This really sums up my overall experience with the Canadian government:
canada.ca/en/revenue-age
> The CRA online services are available 21 hours a day. Due to daily maintenance activities, the services are not available for three hours a day from 3 am to 6 am (Eastern time).
Conversation
If it was any other organization, I'd have trouble believing this was real. However, this is the same organization that made a typo in my birth date when receiving it from the federal government and wouldn't let me talk to them on the phone since they use it as authentication...
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Yeah, that was a major hassle to correct, since when you call them they won't talk to you unless you authenticate. I couldn't even get them to give me advice on what to do as some anonymous Canadian citizen. Needed to keep calling until one of them could be socially engineered.
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That allowed calling them again, authenticating with the wrong birth date and then starting the process of updating my birth date. It also makes me wary of people knowing my birth date considering that the government treats it like some secret password that no one else knows...
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well that's three more horrifying facts than i wanted to learn this morning
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On the positive side, they understand that email is insecure, so they include nearly zero helpful information in their emails beyond saying that there's an urgent notice. I'll probably get a message from my bank's app soon showing that they received some tiny $50 tax benefit.
Yeah, that's why they sent me a concerning email at 3am:
Account: Savings
Deposit Amount: $308.00
Transaction Date: July 09, 2019
Transaction Description: PROV/LOCAL GVT PYMT-CANADA
I don't even need to login to their site after all. I don't know why they make it seem scary.
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It's really such great design to tell someone just after 3am that there's an urgent alert for them and that they need to log into your site to see it which is down from 3am to 6am. They must have a cron job run once the site goes down and sends out these emails. It's ridiculous.
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