ago
    It's incorrect, not new
    - lazyasciiart 7y ago
      I think it's a mismatch in terminology. My brother sent his three kids to us for a holiday. The 11 year old had to be "accompanied" by a stewardess. The 13 and 16 year olds were able to travel "unaccompanied", as in not under the supervision of the airline.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  The US says children must be 5 to travel "unaccompanied" (i.e. supervised by airport staff to the plane etc). From around 12-14 they can go alone, depending on the airline. I don't think there's a European policy, and European airlines seem mixed in whether they allow unaccompanied children: https://www.opodo.co.uk/blog/which-airlines-allow-unaccompanied-minors-to-fly-alone/ https://www.opodo.co.uk/blog/which-airlines-allow-unaccompan...

masayoshis_son 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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_Union#Summary_of_member_states'_nationality_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Un...
MandieD 7y ago
It's possible to like living somewhere and be comfortable with permanent residency, but to have compelling reasons to retain the citizenship of your birth country. Many countries require that you give up the old citizenship when you get a new one. In my case, Germany requires citizenship applicants to show proof that they have attempted to give up their original citizenship, unless it's another EU country, and that's only because the EU high court ruled that they have to let EU citizens retain their EU citizenships. I love living in Germany, have learned the language, contribute a lot to it and will probably live here the rest of my life, but I'm an American and have no intention of giving that up.

jessaustin 7y ago

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...

NauticalStu 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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.
- NauticalStu 7y ago
  0.001K ought to be enough for anyone.
- OJFord 7y ago
  If the fix was to make it signed, that might not be so far off!
kube-system 7y ago
I spent some time debugging insurance systems, and bugs exactly like that were everywhere. There are lots of date comparisons in those kinds of systems, and the order in which those events happen are almost always described to happen in a certain order, but there's tons of exceptions for every case.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

He should apply to be an emancipated minor.

fennecfoxen 7y ago

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-investigated-over-english-test-cheating-claims https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/27/home-office-... 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-administrations-kafkaesque-new-way-to-thwart-visa-applications/2020/02/13/190a3862-4ea3-11ea-bf44-f5043eb3918a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-trump-administra... > 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-nonsense-rules-to-keep-out-immigrants/ https://reason.com/2020/02/14/how-the-government-is-using-no... Thank you for your time.

b34r 7y ago

Fuck international standards right? [eyeroll]

mjevans 7y ago
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."

thepete2 7y ago

tl;dr Write tests, people!

cwkoss 7y ago

He should bring an ouija board to the office.

Seb-C 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.

nurettin 7y ago

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

sevencolors 7y ago
Would be a great setup for a Monty Python skit

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]