I'm not even sure whether I *want* to believe this, let alone whether it's true.

Any chance you could post it again tomorrow?

I mean ID cards who would be dumb enough to try and implement that?

I think El Reg should follow the advice of their latest nom de plume and publish some real news today.

Or maybe there is no news today? "And finally...."

Smiley - cos I havent done any work yet, just been laughing at today's stories.

But i'm calling april fool.

I really hope no one in government would actually use a confidential watermark that tacky.

... luckily the day is ...

Congratulations on your April Fool's Day spoof. Unfortunately, it's much too close to the truth to raise anything other than a cynical chuckle.

Let this be an April Fools...

Funny, even more so because it might be true...

Mines the one with A1 on the back

An excellent and very well executed April Fools - the language of the PDF is so close to Whitehall norms that I nearly posted it to Slashdot.

The problem with the UK government is that it often announces things on 1st April that we might all wish were April Fools jokes but turn out to be deadly serious.

I'll just stick to RFC1149 and its ilk. At least it's possible to avoid crap from pigeons.

Sir Conn Mydic !

This is more plausible than yesterdays story about the guy sticking his cock in a table.

Nice try - I loved the report - well written and clearly a sensible project that no 'right-minded' thinking Daily Mail reader would question.

Happy April

Paris - 'cos observing her every activity could make a good web movie (- or has that already been done :) )

Has anyone else considered the possibility that April 1st would be the perfect day to release a plan of this kind into the public domain?

Everyone laughs and writes it off as a joke ("couldn't possibly happen here, old boy"): and next thing you know the reality is upon us....

Anyone remember the TV series "1990" with its Public Control Department? This could have been the blueprint. One suspects it may have been partly the inspiration as well. The worry is that it all remains just a little too close to believable.

An April Fool...

reverse psychology...

just because you are paranoid it doesn't mean they are not watching you...

Nice try, but you're busted:

/CreationDate (D:20080331190655)

/Producer (Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Windows)

/ModDate (D:20080331190735+01'00')

The giveaway, of course, was the redacted "copy number" on the first page. When I couldn't highlight and copy the revealed text because it had been /properly/ blacked-out, I knew this document couldn't possibly have been prepared by *real* civil servants!

Paris has just produced and 'starred' in her very own big screen movie, a masterpiece of cinematic art entitled The Hottie & the Nottie. Haven't splashed out on a cinema visit myself but according to the Observer's film critic Philip French " There is nothing to commend this disastrous film and not even a herd of wild horses, each laden with a Gucci saddlebag packed with doubloons, could induce me to see it again."

So there you have it, our golden girl is fucked again.

Yes, but a PDF file creation stamp of 2008-03-31 19:06:55 and a modified stamp of 2008-03-31 19:07:35 suggests that they slapped it up whilst a bit bored in the pub last night.

Although 5 pages suggests that the beer was far too cheap.

@JonB and @AnonymousCoward (11.42): the time at which a PDF is created may or may not be coincidental with the time at which the document it displays was created.

"Smiley - cos I havent done any work yet, just been laughing at today's stories."

You had better get your Arsene Ghia then. ;)

Has this document changed?, I am sure the earlier one, without the redacted number, larger in size, with some interesting info in the pdf info fields may add to the conspiracy theory.

Yup, the review is a real stinker! :)

He describes our heroine as a "vacuous, self-adoring socialite" in a film "... starring herself as the most beautiful, sought-after girl in Los Angeles" and reveals a memorable line of dialogue: "a life without orgasms would be like a world without flowers."

I think we should all adopt that as our Paris leitmotif, bless her. All together now in chorus: "A life without ... "

Paris for the obvious reason

While you could of course be correct, in that El Reg theoretically *could* have received the document in, for example, MS word format, and used some print-as-pdf-file feature to convert it for our reading pleasure, I would however, nonetheless, just like to take this opportunity to say

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....... A P R I L ... F O O L ... ! .......

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... dude, c'mon. Even if you can't spot an obvious april fool when you see one, the author's name is "arse in gear"? As in, "Get yer"?

YHBT, big time!

What would Bentham think (aside from roiling in his rave)?