Sunday 24 October 2010

Seventy-two hours on ...

Well over seventy-two hours have now passed since the Scottish Parliament's e-petition website crashed. It remains out of commission. And still no explanation of what the problem is and when it will be rectified.

Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm once again highlights the issue in a report headlined Holyrood Petitions crash persists into 4th day as Parliament launches "Digital Future".

19 comments:

  1. MISSION LOCKERBIE:
    Scottish High Officials have fear before the truth into the Lockerbie-Affair, therefore the successful e-petition website must crashed for the remainder of time ?

    by Edwin Bollier, MEBO Ltd., Switzerland,
    URL: www.lockerbie.ch

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  2. Well this is how it goes - manipulate a trial, send an innocent man to prison, make a covert deal for his release to avoid his appeal, smear a victim's relative and now bring down a lawful petition.

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  3. How long does Rolfe's assertion of Hanlon's Razor hold, before it is superceded by Clark's Law? ("Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice")

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  4. MISSION LOCKERBIE:

    -"Manipulate a trial, send an innocent man to prison, make a covert deal for his release to avoid his appeal, smear a victim's relative and now bring down a lawful petition",-
    Ruth thanks, their words are fuel for attack against injustice !

    MEBO will not keep quiet until it is legally accepted that:

    1.) The MST-13 Timerfragment (PT/35) was a manipulation (FRAUD). see also the Affidavit of Eng. U.Lumpert, Zurich 18th July, 2007.

    2.) The Transfer of the so called “Bomb Bag“ from Air Malta KM 180 on PanAM-103/B in Frankfurt did not take place at all. It is documented with clear evidence. (FAA doc. Prod.1103 and Alert 'Duty x-ray Report' from 21st of Dec.1988, 16.25hour, Prod.1076, the Alert incident log 21/12/88, Prod. 1077)

    3.) The alleged clothes bought in the store of Toni Gauci could only have taken place on the *23rd November 1988 and not as stated on the 7th December. There are clear facts and figures to confirm this.
    *Mr. Al Megrahi was not in Malta at the 23rd of November 1988, as can be proved !

    4.) That the visit of Mr. Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi, alias "Ahmed Khalifa Abdusamad" between 20 and 21st December 1988 in Malta had nothing to do with the Pan Am 103 bombing.

    5.) That the PanAm 103 tragedy as „MISSION AMSTERDAM", was used as a conspiracy against the Libyan Leader Gaddafi.

    6.) That through my „Mission Lockerbie“it will be confirmed that Libya and Mr. Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi had nothing to do with the Lockerbie tragedy.

    by Edwin and Mahnaz Bollier, MEBO Ltd.,Switzerland more on our webpage: www.lockerbie.ch

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  5. blogiston said...
    "How long does Rolfe's assertion of Hanlon's Razor hold, before it is superceded by Clark's Law? ("Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice")"

    Hehe! A well-known proverb starting with "Never attribute to malice ..." was on my mind yesterday too.

    But when you run a service that is real important to so many people, what could be the possible reason for not installing a temporary patch, which is done within half an hour?

    We are moving a bit beyond even "advanced incompetence" here, into at least "indifference".

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  6. When the petition comes back, I think it might be a very good idea for everybody who has signed it to encourage at least five more people to add their names and to publicise it as much as possible over the internet.

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  7. sfm: Did you notice the e-petition site (when it was up) was a bit dodgy in places, anyway? I noticed the 'Discussions' part of the microsite chucked away upper case letters and mangled some punctuation in the textview frame - this alone had me thinking 'amateurish', even before the thing crashed later. Also, the fields input was not logical in some places and too free-form - i.e. it is sometimes important to force users to complete certain fields by making them mandatory, or keeping menu item choices fixed. I wonder if it was an inside development project - or can anyone illuminate me as to whether it is a standard petition format they have seen elsewhere?

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  8. I know as a matter of fact that Guje Borgesson the Swedish lady who raised PE 1332 asked for and was given an extension to the period normally allowed for gathering signatures of several months!

    This can be verified by checking the signature dates on PE 1332 when the e-petition site is active again.

    Should that be if the e-petition…..

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  9. Thanks, Big Nan. I'm sure there would be no difficulty getting an extension.

    The problem is that there's a strict deadline for actual presentation of the petition if it's to be dealt with before the Scottish Parliament elections. That's why we had to impose such an early closing date in the first place.

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  10. Blogiston asked:
    "Did you notice the e-petition site (when it was up) was a bit dodgy in places, anyway? "

    I did note that the design-work was sort of "basic". But actually, for the best programmers "design" is an earthly matter of very little interest, so under the hood could still be a fine piece of work.

    When things take this long time something has gone very wrong. Typically the server would be gone and the backup not too recent.

    Unless it is just because gov.-employed programmers insist on the luxury of having a life? It is after all weekend.

    Well, we can only wait.

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  11. The intelligence services know that time is always to their advantage. People lose enthusiasm; interest wanes. Any delay in the petition won't help it.

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  12. If the site does come to life again then the suggestion that all who have signed try to get another 5 people to sign is a good one.

    This would compensate for the number of people who have tried to sign when this was news and simply gave up when they couldn't get any joy out of the e-petition link?

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  13. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  14. When the petition comes back, I think it might be a very good idea for everybody who has signed it to encourage at least five more people to add their names and to publicise it as much as possible over the internet.

    The trouble with that idea is that it assumes people who care weren't already pulling out all the stops they had. Publicity which was deliberately timed to get people signing up this weekend and into next week is likely to be mostly wasted if those who read it can't get into the site when they try the first time.

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  15. I remember Guje Borgesson's petition well. She showed up at the JREF Forum soliciting signatures at the time. Posters there quickly realised she was joining pretty much every forum she could find, begging for anyone at all to sign. There was some discussion of the case, and her interpretation didn't attract any real support that I could see. However, I suspect she found other venues that were more susceptible to her sob-story, as she garnered over 3,000 signatures in just over three months. So far as I could see, before the site went down, there was no sign of her petition having progressed at all.

    My view has always been that the e-Petitions are just a device to give the plebs the idea that someone is listening, and that they could have some influence. However, no matter how many signatures a petition gets, there's no guarantee of any action, and the parliament is entirely at liberty to say "Thank you for your input, and goodbye."

    Thus, I suspect building and maintaining the e-Petition part of the web site has never been a priority, and nobody is much bothered either about writing decent code, or maintaining it, or about fixing it when it breaks.

    That's politics.

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  16. However, no matter how many signatures a petition gets, there's no guarantee of any action ...
    As far as I could determine, from reading the minutes, a 'result' (which is the best that can be achieved) is merely the Petitions committee chair (currently some labour bint) writing a letter to the Scottish Government (here's me thinking they were the government) reporting that a petition was received on a certain subject and that the signatories were accordingly concerned. They don't have the power to decide anything earth shattering e.g. invoking inquiries.

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  17. Big thanks to Peter Cruickshank from the International Teledemocracy Centre at Edinburgh Napier Uni (folk behind e-petitioning) :- from the Scottish Parliament petitions blog.
    Hmmm? I wonder if the e-petitions microsite links back to Napier University who handle the functionality/collation/application etc. This may explain the apparent lack of urgency or availability or even why the offending web page does not have a temporary message saying there is a fault. I'll take bets :)

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  18. The likelihood that it was the intelligence services is far greater.

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  19. [Further searching for verifiable facts]
    I viewed the html source code for the Scottish Parliament web site. All menu items which reference sub pages and directories are on the same server except the 'e-petitions' page which references a different server (including an entirely different IP address to the main site server). This supports the earlier supposition that the 'e-petitions' site is elsewhere. In fact, it is registered in the internic database as belonging to a company in England (Barefruit Ltd, an internet solutions company, whose blurb states, on error handling, " Users no longer need suffer the frustration of effectively a dead end and a poor surfing experience")
    The main Scottish Parliament domainname is registered by a person in Edinburgh.

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