Is the Broken Web Costing Lives?

Accessibility and availability should be important for public services.

As a regular sea swimmer I read this HN submission with interest [1] and after a deep dig into the document and links I decided to take some action. Some nasty rip currents have appeared at my local beach, popular with tourists with children. Due to reduced maintenance, sand bars have built up during the past two pandemic years which people seem unaware of. There are no waring signs.

So I decided to contact my local council.

I compiled some detailed information with the GPS coordinates of danger spots and a simple explanation to suggest temporary warning signs this summer. Each week they send me a local news letter, so I decided to reply to that with my concerns.

"This is a no reply address and is not monitored"

Fair enough? Not really. In my opinion that's just bloody rude and lazy. But nevertheless, on to their web page...

They have a "Beach Safety" page. Hoorah. But without JavaScript their pages render almost nothing. Okay, so this is important, time to put my own cybersecurity at risk for the greater good and switch on scripts. Still, the page will not load due to external fonts etc. Okay, time to throw my own privacy and dignity to the wind and unblock all the tracking crap. There is a web link but it is obscured by some bad style sheets that makes it disappear under another element.

I give up. Instead I will raise my concerns with the lifeguards, who are probably aware but don't have temporary signs to put up.

Visiting the RNLI site I am immediately thrown out.

   "Access denied Error code 1020
    You do not have access to rnli.org.
    ...
    Performance & security by Cloudflare"

Hey thanks Cloudflare for helping save lives.

Let's disable all privacy and security settings, change my web proxy, and try again.

Beneath the stock images of smiling staff I eventually find a well buried web form that wants, my name, location, daytime telephone, mobile telephone...

How very dare you! I am going out of my way, spending my own time to help others, and you want to data-rape me as our first encounter. I could fill it out with stubs and false info, but then risk some regular-expression dropping my important message. And besides, why should I feel forced to act like a criminal while attempting to help others?

I give up on that line.

Not defeated, I look up their phone number in the plain old phone book. I call and speak to someone who takes my concerns seriously and we manually note the locations of concern. She tells me all guards on those beaches will be informed.

Lately I've spoken to people who cannot book doctors appointments or speak to the police because they are deflected and re-routed to web services that do not work.

Is the WWW finished as an informational format?

Is it being used as a way to dodge responsibility?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31814221