Post about the MI5 terrorist threat level

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<title>UK Threat Level</title>
<pubDate>Sun, 26 Nov 2023 00:08:23 +0100</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">uk-threat-level</guid>
<category domain="https://envs.net/~lucidiot/rsrsss/">Feed</category>
<link>https://www.mi5.gov.uk/UKThreatLevel/UKThreatLevel.xml</link>
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<p>As a citizen of a country that still is within the European Union, I am probably legally required to make fun of the United Kingdom, and Brexit is only one in an ever-growing list of reasons why I might want to do that. But there is one thing that I cannot complain about, and that is their government's website.</p>
<p>I could not find it anymore, but a while ago, I read a blog post about someone watching someone else use a <abbr title="PlayStation Portable">PSP</abbr> to access GOV.UK on some free Wi-Fi to do whatever business you might have on your government's website. They used that as an example of how good Web design allows accessibility, even to people whose only device might have an incredibly limited browser and who still need to fill out governement forms online. My own experience with browsing the web on a PSP teaches me that accessing any website nowadays is extremely difficult, but I am willing to believe that blog post because GOV.UK's design sounds like it could actually fit on a PSP, or at least still be readable.</p>
<p>GOV.UK's <a href="https://design-system.service.gov.uk/" target="_blank">design system</a> causes the website to often be listed on lists of "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture" target="_blank">brutalist</a> websites", due to the design being all about clearly displaying what people are looking for, unlike what most heavily monetized blogs or most web apps do now.</p>
<p>But we're not here to talk about website design of course. Another interesting and much more relevant part of the UK governement website is that they have feeds, and a lot of them. Integrating the UK transport accident investigation branches into <a href="https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/" target="_blank"><abbr title="International Transport Safety Bureau">https://tilde.town/~lucidiot/itsb/</abbr></a> was trivial, just pick the right filters and get your tailored Atom feed. I have started to randomly stumble upon the feeds of other UK public bodies, and I think I'll have to soon spend more time trying to list all the feeds they have because there's a lot to discover. A lot of feeds, of XML namespaces, of relationships to European projects, and probably more.</p>
<p>Let's just start with this rather simple feed: you can get updates on the current <a href="https://www.mi5.gov.uk/threat-levels" target="_blank">national terrorist threat level</a> set by the MI5. I was both surprised at the fact that that's a feed, a feed that only gets updated at most twice a year, and at the fact that they have a separate threat level set for Northern Ireland. I'm fairly sure having a separate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigipirate" target="_blank">Vigipirate</a> level in France for Corsican independentists would just be a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing them to attack more.</p>
<p>I naively hope the UK someday stops all its political bullshit, but only so they can keep feeding me more feeds, and inspire other countries to do the same.</p>
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