[pmjordan]

> This is bizarre, blame the passport for only having the last two digits and not the computer reading it.

I mean, the passport only showing 2 digits is worth mentioning. But I doubt this 101-year-old got much choice in exactly what format his passport contained his DOB - so the software needs to handle it. So if in doubt (e.g. both possibilities yield an age younger than oldest person on the planet) the software should be asking to confirm the century.

If you want to get really fancy, check the issue date first. If this is before the supposed 20xx birth date, the birth date must actually be 19xx. People aren't issued passports before they are born.

[magduf]

I'm wondering if this is a case of idiotic government regulations meeting contractor requirements:

The government stupidly decides to only put 2 digits on the passport. They sign a contract with a company to write OCR software for reading passports. The contractor points out "hey! There's only 2 digits here!", but the customer doesn't have an answer because that's some other department and it's already done. So the contractor just implements the software as specified, assuming that being older than 100 is impossible, because the customer couldn't come up with a solution for this problem.

[ryanlol]

> I'm wondering if this is a case of idiotic government regulations

The MRZ is an ICAO standard so you’ll need to blame the UN for this.

> The government stupidly decides to only put 2 digits on the passport.

This passport was issued by a foreign government though.

> because the customer couldn't come up with a solution for this problem.

The app schedules an appointment with a human, presumably that human will be able to differentiate between a 1-year-old and a 101-year-old. Perhaps the problem never existed?

The home office phone rep fixed this in 30(!) minutes.

[ryanlol]

That’s clever, but still leaves a significant edge case. I’d hazard to guess that 101-year-olds don’t travel very much and are therefore rather likely to be forced to get new passports for this specific purpose. (But perhaps the home office accepts expired passports?)

>But I doubt this 101-year-old got much choice in exactly what format his passport contained his DOB

I’m sure he didn’t, this definitely isn’t his fault.

> so the software needs to handle it

Does it though? It’s a rare edge case that should be trivial to solve with minor human intervention.

[pmjordan]

> Does it though? It’s a rare edge case that should be trivial to solve with minor human intervention.

Apparently[1] centenarians make up 0.02% of the UK population; how well this statistic transfers to EU nationals in the UK I don't know, but if it's 1:1 then this issue affects about 600 people. A large proportion of those will however have some trouble rectifying the problem themselves; the over-90-year-olds I know certainly would all struggle with this sort of thing. In the article, the activist who volunteers helping people with the registration process is quoted as saying it required 2 calls to the Home Office. This is someone who presumably has some practice dealing with the process and the Home Office and they couldn't get it sorted out trivially. If it's an accepted failure case of the automated process, there needs to be an established alternative process; it sounds like no consideration was given to this edge case at all. So, not "minor human intervention."

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

[gshdg]

Seems fair to guess most 1-year-olds don't travel much internationally either.