A great post about how government websites are encouraging us to go back to old and more importantly insecure versions of browsers just to be able to interact online.
We are encouraged to file our tax returns online and use the government web sites to obtain information about our entitlements, but to do so we have to use browsers from the stone age.
I suggest resorting back to more costly channels of delivery like the phone until they get the sites to work in what are considered current browsers.
To suggest to a user of a site that they have to go back to a previous version is unbelievable. As a user and on my personal computer at home i will ensure that my browser is always up to date as i do internet banking and pay bills etc through it. There is no way i will compromise my personal data just to use a government website. Lets just hope it all gets resolved ASAP.
Thanks for the link Carl. What has got me seriously paranoid is that I have been filing my VAT and self assessment forms electronically for several years. I am now wondering if they base their levels of security on those of IE 6. But gov.uk stupidity is nothing new.
When the Inland Revenue (as they were then known) first introduced online filing – and yes I was among the first to sign up for it! – they used IP addresses as part of the identification procedure. They hadn’t realised that most people at that time were using internet connections with dynamic IP addressing. The result – surprise, surprise – was that some people were presented with tax details that weren’t their own.
Just searched my old newsletters and found I wrote about it in July 2002. Go to http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/2002/jul2002.shtml and scroll down to “Inland Revenue’s Cookies Fail Crunch Test” (Sorry about the awful pun).