Innovation vs anti innovation

Few things surprise me any more. But today, I experienced something that made me sick to my stomach. It mad me deeply sad with the state of the world. In one word. Adobe.

My company is a purveyor of fine innovative solutions to certain gov IT problems. We have found a simple way to deliver, encrypted, a pre-filled form that only the end user can open, complete and return (encrypted). It could enable us to deliver and put online large swathes of government transactions in an easy and convenient form which is ridiculously secure (see previous post).

We encrypt PDFs. We sold this to a gov dept. They love it. Then we hit a snag. In Adobe reader it will allow you to open the pdf and complete the form but Adobe have locked down the reader so that all you can do is print the form out. In theory, the PDF standard should allow you to just save the form pdf with the data entered and it would re encrypt with the original key and could be sent back.

But Adobe have locked that bit of functionality down so that you cannot save the form to send back. You can, if you either pay 360 pounds for an Adobe Acrobat license per end user receiving the form or purchase (at the sender end) a Adobe enterprise xyz server. Well just buy the license I hear you say! I would but for 2 reasons. They license is on a per user basis and although technically (according to Adobe) we would only need 1 user license unfortunately they only sell in a minimum of 1000 users. That sadly means that the license to do this is 45K pounds. But they offered a discount. Nice of them. 29k pounds. But, then they rang again and said there is 20% maintenance cost. Which is compulsory for 1 year.

Nice.

Luckily, where ever there is a greedy corporation trying to exploit people there is an innovator. We found another PDF reader that does allow you to save and send back encrypted. And its free (even for commercial use). So you would think that was that for Adobe.

But no. Gov comes to the rescue. Their clever people think that end users will have adobe reader and (although the reader is not a standard tool) that we should make it work with Adobe. At a cost of a minimum of an extra 65K pounds of tax payers money.

The good news is we have found a way to do it without PDFs involved at all. But only time will tell if Gov will wake up to the fact that this is pure profiteering by Adobe.

As I said, I felt sick to my stomach. I hang my head in shame that I belong to an industry where greedy corporations can needlessly lock down open standard tools in order to extract cash for no extra value. I hang my head further in shame in gov supporting such practices.

Security people

There is something odd about most security people. A lifetime of trying to find faults in everything does that to a person (although it is natural to woman so why are their so few women in IT security).

We demonstrated a new product this week to a government department. They current send some paperwork out via post and want to go electronic. We demonstrated the system to them. I pointed out the encryption we use (AES 256) means that there is very little chance of it being cracked. But gov security guy insisted that we use a cracking tool to prove it. Put this in perspective. We were being asked to demonstrate this in a 2 hour meeting.

They sat down, we talked. We then fired up the password cracking tool in screen. We set the password length and let it go. After about 10 mins it had tried about 45,000 passwords. The trouble was the combinations it had left to try was 4.5 times 10 to the power 98.

Thats 4.5 with 98 0s after. Lets try this in Excel.

So 4.5E+98

The most powerful supercomputer on the planet today can achieve 1000 million tries per second.

That works out at around 1.43E+82 years to crack.

Now I have to say the odds were against it being cracked but one must remember that it could get it first time. So I was a little nervous. I am not that lucky, but I am that unlucky.

But the funny thing was that the security guy kept asking if we had any faster computers or quicker software. All I could say was 10 to the power 98!

Security people. Got to love em

My thought for the new year

I am not a consumer. I consume, but I am not a 'consumer'. Please stop treating me as a consumer first and human being second.

Christmas Reading

I managed to get the opportunity to have the brain cool down from work and other stresses for a whole day over the XMAS period and managed to read a few books.

The first one, a present, was Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Superb. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature for this book. When I read it I thought, hmm, I bet this is one of those books that has complex hidden meanings. But Hemingway himself said

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things"

How right he was. Its just a very enjoyable read and you get the sense that you can pick what it represents for yourself. No hidden meaning that only academics will spot. Its also short and you can read it in a few hours. Its a good book for a train journey or a flight.

The second book I have read is by Mark Fisher entitled Capitalist Realism, is there no alternative. Heavy? Yes. Very. But it sets out clearly what is wrong with society and capitalism. The thing that got me most about his theories is that it answered something I already knew but could not articulate. Simply put, that we live in a world of systems that none of us can change, that do not work as they should and there is no responsibility to be found in the subjects that we regularly talk about. By this I mean things like 'banking' 'corporate' 'capitalism'. These systems have no voice, are not human and cannot take responsibility. They are a consequence of the way the world works and not the cause.

He describes these systems with a wonderful analogy of the dreaded call center. You have to explain your problem over and over to different people who have no power to change anything and there is nobody in charge. It is the hopelessness of being caught in a system that does not work and there is nobody to do anything about it.

The reason I liked it most is because it beautifully describes the problem we have with IT in government. If you read this book you will understand why government is as it is today, why it does not work, why it can never work, and why there is nobody that can change it.

We have let ourselves pass through a one way door and found ourselves in a hellish place with only further one way doors ahead. And you just know that what lies beyond is worse.