Re: [lp-ca-on] Ontario government forms

[Bob Jonkman]

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Greg wrote:
> I suspect the government uses some of these (pdf) formats for 
> "security". They think it's like paper because they think people 
> can't or won't modify it.

Absolutely true. For a while in the early 2000's the City of Toronto
was distributing ward maps as PDFs, which they had "locked" to
disallow printing. That stopped people who used Adobe products, but it
was almost trivial to unlock those PDFs and print the maps with
GhostScript and GhostView, even on a Windows computer. And then it was
possible to save the unlocked files as printable PDFs.

Security isn't possible in non-FAIF products.

- --Bob.


On 2016-05-20 08:13 AM, Greg Knittl wrote:
> Hi  Blaise,
> 
> tomorrow is the march against Monsanto. Very similar situation. 
> Monsanto getting a chokehold on the food we eat through
> intellectual property. And it's cheaper than organic food in the
> (very) short run. So one strategy is to try to make connections
> with other groups fighting similar issues both to understand their
> strategies and to try and combine forces. I think I've even seen
> the FSF say something like this.
> 
> There are real concrete benefits to using open standards that the 
> government might care about, or be made to care about. Again I
> think it's more long term. It's a pain to write my own spreadsheet
> to do taxes and then submit on paper, but there are important long
> term benefits. I've been doing this for 9 odd years and it's just
> text and xml. It migrates seamlessly. I should be able to rerun
> those calculations if I have to. Adjustments to prior years happen
> and you may want to cross check the CRA's calculations. With
> Capital Gains you have to keep records from initial acquisition to
> final disposition of an asset which can be decades. I can search
> with grep. I can repurpose it. My Dad's taxes are on a collection
> of Windows machines, some lost in the mists of time. I'm actually
> hanging on to a physical Windows Vista machine for some of his
> taxes because I have no idea how to migrate that.
> 
> Same thing for forms. Both parties will get records they can carry 
> forward much further into the future, can search more easily, can 
> repurpose etc. I suspect the government uses some of these (pdf) 
> formats for "security". They think it's like paper because they
> think people can't or won't modify it. I'm not an expert, but my
> impression is that these are not cryptographically secure
> approaches. If there is a way to apply cryptographic signatures to
> html5, xml or plain text formats government could have the best of
> the non-repudiability of paper and the flexibility of electronic
> information.
> 
> Greg
> 
> On 16-05-19 09:41 AM, Blaise Alleyne wrote:
>> On 19/05/16 12:46 AM, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, May 18 2016, Stephen Paul Weber wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Really, it's more our responsibility as a community to get 
>>>> software that cane handle the forms in order. Getting
>>>> tickets with examples filed in the right places is a start.
>>> I agree it's our responsibility to fight this fight.  I
>>> wouldn't say "get the software the can handle the forms", but
>>> rather ask the government to create forms that can be handled
>>> by Free Software.
>>> 
>> Seems like both are valid, but the technical solution is a 
>> temporary workaround while lobbying the government may or may
>> not work (or may take a long time).
>> 
>> If I'm following this, the reason that free software
>> applications can't currently handle these forms is that they're
>> based on a hodgepodge of perhaps proprietary, perhaps
>> undocumented file formats that are inconsistently used or would
>> need to be reverse engineered or something?
>> 
>> It seems like getting tickets filed in the right places could be
>> a productive short-term solution, to assist free software
>> projects to handle these forms, but it's more of a temporary
>> workaround. (It does seem like it's a moving target too...)
>> That's a solution that takes mostly developer time/attention --
>> not convincing a bureaucracy/government to care.
>> 
>> But asking the government to create forms that can be handled by 
>> free software is a better fix -- just might not be easy, so the 
>> technical workarounds may help in the meantime. I'm not sure the 
>> government would care about free software per se, but they might 
>> care about accessibility, maybe about choice / not requiring 
>> Canadians to use software from one particular foreign for-profit
>>  corporation to interact with their government... *shrugs*
>> 
>> Still, a lot of work to get people to care in the first place, as
>>  opposed to "what's the problem? It's free (gratuit), isn't it?"
>> but there may be some arguments that work better than others with
>> that mindset...
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> 
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