First day at Infosecurity 2009, and a very interesting day.

Ex-home secretary David Blunkett made his keynote speech, and many journalists didn’t bother covering it because selected bits of it had already been released to the media previously relating his vision of the London 2012 Olympics being in danger of attack by terrorists and cybercriminals.

However I attended because I wanted to see if he had anything to say other than that, and listening to it and some of the questions after was very enlightening as Blunkett revealed that he saw biometric passports as an alternative to the much discussed ID card scheme.

Very interesting point of view as it went against the general Labour policy at the top. However he went even further.

Although he didn’t criticise Jacqui Smith’s plans to get companies to track user data, he did tell the audience that he was very worried about what this data was going to be used for, and that it was vital to ensure that a thorough investigation of police and local authority surveillance was vital to ensure that this data was kept safe and used properly.

I felt myself nodding along to much of what he was saying, as it was total common sense! It’s fair enough if the police and security agencies need to keep the data, but not enough has been mentioned about what this would entail and what it would be used for.

Amid all of the media hype and fury, this is totally key. We are generally going to have to accept that much of our data is going to be kept and tracked, but the real question is about its safety and its use.

Instead of focusing so much on the fact that the government is going to use our data, we have to focus more on that - the review of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) that should be coming soon will be very important when trying to calm public fears of the UK becoming a surveillance state.

A politician making sense? Madness. Maybe being a member of the Cabinet is what makes you so out of touch with what the discussion should actually be about.

An internet backlash has started against the the lawyers who helped prosecute and send the Pirate Bay founders to jail.

According to reports,  the latest in a string of online reprisals saw a website belonging to the MAQS law firm taken down, which was acted on behalf of the US movie studios during the trial.

The website of movie industry body IFPI also had to be taken down after being found victim of a Denial of Service attack. According to the website TorrentFreak, this was part of something called ‘Operation Baylout’ organised by a band of Pirate Bay supporters.

Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde said he understood the frustrations of the people, but didn’t think it would solve the problem. He says: “I hope they do something more permanent instead, like giving the idiots that give power to the media industry lose their own power.”

The Pirate Bay itself went offline last night, and in the IT PRO office we made educated guesses and investigated what might happened - did ISPs finally decide to block the site, was it another reaction in the vein of Facebook blocking the Pirate Bay, did the police decide to raid the servers again…?

No, nothing like that. In fact all that happened was that Pirate Bay had suffered a broken fibre connection, and to be honest I thought this was likely - people have tried to take the Pirate Bay down before and they never had any luck doing so.

What comes out from all this is that the story will keep running - there’s no end in sight to the business of the trial, while as we’ve seen, the Pirate Bay looks as healthy as it always has been.

RSA has pointed me out to this blog post that offers some previously undisclosed information about one of the members of Dark Market, a forum which involved criminals buying and selling credit card data and was shut down by law enforcement.

It shows that although it might be easy to make money as an online fraudster, the law was maybe beginning to catch up on the problem thanks to intelligent detective work.

Chao, real name Cagatay Evyapan, was behind a group called the ‘Crime Enforcers’ - an assembly line of ATM and Point of Sale card skimmers. RSA’s Uri Rivner said that he climbed the ladder of the criminal underground, and that point became a name that all cyber criminals recognised.

Rivner says that Chao stood out as an ‘exceptional’ online fraudster -  he even created instructional videos explaining how to install ATM skimming devices he built and sold.

Instruction video on using ATM skimming devices.

How Chao was caught

Chao was caught through the Dark Market operation as a moderator. Using undercover tactics, FBI agent Keith Mularski pretended he was a fraudster using the handle ‘Master Splynter’.

He was found in Turkey thanks to the Turkish National Police cooperating with several law enforcement agencies around the world, including the FBI. The police found him due to one weak link in the chain - he needed to ship thousands of ATM skimmers around the world.

Thanks to discussions with international shipping companies, it led to the pinpointing of Chao’s whereabouts. They located Chao on the outskirts of Istanbul, put him under surveillance and found his apartment being used as a huge assembly line for card skimming devices.

Seven ‘Crime Enforcers’ were arrested, including people helping him with the manufacturing and his cashier.

The result of the raid

The Turkish police found 1,000 ATM skimming devices, 2000 fake PIN pads, and a large amount of fake Point of Sale devices - the ones you use in restaurants.

Rivner said that a single ATM skimmer could record one hundred withdrawals a day - using a ‘conservative’ estimate of $1,000 per compromised card that is potential damage of 100 million dollars a day.

If it takes ten days for the device to be discovered that’s a potential one billion dollars of potential fraud.

So the rewards are great - but as Chao’s arrest shows, maybe there is light at the end of tunnel thanks to worldwide law enforcement cooperation.

But as Uri says, as soon as Chao was caught, other have taken his place.

In my feature the Top five sci-fi tech we didn’t get, I put human cloning as one of the technologies we haven’t seen yet, and remarked that with advances in DNA science it could be closer than I thought.

Well, reports have indicated that ‘maverick’ doctor Panayiotis Zavos has already done it - cloning 14 human embryos and implanting them in the wombs of 14 volunteers.

Naturally, the Daily Mail has chosen to go for the fury baiting angle, by reporting that a ten year old little girl who died at the age of ten could be brought back to life thanks to freezing blood cells that he secured after her death.

According to the Independent, the cloning was recorded by a documentary film-maker, who testified that the cloning had taken place, and that he was actually dealing with women who were prepared to carry the first cloned embryos specifically created for human reproduction.

Is this to be believed and are we actually at a stage where human clones could be born? The New Scientist makes the good point that he provided no scientific proof or data to back up the claims.

If it isn’t true, then it shows the lengths and ways people will go to in securing publicity and fame. He appears to have a long career and has a long list of qualifications - is he so desperate for publicity that he would go as far as making up wild claims?

If it is true, then that’s a whole different matter.  It is simply hard to believe that people would volunteer to have a cloned baby, but perhaps if you are looking at the publicity and fame surrounding it, then it is maybe understandable.

From the doctor’s point of view, you can also understand why he’s attempting it in the first place. No matter how abhorrent you may find it, a successful birth of a human clone would put his name down in history forever.

Before Google came and dominated search, I remember using Jeeves. Back in the days when I used search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo (Showing my age there).

So why have Ask.com brought the quintessential English butler back? Is it a sign of desperation? Google are now so far ahead of the pack its untrue, so I guess its fair that Ask had to do something about it.

He’s filled out since I last saw him. He’s gone all three dimensional for one thing, kind of like a Sim.

Jeeves says that he popped out three years ago in a search for knowledge and returned to good old Blighty armed with answers. Cos he’s like, a real person. He’s also got all social networked on on Twitter and Facebook.

Three years is a very long time in IT, and although they may pick up traffic based on the whole retro ‘I remember him’ aspect, the fact is that its just a computer program made out to be a personality. It’s not going to touch Google - nothing like that will. There’s nothing new.

What they should have done is create a virtual Stephen Fry, who played Jeeves in the series Jeeves and Wooster. I for one would love to ask him questions and see him pottering around on my desktop doing Stephen Fry things.

But then again what would be the point? We have the new hot thing Twitter - I can see Mr Fry day to day, minute  to minute.

And that’s the problem with bringing Jeeves back. There’s no change, there’s no new technology, he’s just doing the same thing he always did - answer search queries in an inferior way to Google.

Normally for speeches like Gordon Brown’s talk about Digital Britain today I would like to actually be there, but it is becoming more common for the press to view these talks on video.

I managed successfully to watch Salesforce.com’s keynote speech on the web a week ago, and I was encouraged by the possibilities of this. Perhaps I would never need to go to a big speech ever again!

So the Digital Britain summit arrived, and the organisers decided that it would be a good idea to showcase the government’s digital credentials by streaming it live on the Digital Britain forum website.

Unfortunately it didn’t work. Technical hitches meant I wasn’t able to listen to anything without it cutting out, and Gordon Brown was just a flicker on my MacBook screen.

Not good, but unfortunately it wasn’t as if I didn’t expect it. If Microsoft or Cisco were trying to set me up a video feed I would be shocked if there was any problems with it, but public sector wise I didn’t really have much of an expectation.

It is a bit worrying that the Digital Britain team, based in the Department for Business and the Department for Culture, couldn’t even get a simple video feed right.

Also had a problem with the Digital Britain Twitter feed. It was all well and good to be trendy as it is the new hip technological thing, but there was absolutely no point in many of the tweets with the owner of the feed spouting random messages.

The only way that Twitter can really work in speeches and talks like this is if there is the provision for links with more information, such as the material on their actual Digital Britain blog. Otherwise it’s just a selection of random messages anybody could do - even if they weren’t actually at the event. The live blogging was a nice touch though - that seemed to be the only thing that worked well.

Oh and next time guys - the joy of putting things on video means that you can record and post things for people to play at our pleasure. There were a lot of speakers I was interested in hearing (such as Stephen Fry) but couldn’t spend all day in front of the computer waiting for it to come up.

Do what kids do. Stick the individual speeches and talks up on YouTube. You might get a whole lot more of the internet generation actually understanding what the government is trying to do.

Spotify is riding high on a wave of good publicity, signing a deal with 7digital that means users will be able purchase tracks - possibly giving iTunes a major run for its money.

If you haven’t discovered or used it, then what you are missing out on it is a free, legal music service that pretty much allows you listen to unlimited streams of virtually any track or album that you might think of.

Too good to be true you might say - there must be lots of artists and record companies that haven’t signed up. Although it does lack songs by the likes of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, it has struck deals with all the major record labels - load it up for the first time and you’ll be surprised at what you can listen to, with no fee.

The way they manage to make this pay is by is 20 minutes or so, hitting you with a short advert. Considering that listening to the radio many stations seem to hit you with a advert every second song, this isn’t too much of a big deal. Spotify is also trying to make its premium paid-for service more attractive to users - it remains to be seen how successful this will be.

Spotify celebrates its third birthday today,  and their founder Daniel Ek has blogged about how the service first started with the aim of providing a way to allow listeners to be able to listen to whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, but without having to act illegally.

The next move for Spotify is to open up to a wider community, while at the same time respecting rights holders, as well as generating enough money to provide users with a decent service.

Ambitiously, it wants to be the platform for people to consume, manage and discover music.

Ek says: “To reach our goal it’s important for Spotify to be wherever our users are. Music should be accessible on your favorite platform whether that’s a social network, an IM service, a mobile device or a media centre in your living room.”

Personally, using Spotify has been great. It slaps the iTunes store with a wet fish, considering you’re only allowed to listen to any song by purchasing a track.

It also encourages you to listen to music you don’t necessarily have access to or just want to test out. I’ve listened to the entire back catalogue of Jimmy Hendrix and Stevie Wonder in this way - if you want to discover new music, this might be the best way that you can do it.

Importantly, it does have a role to play against piracy. Many people download songs because there is no other way to listen to them without having to purchase it online or buy a CD. This way, you can listen to the album for free, and then decide to purchase it if you want to keep it.

As one user commented: “Spotify really IS BETTER than piracy. Neither I nor many of my collegues have downloaded one single song illegally since we got Spotify accounts.”