I had a parental visit at the weekend, and we decided to take in some of the tourist sites around the capital. On Sunday the itinerary involved a quick spin on the London Eye – it does actually move much faster than it appears to from my office window - followed by a gig in Hyde Park.
To the embarrassment of my family I had items from my bag confiscated at both.
This often happens to me, as an inveterate tinkerer and technology hoarder; bike parts taken by Science Museum staff, USB drives and mobile phones at a laptop manufacturer’s design centre. It’s no big deal to me, as long as it’s justified.
On the Eye it was a small toolkit I carry in case my bike falls to pieces. Fair enough; the spanner could be used as a weapon, perhaps, or to undo the capsule and send it plunging into the Thames. At the concert, though, it was my DSLR which was flagged up, as I was told that on the second day of the two-day event, staff had been told to stop “big cameras” from entering. This has been happening more and more in the last year or two.
With all the critical media coverage of high-profile data losses in recent months (much of it here on PC Pro), it’s no wonder that people are thinking more and more about their own data security. It makes sense to be paranoid, to a certain extent, but it’s easy to go too far. (more…)
“Microsoft today announced the launch of Microsoft Store, an online retail destination which, for the first time, brings together a broad range of Microsoft’s consumer software products to a single location,” reads the breathless press release that’s just landed in my inbox.
“Microsoft Store will allow customers to easily explore and discover the company’s portfolio of consumer products…”
Erm, no it won’t. Because when we tried to visit www.microsoftstore.co.uk we were confronted by the following error message:
The press release adds: “Microsoft’s Store ESD platform will be made available to partners in the future, following rigorous testing of the consumer experience.” Such as checking consumers can actually see the website, perhaps?
I, like a lot of you, own a mobile phone that stores more than just a few phone numbers. Being a BlackBerry Pearl it also has copies of my recent emails, my full contacts lists and all sorts of notes that I find useful. Obviously this information is backed up, so losing a phone is not a problem in that respect. But when this phone’s keyboard packed up I wanted to erase this data before I returned it for replacement.
A quick call to Vodafone and a replacement was on its way, but I had to return the broken one. Fine I said, but how do I erase my personal data on this phone? All its suggestions involved using the keyboard, not much help really. Why not have a reset button on these phone that will clear all the data on them? Better than that, why can’t the service provider ( Vodafone in this case ) send a signal to the phone to instruct it to erase all the data on it, obviously with your permssion?
Is it any surprise that personal data theft is a big problem nowadays when such small devices that can easily get lost or stolen can contain such a wealth of private information?
Come on you phone providers, think about security: the more information we store on these devices the more important it is that this information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Or am I just being paranoid?
Not a question I ever thought I would find myself asking, nor to be fair finding myself intrigued by the answer. Not even if we got into the hypothetical territory of quantum encryption where those wearing the white coats and bemused expressions will happily tell you that every possible encryption key can be tested simultaneously, resulting in encryption, and of course decryption, before you can stifle the yawn.
However, perhaps it is because it is a slow news day or I the fact that I need to get something geeky into my system following the mind-numbing experience that is shopping at Tesco, but a press release from Protegrity Corporation and Teradata managed to get me considering the speed of encryption question.
The last time I crossed the Swiss border was from the south: Mr Honeyball and I were going from Cannes to Mulhouse and the Schlumpf Museum (link is noisy - speakers off!), and I figured out that the best way to do this is not to schlep all the way round the French Alps, but instead go through the Gotthard pass and overnight in Lucerne.
As always, the Swiss border guards are like someone from Friends Reunited: cautious, a bit shy, and then the minute you are nice to them you are their best friend ever. Jon was expecting to be taken away and have his fillings sent for assay, but I deliberately picked a small crossing on the SP3 from Varese & Malnate, knowing the traffic would be light and the guys would be relaxed - and we wanted to drive over the bizarre ground-loops we found on Google Maps.
This friendly but thorough encounter - and a previous visit, going in through Basel, where the guards spent longer marvelling at the Japanese tax-disc on my personal import Subaru that they did looking at my passport - put me in mind of people’s approach to firewalls.
Working with a home network is not about appointing yourself a nice Swiss border guard (say “Gruezi” to the ones in the eastern half of the country if you want to be well treated, and make sure you roll the R without typical British embarrassment). it’s far more like having a garden wall with five different colour coded Tradesman’s entrances, all with doorknobs wired up to the 3-phase at your nearest substation - and yet so many devices now want unlimited access both to, and from, the web.
This last month I have had more questions about PS3 and XBox cohabitation on home networks, than all the other enquiries put together. It seems like those machines want to stand on the net unprotected and unencumbered: the fact that attack traffic seems to backtrack into all the addresses where games consoles announce themselves, on the principle that people playing games are probably not terribly au fait with protecting their other compute resources, seems to support my suggestion:
Buy yourself a proper, separate, hardware firewall. Not some freebie that hacker dudes can treat like a Swiss border guard.
