Greetings from San Francisco! Back in the UK, I know most of you are probably gearing up to go home for the day; but out here it’s 8.15 in the morning and the Intel Developer Forum starts in 45 minutes. Over the next three days we’ll be learning more about 32nm CPUs, scoping out the successor (already) to Nehalem and – inevitably – enjoying more talk about Larrabee, Intel’s multi-core x86-based graphic system, now coming up to a glorious three years of development with no release in sight.

Still, leaving that aside, Intel’s doing pretty well right now. With Lynnfield barely out of the traps and a die-shrink already rumoured before Christmas, it’s clear that the company is, right now, at the top of its game in terms of innovation and engineering.

Which is why I was amused this morning when my very first interaction with IDF – the registration process – exposed a glaring security slip.

Checking out the check-in

On the face of it, it looked like a good demonstration of “the power of connected computing”, or some similar buzzwordy phrase. The company had decided to use a web-based registration system, and had lined up little kiosk computers, running IE8 and connected to the main server, in the entrance hall for attendees to enter their details.

The trouble was that Intel hadn’t disabled Internet Explorer’s “autocomplete” feature… so when I pressed “G”, to enter my surname, I was surprised to be presented with a lengthy drop-down box showing all the previous surnames that had been entered. It quickly became clear that, if I had the patience – and didn’t mind looking a little suspicious – I could easily use the information stored across the various kiosks to compile at least a partial list of people who’d already registered this morning.

All right, there’s probably a limit to how much mischief I could cause with such a list. But I guarantee you that if you were to ask Intel for this information it would refuse to provide it. Meanwhile, the technology it has chosen is leaking information, and compromising attendees’ privacy, in a wholly unmanaged way.

The moral, if there is one, is probably to be very wary of using general-purpose, off-the-shelf solutions for specific applications – because user-friendly features that are helpful in one context could be disastrous in others.

And since the world’s biggest provider of general-purpose solutions is probably Intel, I think this is quite a poetic start to the proceedings.