You are not eligible for an ETA if you are a British citizen.
On first glance, that sounds fairly common sense, as if you're a citizen, why would you need/want one? But there's a wrinkle...
It means that British citizens with dual (or more) nationality must have a UK passport, and must travel into the UK using it, and cannot use their other-nationality passport(s) like they used to be able to do.
Which means paying for a British passport if you didn't have one before.
(There is an alternative, but it's silly money, £589 vs £95 for an adult passport).
And IIRC, the whole thing is because of the new electronic border system that's being introduced or something like that.
Some British women now find themselves in a Kafkaesque situation where the UK home office refuses to renew or grant them a UK passport, because their foreign passport is under a different name. (Greece and Spain are mentioned in [1], but I know people in France affected by this)
Where previously these women could at least travel to their birth country to visit dying relatives on their foreign passport, they are now locked out waiting two months for a £600 entitlement certificate. Meanwhile, non-British visitors can just pay £16 for an ETA on this whizzy app.
While this is a real problem and I do have relative who had this issue like this there are ways to get new UK passport without paying £600 or changing legal name in other country.
It's just take digging in government rules and arguing. As long as it's not the first UK passport it's doable.
My friend went round and round and sent many documents back and forth for over a year trying to renew her British passport, to no eventual avail. UK authorities were extremely unsympathetic and unhelpful. The offending "misnamed" foreign passport was long expired and French authorities required a valid British passport to renew it - she was left without any passport at all for over a year, until the French took pity and provided an alternate path to renew her French passport.
Hey. I will ask how exactly it was solved and try to reply here in a day or two. My relative is woman so problem was that she had her original name in a passport from country of origin and UK passport had her name after marriage.
Sure, but it was a change that was slipped through under the radar without any proper justification for it (the situation wasn't even clarified for dual nationals until quite close to the deadline).
eg South Africa allows dual but you’re not allowed to use the other passport at border or within country.
I can kinda understand it from give perspective. Harder to track people when they switch constantly. People flying in on one passport and out with the other etc
Most countries require their own dual-nationality citizens to enter on their local passports not foreign ones, Britain was an exception before. It's not unreasonable to ask for the British passport, and I say this as someone affected.
Even if one takes this as legitimate, the "foreign" passport gives enough information already (otherwise they couldn't prevent me from acquiring an ETA with it).
Keeping track of which of your citizens are outside of the country. Ensuring the state knows you are a citizen and should be treated as such.
France had a weird issue recently about the media talking for ages about someone who committed a crime while the state had asked for him to be deported months before on the basis of his foreign passport and it took weeks for someone to finally notice that the guy was actually French. It made the police looks clownish.
I've read the issue is that some countries require you to renounce your previous nationality to get citizenship, and people have taken advantage of not needing a British passport by lying about renouncing their British citizenship.
I've seen claims this technique was actually recommended by the British consulate, no idea if that's true.
> I've read the issue is that some countries require you to renounce your previous nationality to get citizenship, and people have taken advantage of not needing a British passport by lying about renouncing their British citizenship.
Oh that's an interesting little loophole that might be a[nother] reason. A handful of EU member states disallow dual citizenship, so those taking advantage of "EU and British" might be impacted by this.
This new rule might be problematic for those Northern Irish people who identify solely as Irish (as is their right under the Good Friday Agreement) and who only hold an Irish passport: unless things have changed since the DeSouza case [0], the UK Government and UK law treat everyone born in Northern Ireland (as long as at least one of their parents meets citizenship or residency requirements) as a British citizen, regardless of their opinions on the matter. The UK Government holds that this is compatible with the GFA because you can renounce your British citizenship; but you have to pay hundreds of pounds to do so.
Small point, if you're traveling from republic of Ireland you don't practically need a passport or an ETA, you can just drive over the invisible border
Yeah... I'm just now realizing how relying on unit count in the listing is more problematic than I thought. Sellers say their unit count is 1, but the product title says it is 4 dozen. I need to figure out how to fix these inconsistencies.
Most of the people working at Ars are the exact same people who have been working there for the better part of their entire existence (source: me) Most of them _are_ experts in their fields, and most are vastly more qualified in their fields than pretty much anyone else publishing online (both now and 20 years ago).
It seems that _certain kinds of individuals_ have had rose-colored glasses on about pretty much everything online, but for Ars especially for some reason.
They detest change in a publication that covers the reality of actual life and technology, rather that commit suicide and stay covering stuff the same way they did in 1997—which 8 people total want to read (and not pay for, by the way).
Ars has been operating at an exceptionally high level for their entire history and have outlasted many other flashes-in-the-pan which are now relegated to the dust bin of history.
Is Ken still actively involved? He seems to appear to clarify something and then disappear into the background until the next major change (I expect the article about this to be bylined to him, as is appropriate).
tl;dr : the website formerly known as office.com that was a portal for accessing a bunch of stuff changed name to "Microsoft 365" in 2022, and then again more recently (adding the copilot bit).
Edit: Although the horror show that is Microsoft product naming in that area left the door wide open for this confusion.
Replacing Office with Microsoft 365 as the brand is still stupid. I was messing with Windows 11 a while back pre Copilot, and in the start menu was a pre installed spam link for “Microsoft 365 (Office)”. The fact they had to put the old brand in parentheses at the end should have been a hint they’re doing something stupid.
On digging further: OK, this is not really creating anything at all, it's just merging the NCA and various existing regional organised crime outfits together into one body.
In the last week or two it's been rumoured that Oppo are pulling the plug on OnePlus, and are going to wind up the brand entirely. (Although it may cling on in certain markets, like India).
Their website is indeed out of date. Reminds me of Haxe in that aspect. The language itself is receiving significant development, but the website looks abandoned, and no new blog posts have been posted in a while.
From one of the photos, the cable spec "G657A2" is visible on the outside - and specs listed for that indicate it's "bending insensitive single-mode fibre", apparently it can tolerate 10 loops around 15mm mandrel. (Which does surprise me).
But yes, agreed, a lot of "Er... why would you do it like that?" bits.
Those 10 loops definitely only apply to the single mode fibre itself, not the entire assembly with armor and everything, because that's just... physically impossible.
Cables for direct burial only like to be bent once or twice, and then only gently. Anything else may very well break the armor (whether plastic or metal), after which all bets are off.
Still, for the outer jacket to become brittle to the extent described, something else is required, which may very well turn out to be "shoddy manufacturing"...
You are not eligible for an ETA if you are a British citizen.
On first glance, that sounds fairly common sense, as if you're a citizen, why would you need/want one? But there's a wrinkle...
It means that British citizens with dual (or more) nationality must have a UK passport, and must travel into the UK using it, and cannot use their other-nationality passport(s) like they used to be able to do.
Which means paying for a British passport if you didn't have one before.
(There is an alternative, but it's silly money, £589 vs £95 for an adult passport).
And IIRC, the whole thing is because of the new electronic border system that's being introduced or something like that.
reply