December 7, 2016

New political party to use a democracy app

Filed under: Dutch first by Orangemaster @ 12:04 pm

vote-counting-rnw

Since we’ll probably have to explain this at Christmas parties, shock blog ‘Geenstijl’, who brought us the crowdsourcing of Dutch European Parliament vote count and blocking the ratification of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement being ignored by the Dutch government for 238 days so far, has decided to found a political party.

GeenPeil – it rhymes with Geenstijl and refers to polling – promises to set up an Internet app to hold ‘microreferendums” for all bills that pass through parliament. “All rank-and-file members of the party will be able to influence how its MPs vote on law proposals, always voting the way of the outcome of the microreferendums.

Like them or not, the fact that Prime Minister Mark Rutte has ignored the results of the democratic referendum prompted by this lot on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement and possibly passing on the problem to the next government after the 15 March 2017 elections, is really embarrassing and proves that democracy isn’t being respected at all.

GeenPeil, has its own issues. Last month, Dutch media reported that the European Parliament has demanded they pay back €14,500 in subsidies. GeenPeil had used the money, which came from the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe, a body created by Ukip, a British eurosceptic party, to pay for a newspaper advertisement calling on readers to support the Ukrainian referendum initiative for a referendum although the grant was not allowed to be used for national campaigning.

Although the referendum was legally non-binding, senior politicians had promised they would take the result into consideration and it’s such a thorny subject that the issue is on the agenda of this month’s EU summit in Brussels.

(Link: euobserver.com, Photo by Photo RNW.org, some rights reserved)

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June 8, 2015

Google, KLM and government favourites with Dutch students

Filed under: Aviation,Food & Drink,General,IT,Technology by Branko Collin @ 10:09 pm

klm-plane-steven-straitonSwedish marketing agency Universum has been polling Dutch students on who they want to work for after graduation.

A whopping 12,000 students from 32 universities and polytechnics were asked about their career preferences. Major Dutch companies such as Philips, Shell, KLM, Heineken and Endemol were named, but large American companies such as Google and Apple also made their appearance.

Both law and arts & humanities students named the national government as their preferred employer, followed by Google for the former and KLM for the latter. Business students like KLM and Google the best, engineering and physics students prefer Google, followed by Philips.

Compared to last year, TNO, Coca-Cola, IKEA and De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek failed to make the top 5 in any of the categories.

(Link: ANS, photo by Steven Straiton, some rights reserved)

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June 11, 2014

Government still misleads masses with digital ID system

Filed under: IT,Weird by Orangemaster @ 11:39 am

For years, local governments have been mistakingly pointing tens of thousands of citizens if not more to an advertising agency called Digi-D in Waalwijk, Noord-Brabant instead of to the Dutch national government’s digital identification system called DigID (no hyphen, and ID in capitals), indispensable for filing taxes and other matters nowadays. In October 2012 10,000 people sent their details to Digi-D. It’s June 2014 and the wesbite the agency set up to tell people about this serious cock-up counted 40,805 mislead people on 6 June.

Digi-D the agency has been around since 2002, while DigID started up in 2005. The government’s game plan has been to strong arm the agency into changing its name, but the agency claims that it would cost them 110,000 euro to change their name, never mind lawyering up for something they didn’t mess up. To make it worse, the agency is being forced to store all this data to prove that it is a nuisance to them, but if ever the data leaked, the government would blame the agency for it!

(Link: www.omroepbrabant.nl)

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March 5, 2014

Chain mails warn government about journalist Brenno de Winter

Filed under: Weird by Branko Collin @ 12:01 pm

Brenno de Winter is an investigative reporter who was declared Journalist of the Year 2011 and that accolade seems to have the entire Dutch government quaking in its boots.

Crazy chain mails about the danger he poses are doing the rounds at all levels of Dutch government. De Winter wrote last Monday:

The army has been alerted, the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism has been brought in and all the departments have been warned. Letters are circulating among thousands of civil servants containing my home address and photos of me. We are at threat level one because Brenno is in the country and whoever spots him should raise the alarm immediately.

The alarming mails started because somebody believed De Winter was working on an article about government security.

De Winter found out that there was a campaign being staged against him when he went to the Finance Ministry for a meeting and a lunch. “A woman said: ‘We have to call security because we have a protocol about you.'” Four security agents came to bark at De Winter for a while before letting him go to his appointment, but not without one of them accompagnying De Winter: “The man watched everything. What I ate, how I ate it, whom I talked to, how I spoke and what I talked about.”

Both the police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs have distributed correction letters clearing De Winter’s name, although it remains to be seen how effective these rectifications are. The police seems to have an effective system for distributing libel, but not for retracting it. The police’s correction points out how damaging the chain mails are: “These actions paint an incorrect picture of Mr De Winter and hinder him without reason in his profession as an investigative reporter. Certain data about Mr De Winter have been distributed illegally and without sufficient regard for professional standards.”

De Winter’s main qualm with the campaign against him is that it does nothing to intercept real bad actors.

In 2000 reporter Willem Oltmans was awarded 8 million guilders in damages following a conspiracy by the Dutch government to silence him after he had interviewed president Sukarno of former Dutch colony Indonesia.

See also: No fees for freedom of information requests says Dutch Supreme Court

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February 25, 2013

Printing error in law could mean more money for record companies

Filed under: IT,Technology by Branko Collin @ 1:20 pm

Here is some free advice for our government. If you want the difference between gigabit and gigabyte to be clear, do not abbreviate those words!

A small printing error has made it so that multinational record companies can pump even more of our tax money out of the country, at least in theory. In October last year the Ministry of Justice published a table of copyright levies in Staatsblad, the official government newspaper in which laws and decisions must be printed to become legal. Where the ministry wanted to write ‘gigabyte’, it wrote ‘Gb’, an abbreviation meaning gigabit. When talking about storage a byte typically contains 8 bits.

This means that legally speaking people who for example buy a smartphone with 2 gigabytes of storage would have to pay a higher price.

In practice this will likely not occur. Jochem Donker, a legal consultant working for Stichting Thuiskopie, the organisation that will collect the levies, told Webwereld: “We agreed upon gigabytes, so I find it hard to imagine that parliament suddenly changed its mind. This is probably a capslock error. I expect we will not abuse this.” Several lawyers called the use of ‘gigabit’ “an apparent mistake” (kennelijke verschrijving).

The ministry has decided that it will not correct the text until the levies are up for revision in 2014. “If we had meant gigabit, we would have written Gbps.” Fail! Gbps means ‘gigabit per second’. Later the spokesperson admitted that the ministry had made a mistake. “But it is evident that we meant ‘gigabyte’. The reports of the lower house also say ‘gigabyte’.”

Here is more free advice. If you desperately do want to use abbreviations, for instance because you are printing a table and the columns aren’t very wide, explain your abbreviations in a legend.

(Image: Staatsblad)

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February 9, 2013

No fees for freedom of information requests says Dutch Supreme Court

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 5:05 pm

Municipalities can only charge fees for personal services and responding to a freedom of information request is not such a service because it serves a common good.

That is the conclusion the Dutch Supreme Court reached yesterday.

In the past years municipalities often charged considerable fees for dealing with freedom of information requests in order to derail the process. RTL Nieuws refused to pay these fees and was sued by several local governments in reponse. According to De Nieuwe Reporter the municipality of Landgraaf lost its case, but Leerdam won. The Supreme Court was asked to provide clarity.

Municipalities can still charge fees for the form in which it responds to a freedom of information request (WOB-verzoek in Dutch), i.e. for photocopies and such. The Supreme Court made a point of mentioning this even though nobody had contested the issue.

Reporter Brenno de Winter sees the verdict as a starting point to get his money back: “It took me hundreds of hours to get rid of these fees. This lost time represents a lot of money to a freelancer like me. I am going to ask back fees that I had already paid and charge the municipalities for the time I lost. […] I am also studying options to criminally charge four civil servants because they threatened me with costs [of up to 30,000 euro] if I were to persevere with my information requests.”

De Winter was declared Journalist of the Year 2011 by the Dutch Association of Journalists NVJ because of his scoops concerning the bad security of both the OV transport card and government websites.

(Photo of journalist Brenno de Winter by Roy van Ingen, some rights reserved)

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October 8, 2012

Governments mislead citizens into sending digital information to wrong address

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 12:01 pm

The Dutch national government has put a lot of work into its digital identification system, as DigID is pretty much obligatory for most people these days. For instance, most people cannot file tax returns without one.

However, the government would not be the government if it had not found ways to mess up its own system. The latest howler is reported by WebWereld which writes that a lot of municipalities refer citizens to an ad agency called Digi-D (note the hyphen).

The ad agency existed before the government came up with the name DigiD. The agency claims it has already received sensitive data from 10,000 mistaken citizens, and it has tried to get the government to mend its ways, so far to no avail. Being an ad agency they have now started a campaign to do what the government should have done in the first place, namely point citizens to the right address. The slogan: ‘be careful with your DigiD!’

WebWereld lists several official government documents that refer citizens to the wrong organisation.

Apparently local governments have a checklist that tells them to pay attention to the correct spelling of the name DigiD, among other things.

(Photo by Mystic Mabel, some rights reserved)

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September 2, 2012

Dutch Rail abused privacy ‘anonymous’ transport card users, and more

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:27 pm

Dutch Rail is on a roll. Last Tuesday Webwereld reported that the state-owned monopolist has been sending spam to the users of the ‘anonymous’ version of the OV-chipkaart, the troubled Dutch transport card.

According to the tech news site, users of the anonymous card, with which you can pay for travel across modes and providers, had to give Dutch Rail their e-mail address in order to be able to travel with the company—presumably so that Dutch rail could differentiate between first and second class. Dutch Rail would then, however, abuse those addresses by inundating them with spam.

Earlier Dutch Rail was fined 125,000 euro by the Dutch privacy authority CBP for storing sensitive data about student travellers for too long.

It has not been a good week for Dutch Rail. Yesterday De Volkskrant reported that the company has been evading taxes by buying trains using a subsidiary in Ireland. The subsidiary would then leases those trains to the Dutch parent company. Train companies pay 9% in taxes in Ireland, but 25% in the Netherlands.

Par for the course for big business, you say? That may be true, but Dutch Rail is owned by the government. Basically, this is the example the Dutch state is setting to all tax payers. To make matters worse, Dutch Rail has a monopoly on all the juicy routes in the country. Other transport companies are allowed to run trains in the country, but only in areas that are not as profitable.

Suffice it to say that politicians were not happy, with for example PvdA (Labour) leader Diederik Samson calling Dutch Rails’ tactics ‘wrong’ and an example of ‘a lack of morals’. It is unclear to me whether politicians are upset because of Dutch Rails’ behaviour, or because their baby got caught red-handed.

(Photo by Flickr user UggBoy hearts UggGirl, some rights reserved)

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August 9, 2012

Government snubs its own cookie law

Filed under: General,IT by Orangemaster @ 6:31 pm

Not only does the new cookie law confuse Dutch website owners, but the Dutch government who came up with it can’t be bothered to adhere to it either. Their argument is that they don’t need to follow the rules because the cookies are not being use for commercial purposes. Watchdog Opta disagrees and says that cookies can only be placed without permission if it impairs the functioning of a website or if it cannot offer certain services.

The cookies used on the government site Rijksoverheid.nl are used to keep statistics, and therefore OPTA says they are a no-no. The government has conveniently failed to provide a counter-argument.

This definitely fits the description of “Do what the preacher preaches, but not what the preacher does”.

(Link: www.nu.nl, screenshot: the Telegraaf cookie banner)

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March 10, 2012

Wifi roll-out on Dutch Rail trains progressing as scheduled

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:06 pm

Each month ten Dutch Rail trains are equipped with free wifi, so that all 365 trains should have wifi by the end of 2013, Webwereld reports. This is according to schedule.

Currently wifi is free. Dutch Rail still has to decide if it will start charging money for usage after 2012. The national government gave Dutch Rail a 15 million euro subsidy for putting wifi on its trains.

In 2011 the number of trains featuring free wifi doubled, but usage quadrupled. Data rate and session length have stayed the same, 9MB and 40 minutes respectively.

Webwereld, a computer news site, asked some of its users about their experiences with the service. The consensus seems to be that it is as good as one can expect from ‘free’, but not better. Complaints centre on bad connections and slow speeds. One odd complaint is that the operator, T-Mobile, seems to be using German IP numbers. Users get to see the German Google when they want to search, and Facebook warns them that somebody is trying to log into their account from Germany.

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