Nectec, the GT200 and the fall of reason

picture from link

One one level it is nice to see that the government has put perhaps the only branch of government with a modicum of common sense on the job. Nectec was told to hold an inquiry.

But does anyone remember that other inquiry that Nectec did a few years back into the 888 million Baht procurement project of the smart ID cards? The MICT severely restricted Nectec's access to the card, giving them mere minutes to test a few key areas as per an agreed list, not even the entire list they should have been able to test as per their role as an independent third party.

Not only did Nectec find that the cards were not compliant, but in their brief testing, they found an EMV module (europay-Mastercard-Visa) for e-Cash and a couple of unidentified programs in it, none of which were in the terms of reference.

But despite that overwhelming evidence and the independent report saying that the cards were non-compliant, the ICT Ministry chose to vote them as compliant. In a democracy, only votes count, not the laws of mathematics.

I often ask key MICT people what 32-4 equals. The card came with 64 kb of memory, of which only 32 was avaialble and of that 4 was used for bug fixes. The TOR says that the card needs 32 kb of available memory for the javacard apps. The answer is that "the committee voted them as compliant".

Score one for democracy.