While it looks like a kitchen cabinet from the eighties, it’s actually a serious piece of kit, with a heavy-duty punch that makes mincemeat out of both 3.5in and 2.5in drives.

Duplo International delivered the machine to us with a bin full of already-destroyed hard disks in tow, but we had to give it a go ourselves. Sure enough, the 3.5in disk we dug up from the bottom of the Labs – an IBM Deskstar sporting a capacious 185GB – was soon rendered useless thanks to a punch that pierces disks with between 2.5 and 3 tons of force, as the following video demonstrates.

That’s enough power, according to Duplo, to theoretically lift a truck, so you can be sure it’ll put a rather large dent in the average hard disk.

It’s not the quick cut-and-shut process you’d assume it is, either – instead, the 0101 seems to enjoy its particular method of torture. Press the power button with a hard disk in the slot and, once it’s illuminated by a green light, the punch emerges from the side of the bay, slowing piercing its way through metal, silicon and glass, before retreating once the disk is destroyed.

Once that’s done, a flick of a switch drops the hard disk into an obsolete abyss. Or, more realistically, a bin in the bottom of the cabinet.

Of course, punching a hole through a hard disk doesn’t necessarily render the data destroyed – I’m pretty sure NASA would be able to retrieve it, for instance – but it certainly makes it incredibly difficult to retrieve any information without specialist equipment.

It’s a viable option for security-conscious businesses who need to ensure that data can’t be retrieved – and, as we’ve seen, it’s pretty satisfying to use, too. The catch? Well, that’ll be the price – £1,995 excluding VAT.

Would you shell out that much, or have you got a favourite – and cheaper – hard-disk destruction method? Let us know in the comments.

For years, fixed and mobile broadband providers have used the term “unlimited” to advertise services that are anything but.

We’ve moaned about it for years, and last month even our normally docile telecoms regulator said the term “unlimited” was being abused.  “There are people offering unlimited packages that contain a fair-use policy that means what you are getting is not unlimited,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards. “If you are claiming unlimited then it needs to be unlimited.”

It seems the industry wasn’t listening. New data tariffs are still being advertised as “unlimited” even when they have specific download caps.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been conducting a review of broadband advertising, but frankly, we’re tired of waiting for this weak-kneed, self-regulating body to get its act together.

So, from now on, whenever we see a new tariff being advertised as “unlimited” when it patently isn’t, we’re going to add it to our blog of shame.

T-Mobile has the misfortune of being top of our list, simply because it’s the first network we’ve noticed to launch an offending tariff since the Ofcom chief declared war on the term “unlimited”, but we’re certain there are many more.

So we need your help. If you see a fixed or mobile operator advertising a new “unlimited” tariff that has strict limits, let us know on comments below, and we’ll name and shame them too.

THE “UNLIMITED” BLOG OF SHAME

TARIFF: T-Mobile tariff for iPad 2 (new customers)

WHAT IT SAYS: £25 per month including 1GB Anytime data, 1GB ‘Quiet Time’ data and unlimited Wi-Fi.

WHAT IT MEANS: Wi-Fi usage is subject to a 10GB per month fair usage policy.

DATE LAUNCHED: 25 March 2011.

(Update: A T-Mobile spokesperson told PC Pro: “Blocking providers from using the term ‘unlimited’ when a data cap is applied is something which Ofcom is currently considering, but hasn’t yet put in place. There are a few different options which it is still weighing up, and this is just one of them.”)

Much has been written about the security of data in the cloud, and even more about the insecurity of the same. Until now, things have been somewhat quieter when it comes to how we access cloud-based data on the move. That, I suspect, is about to change.

Plenty of effort has been poured into securing online data stores, and plenty is made by the providers of those cloud services in making sure potential customers know about it. Which is why the bad guys are understandably looking for the soft targets, and at the moment that would appear to be Android apps.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: the smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of cloud computing. That rings especially true at the ‘free’ end of the cloud scale where the attraction of services such as those provided by Google can offer real bottom-line savings for hard pressed small business concerns. Security within the free or low-cost cloud isn’t somehow automatically weaker than that found at the expensive end of the cloud provision market either.

You can be sure that Google has invested heavily in securing the data at rest within those cloud bases, incorporating all the multi-layered protocols and synchronous replication processes you might expect. But perhaps it needs to invest more at the other end, the smartphone to be precise. What you need to ask yourself is whether Android could be the weak link in the cloud security chain?

Dan Wallach, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, got the ball rolling when he revealed that his undergraduate security class had decided to listen in on the traffic to and from his Android smartphone, a Motorola Droid X running Android 2.2.1, with his permission of course.

With Android overtaking Apple iOS as the most popular mobile operating system, security of Android apps is going to become something we hear more and more about

The class used Wireshark and Mallory to sniff the data and quickly discovered that Google wasn’t encrypting traffic heading for Google Calendar (using the default Google Calendar app that came with the phone) which is a pretty bad start if you were expecting this kind of information to be kept secure and confidential in transit. Google is, I understand, planning on introducing encrypted traffic to Google Calendar on Android as part of an unspecified maintenance release in the future.

What really grabbed my attention, however, was while the professor had a Facebook account configured to specify fully encrypted traffic, the Android Facebook app ignored that and sent everything in the clear. Especially as Wallach notes “Facebook isn’t doing anything like OAuth signatures, so it may be possible to inject bogus posts as well”. Oh, and one of the requests that the class saw heading to the Facebook server was carrying a SQL statement, which doesn’t bode well.

Identity management specialist Phil Lieberman argues that the sending of data (other than passwords) in the clear is “absolutely typical of open-source software” and insists that there is little or no incentive for the software developer to do otherwise unless the destination system absolutely requires it.

Indeed, he goes further to warn that the Dan Wallach revelation is an “early warning shot” when it comes to the use of cloud-computing platforms and Android. “The stark reality is that computer science graduates rarely, if ever, receive any training on how to write secure applications,” Lieberman claimed. “So it should come as no surprise that many applications created by these same people are insecure”.

Certainly, with Android overtaking Apple iOS as the most popular mobile operating system, security of Android apps is going to become something we hear more and more about. Unlike Apple, which has had relatively little problem with malicious apps finding their way onto iPhones, courtesy of what some argue are Draconian controls over what reaches the App Store, the Android Market accepts anything that is uploaded and there are no such pre-publication clearance controls to filter out the insecure and downright dangerous.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that just last week we have seen the discovery of some 50 or so Android apps infected with the ‘DroidDream’ rootkit, which are capable of intercepting and diverting personal data. Of course, Google acts quickly (within minutes in this case) to remove such software as soon as it can when such a discovery is made, but that didn’t prevent people downloading them and being infected in the first place. The DroidDream rootkit also has the capability to download other malicious software which it can then install, so nobody really knows how many handsets are already infect or what they are infected with.

More alarmingly, those same infected handsets, or even the same apps, could be used to access business data in the cloud. Whereas much focus has been put on ensuring company data is properly encrypted when stored on mobile devices, that focus has to now widen to include the apps being used to access the data in the first place.

At the very least, security policy needs to encompass the usage of authorised apps only on any device used to access business data. Better still, ensure that processes are in place that control what data and services a mobile device can, and cannot, access. Either that, or as Phil Lieberman starkly says “use your smartphone to log into cloud and secure systems at your peril”.

How much is your data worth? You may think that the customer database your business has built is priceless, and individuals probably regard their online data as being rather valuable as well. After all, that’s why we put so much effort into securing it. Unfortunately, the basic economic laws of supply and demand exist within the criminal marketplace just as they do elsewhere.

Which means that our perception of value is hugely over-inflated when compared to the reality of the online underground economy. That reality is that as malware production and exploitation has rocketed, and stolen data has flooded the marketplace, so the price has plummeted to pretty unbelievable lows.

I’ve been scouting around the various cybercrime underground markets, as well as talking to professional security researchers, and have found pricing that ranges from a few pence for basic stolen credit card numbers purchased in bulk, to a few hundred pounds for a verified ‘active’ bank account with a balance in excess of £10,000 and an online purchase history to go with it.

The risk of arrest is far higher to the person cashing in on a stolen bank account than it is for someone simply selling the data on the underground market

At the really cheap end of the stolen data market are those volume purchases of stolen credit-card numbers. If you fancy taking your chances with a bunch of 100 US-originated cards, unverified and with no guarantees of still being active, then you can pay as little as 10p per card.

Double it if you want the same volume but with a guarantee (whatever that may be worth when dealing with low-life criminals) that the accounts have not yet been reported as compromised, and double it again if you want UK-originated cards rather than American ones.

Platinum variants used to carry a premium, but these seem to have all but disappeared. The bad guys are not adverse to racking up the profit margin with value-added deals though, charging an extra £1 per card if you want accompanying security data (such as postal address and mother’s maiden name) and 50p per time for cards registered to an owner in a specific city.

Unverified bank account data is also cheap enough at £1 per record, but if you want one that comes ‘guaranteed’ as active and with a positive balance of up to £500, then you can up that to £50. The bigger the available balance on a verified account, the more you can expect to pay. How does £400 for an account with around £50,000 of available funds grab you?

The most expensive charges are reserved for accounts which have an existing record of online purchases and PayPal transactions, and are therefore less likely to attract unwanted attention as the funds start to empty.

I know what you are thinking: if that balance was really available why would the criminals be selling the account data for such a relatively small amount instead of cashing in themselves? The answer can be summed up in one word: risk. The risk of arrest is far higher to the person cashing in on a stolen bank account than it is for someone simply selling the data on the underground market. Especially as most transactions are made using ‘untraceable’ cash transfer services such as Western Union or Liberty Reserve.

DIY Kits

The underground economy doesn’t only apply market forces to the value of your data, but does the same when it comes to selling the tools that allow the bad guys to steal it in the first place. The news that you can now buy a do-it-yourself kit for creating a rogue Facebook application for as little as £15 on the web black market came as absolutely no surprise to me.

Nor that yet another kiddie script on steroids kit has surfaced; after all, it was only a matter of time before someone decided that there is more money to be made and less exposure to risk by selling a Facebook malware app creation kit than operating a Facebook malware app scam. What’s more, it’s certainly no surprise that such a thing should come so cheap.

The malware business has long since followed hacking and become commoditised. By which I mean, just as with the hacking business before it, as malware activity has increased dramatically over the past few years, so the market value of malware exploits and the kits used to create them has declined equally dramatically. So whereas the top-end rogue coders selling highly customised and complex Trojan exploit kits to establish hard-to-track zombie networks, which can be used to rent out DDoS and spam attacks, are still demanding many thousands for their handiwork, the budget end of the market is really low cost.

Ironically, the templated, kiddie-script kit end of the malware market is also plagued by piracy, with gangs cracking software and making it available for free. The payload for this free lunch being pretty similar to most pirated commercial software, in that it carries malware of its own. The crackers add code that ensure a copy of any data stolen is passed back to them for resale, and some even comes with a Trojan built in to allow them to take control of the network used by the rival gang installing it. That creates more stolen data to flood the market and further drive the price down, which in turn means they need to steal more in order to make a living.

But perhaps the saddest thing about this malware cost equation becomes apparent when you factor in the cost to business of the data being stolen which, according to a report from the Ponemon Institute last year, sat at an average of £64 per record.

Step forward David Bayon and Darien Graham-Smith, who claimed that T-Mobile’s decision (now partially reversed) to cut “fair use” data caps to 500MB was essentially “fair” – it was just the way T-Mobile presented it that was the problem.

Sorry chaps, but you’re wrong. Hideously, grossly, sleep-with-your-wife’s-mother-behind-her-back wrong.

T-Mobile’s argument – partially supported by the PC Pro Two, as they shall henceforth be known – is that anything more bandwidth-chomping than basic browsing should be performed on a Wi-Fi connection.

Let me remind all concerned that these are mobile phones – the word makes up 75% of T-Mobile’s name for God’s sake. If I only wanted to watch video, use Spotify, download a podcast or upload photos when I was within spitting distance of a Wi-Fi network, I wouldn’t bother with a sodding smartphone. I’d use my laptop – it’s far better for all those jobs.

I paid a couple of hundred quid for an iPhone and thirty-odd quid a month to my network precisely to enjoy the multimedia benefits the smartphone brings. If all I wanted was to make calls, read email, and browser the occasional webpage, I could do it on a Nokia No-Name 8700 on a £10 a month tariff.

The mobile networks have sold us these all-singing, all-dancing smartphones, weaned us on to expensive all-inclusive monthly tariffs, and now want to take away the free drinks. And not even in an up-front way, but in a sneaky change the Ts&Cs and hope they don’t notice way.

Perhaps if T-Mobile et al spent a little less on ridiculous, celebrity-filled TV adverts telling us “life is for sharing” and invested more money in a network that was actually fit for sharing, it wouldn’t have to trim its “fair-use” policy in the first place.

I don’t consider myself an IT expert. I consider myself to be an enthusiastic user of technology who just happens to know a thing or two about specific IT subjects and has an ability to communicate that knowledge to others. Not everyone is so shy in stepping forward to don the ‘expert’ hat though, and that is causing problems for businesses.

The Urban Dictionary definition of Expert Syndrome is an ailment that is characterised by “the need to expound on a given topic beyond actual knowledge” and that advanced sufferers are “often unaware of the condition, losing the ability to distinguish opinion from fact”. Before you dismiss this right now as being just another of the many somewhat jovial opinion pieces fuelled by an excess of seasonal cheer, there is actually a rather serious side to IT Expert Syndrome. To grasp the seriousness of the problem you first have to appreciate the duality of the learning theory concept of transfer.

Transfer is taking a newly taught skill set and transferring it from the theoretical into the real world, or putting what you have read about or been taught and putting it into a hands-on, practical and appropriate context. The problems really start when you consider negative transfer, or taking what you have learned in one context and applying it totally incorrectly in another, where it hinders advancement.

Hands up if someone where you work thinks they know more about IT than the IT department? Hands up if you are a junior IT support worker and think you know better than the IT admin guy? Hands up if you are the IT admin guy and think you know better than the IT director? OK, that last one was a bit of a red herring as you probably do, but the point remains that IT Expert Syndrome is not only infectious, but in danger of reaching epidemic proportions in many businesses.

When independent research firm Dynamic Markets, commissioned by Informatica Corporation, surveyed 300 sales and marketing managers and 301 IT professionals, the results suggested that UK business employees are increasingly taking on the role of DIY IT expert in order to get quicker or more convenient access to the company data they require. The research reveals that IT Experts Syndrome most often reveals itself in the sufferer making use of unauthorised online applications and cloud computing services, so as to better manager their data access requirements.

What this outbreak of IT Expert Syndrome highlights most is the battle over ownership of data

As Mark Seager, vice president of technology at Informatica says “the rise of new models such as cloud computing will create a headache for IT departments if they are not integrated in an overall IT strategy. Business users now think it should take hours not weeks to implement new technologies. When they perceive IT to be behind the curve, they’re going off under their own steam and purchasing software without realising the implications this has on their company”.

According to Informatica, 39% of those who admitted to buying, installing or using their own software in this way did so because of a perceived sluggish response from the IT department. If your temperature is now rising, your cheeks are getting a little flushed and you are experiencing an overwhelming feeling of ‘quite bloody right as well’ then I’m afraid you are also displaying signs of the infection.

The real IT experts (and, as far as the average business is concerned, that definition has to apply solely to the IT department) are finding themselves drowning in a veritable tidal wave of data created by new applications and software flooding the corporate infrastructure.

Before I go any further, yes, I have to agree that perhaps the ‘expert’ tag is misplaced if the IT department has not put measures in place to prevent the installation or use of unauthorised software. It’s not exactly difficult, after all, and to not do so is leaving the business wide open to potential security breaches. But that, perhaps, is something for another blog entry.

What this outbreak of IT Expert Syndrome highlights most is the battle over ownership of data. I’ve always thought that data ownership is pretty clear cut: corporate data belongs to the company in terms of both the physical possession of it and responsibility for that information as well. Yet 56% of the business users asked in that Informatica study believed that data ownership should rest with the employees that use it. Unsurprisingly, IT managers didn’t share this view with more than half insisting that the IT department was the right place for data ownership to fall.

The trouble is, quite apart from the administration overhead that this data ownership uncertainty introduces, that a fragmentation over who has first dibs on data is likely to replicate itself as a fragmentation of that data itself. Without full access to all business-critical data it becomes impossible to maximise revenue for the business.

And it doesn’t take an expert, self-proclaimed or not, to appreciate that.

This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

And yet more so when the methodology behind that value is about as clear as mud to anyone without an economics degree. I’m sure that the Centre for Economics and Business Research knows what it is doing, but I’m not so sure that too many people out here in the real world really care.

Seriously, does “the Cloud Dividend report identified the cost savings (CAPEX and OPEX) made by companies adopting cloud computing services and measured these against macro and business variables such as business development opportunities; business creation; indirect gross value added (GVA); tax contributions; as well expenditure on cloud services to determine the Euro value of the technology in each country” make sense to anyone out there?

Back in the real world, I would venture to suggest most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy, regardless of how that prediction was arrived at.

What your average small business (heck, any business at the end of the day) is really interested in is the bottom line: what will investing in the cloud cost the business, what return will it bring on that investment, and how long will it take to realise it?

The questions I hear being asked include, for example, why should I buy into cloud data storage when storage hardware is so cheap I can have all the onsite and offsite data backup I want, for a sum that is not only a fraction of the yearly cost but a one-off investment at that?

Most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy

It’s a bloody good question when you come to think about it, and if all you are looking at is the plain vanilla value-for-money equation (and forget the data security, access, ease of use, outsourcing all that jazz arguments), one that is very hard to counter with a cloud-based response.

Or how about questions relating to cost savings on power (servers are cheaper to run if someone else is paying the electricity bill) and support (ditto) which need to be worked out before any move into the cloud is considered? How does the balance sheet compare between purchasing and maintaining an IT asset such a server compare to the ongoing cost of outsourcing that requirement to a cloud provider?

The cost of securing cloud data is often ignored, especially at the small business end of the scale, but that’s definitely a false economy as the Data Protection Act doesn’t care too much how big your business is, just how you protect customer data. Push it out into the cloud and your worries are not necessarily transferred to the cloud service provider, it all depends upon the exact wording of your service agreements.

So I guess what I am saying here is that small business needs to get its calculator out and do some very real world sums before jumping into the cloud with both feet and all associated data, to ensure that it’s not just throwing money into the ether.

No matter how much those who would extoll the virtues of cloud computing as the future of IT try and bombard and befuddle us with macro-economic predictions on a global scale, it’s the here and now that is of concern to the average small business which has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

“We don’t think it’s fair that the many should subsidise the behaviour of the few, and we think that we have a responsibility to our customers to address this kind of imbalance,” Dunne stated.

I’ll have you know that I’m the proud holder of A-level maths (grade C), and so I’ve dug my calculator out. By my reckoning:

O2 had 26 million customer accounts at the start of 2010, so it has 26,000 heavy data users

26 million x 200MB = 5,200,000,000 MB total data usage across the network per month

5,200,000,000MB  ÷ 3 = 1,733,333,333MB per month used by the 26,000 heavy data users

That means the average heavy data user consumes a staggering 66,666MB (so around 65GB) per month

Quite how anyone manages to download 65GB per month over a 3G connection is beyond me. You’d have to be running the connection round-the-clock. And indeed, when I put that scenario to O2’s press office, the spokesperson said that’s exactly what’s happening.

But instead of punishing the few to protect the many, O2 has done the exact opposite: it’s put a 500MB cap on previously “unlimited” accounts to ward off the data hogs.

If the rapacious appetites of the minority was causing O2 such a problem, why didn’t it impose a ceiling of, say, 5GB a month? By my calculations (A-level maths, remember) that would still wipe almost a third off O2’s total data traffic and only potentially infuriate a relative handful of its customers.

Instead, 26 million customers are now going to have to keep a careful eye on their data consumption, or risk being hit for excess charges of £5 per 500MB.

O2 insists that 97% of its smartphone customers will be unaffected by the 500MB cap and that the new charges will allow it to better plan investment in its network. “We have invested £½ billion in our network over the last two years; £10bn to date,” an O2 spokesperson told me. “In November 2009 we unveiled plans to accelerate our network growth, totalling £100 million over the coming year. This includes building 1,550 new sites across the UK by the end of this year.”

That’s all well and good, but let’s not pretend  an enormous data bill is destroying O2’s finances. O2 owner Telefonica recently announced annual profits of €1.6 billion, with its earnings statement paying tribute to the enormous growth in revenue from mobile broadband services.

O2’s CEO describes these changes as “fair and transparent”. I’m willing to credit him with the “transparent” bit.

One IT Manager has had enough, though, and taken the matter into this own hands by creating the Bustadrive, a machine that uses a powerful “hydraulic punch” to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable.

The Bustadrive is a product born out of the many frustrations of Ross Waterton, who spent “years decommissioning PCs” and handing hard disks over to destruction companies in a “readable state” but only being given a certificate to let him know that his disks had been destroyed and the data on them hadn’t been accessed – but that wasn’t enough for Waterton, who would have preferred a more water-tight solution.

Waterton built the prototype to use with his own firm’s hard disks but also lent it to friends within the industry – “who all suggested that [Waterton] manufacture and sell the unit”, especially when competing hard disk crushers were “expensive in comparison” to the Bustadrive.

Opinions were mixed when the device arrived in the PC Pro office, though – while I loved the machine and could see exactly where Waterton was coming from, other members of the team doubted that the bent platters of our pair of test disks were actually unreadable. To verify Waterton’s claims, we contacted data destruction companies to get their take on the Bustadrive.

Richard A. Tanfield-Johnson, from ITGreen Computer Recycling, said that “simply chopping the platter in half wouldn’t remove the data” and confirmed that it could be recovered – but the costs of retrieving any remaining information “would be prohibitive”. That’s because you’d need “something along the lines of an electron scanning microscope” to read the data from the remains of the platter – and those currently sell second-hand for at least £40,000.

Tanfield-Johnson also confirmed that, once you’d cracked open a hard disk to extract the platters within, recovering any data would become even more difficult, because you’d need “the same model and make of [circuit] board” to access each track of data on the disk. So, unless you’re willing to spend tens of thousands of pounds, it looks like your data is safe.

Andrew Speedie, a security controller for Secure IT Disposals Limited, concurred, and explained that there are two ways to generally recover data from hard disks – keyboard recovery and laboratory recovery.

Keyboard recovery is only effective when the disk is “mechanically undamaged” and the disk can be plugged into a PC and software can recover the data – and the Bustadrive certainly doesn’t leave disks mechanically undamaged.

Laboratory recovery, meanwhile, “requires specialist equipment” to read disk platters and sometimes has to be conducted by hand, which can take a huge amount of time “depending on the level of damage”. It’s fair to say that laboratory recovery will be beyond the scope and budgets of those looking to recover data from the average hard disk, with Speedie unable to give names of the specialist organisations who can perform such tasks.

The Bustadrive, then, looks like it’ll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers – and, costing just £200 to buy and with a £75 hiring option being considered, it’s far cheaper than both competing products and other services that offer to shred, crush and destroy hard disks. If you destroy a decent number of disks then the Bustadrive could pay for itself within weeks.

Waterton claims that if you invest in the Bustadrive it’ll become “as essential as a screwdriver” – so, if you’d like more information on this unique product and would like to find out more, visit Bustadrive’s website.

Now it turns out this is a slightly over-dramatic first sentence to the Guardian article.

The prime motive behind the concept of every car including a little black box is to keep traffic running smoothly (drivers can be warned of hold-ups and accident blackspots due to black ice, for instance), and there are other benefits too – traffic lights could automatically change as you approached them, you could be warned if an ambulance was heading your way, a parking space could be reserved at your chosen destination as you approached.

The end result of all this should be traffic moving more smoothly and fewer accidents.

But the fact remains that the Government and police would be able to pinpoint not only where our cars are but also where they’ve been. Tie that in with mobile phone records, and it becomes not just the car that’s tracked but us, the British (and European, as this is a Europe-wide measure) population.

We’re all used to having our privacy invaded, but even with the benefits of reduced accidents (and deaths) and quicker journey times, surely this is a step too far? The current set of European governments may be quite benign, but you don’t have to look too far back in history to find totalitarian states and dictatorships in Italy, Germany and Russia.

If we put black boxes in every car, and match that with a network of masts and satellites to track our move, we’re giving a weapon of awesome power to those who want to mis-use it. Sure, it will probably never happen in our lifetimes, but the world is a very strange place.

We should put some protective measures in place to make sure it’s never easy to take control of our lives, and I for one don’t want my every move – however dull – to be tracked.