Web of deceit

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

This started as the perils of running a website but while researching, the way one British newspaper handled a story showed just how sleazy it really is.

The website in question, currently in the news, was created by two men as an introduction site linking women with sperm donors. The men who are waiting to be sentenced, have been told by the judge that she is considering a custodial sentence.

Their website had been running legitimately until new rules which changed the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act were introduced in 2007. Organisations procuring, testing or distributing sperm needed to be licenced. The men had applied for a licence and sought clarification of their position, as well as discussing their business with the head of policy at the HFEA before the new rules were brought in.

Even the prosecution described their website as introducing men who wished to supply sperm to women who wished to use the sperm to impregnate themselves. The new rules are to protect women from diseases but the couple were in court because one woman managed to read the anonymous donor’s name on his medical report supplied with his sperm through the marker pen obliterating it. When she failed to get pregnant she wanted her money back.

Over 800 women used the website and were able to make choices of ethnicity, height, hair colour and even the hobbies of the donors. Couriers delivered the sperm in a pot inside a cardboard box along with a syringe for the women to do the deed.

Let’s face it, anyone who buys such a thing off the Internet knows they are taking a risk if they then shove it inside themselves. It was made clear to the women what they were getting into and exactly how much it was going to cost. All charges were transparent and no guarantees were made of them getting pregnant and even the website only admitted success of 37%.

Whether they men who ran the site should be put into prison is a moot point. There are other websites supplying exactly the same service, which is in any case similar to an introduction dating agency. One wonders how many dating agency introductions lead to French lessons, seats re-caned and all the other euphemisms for sexual services.

Newspapers reporting on the case have given the details of the two men involved but one has taken things far too far. The Daily Mail’s article, written with words such as ‘con men’, ‘net scam’, ‘distasteful’ and ‘unsavoury’, includes photos of the men and one’s house.

It is the Daily Mail’s publishing details of a wife’s name and the colour and type of her car that is distasteful. Worst still, the Mail names the couple’s children, their school and work details in a totally unsavoury manner. The Mail’s readers seem to agree, their comments are supporting the men.

Obviously a website purporting to sell goods which never arrive or are not as advertised is committing an offence. In the case of the latter, Sainsburys fell foul of it when it sold me an Induction hob which only proved to be anything but after it had been fitted into the worktop. At least their healthy dose of compensation made up for fitting new worktops and hob. But I should have suspected something was wrong when I bought a new TV from ‘R Goth’. The TV never arrived even though they billed my card for it repeatedly.

Luckily my credit card company picked up the tab for that but the guys running it were presumably criminals and should be banged-up, not the two guys above who were giving women exactly what they wanted and their website advertised.

Your network is under attack from The Cybermen

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

Forget the Daleks, everyone knows the scariest Dr Who monsters have always been the Cybermen. IT admins need to get out from behind the sofa though, the Cybermen are attacking your network!

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Multitasking

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

I followed a link from my company’s home page to an article on the perils of multitasking, how we don’t give either task our full attention. I filled in a response form to agree that it was a bad habit and that I never used to do multitask but it seems part of the American business culture I am now a part of.

Of course I was “watching” a web cast from management linked from the same homepage at the same time. The thing is neither task required my full attention. In fact I don’t think either deserved any attention at all.

That appears to be where the multitasking ethos is coming from – management give out so many pointless tasks that the only sensible thing is to do 2 or 3 or 10 at the same time.

I sometimes think if management ever did anything useful they’d remember the need to concentrate sometimes.

Everybody look at me!

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010

If you are one of those people who never read 1984 and want everyone in the world to know your precise location, then I do not envy you.

Not only are you unconcerned about maintaining your own privacy, which is admittedly your own prerogative, but you may now also be opening yourselves up to higher insurance premiums.

Confused.com has put out the warning after crooks in Nashua, New Hampshire, targeted people who checked into places on Facebook, allowing the burglars to deduce when their victims would be out of the house.  They managed to break into 50 homes and stole $100,000 worth of stuff.

“What’s happened in the US could be the start of a worrying trend and if insurance providers see it as a potential risk, you can bet your home contents on the fact they’ll start pricing for it,” said Gareth Kloet, head of home insurance at Confused.com.

Now Facebook has launched its Places services, and with Foursquare already a force in the market, it would come as no surprise if insurance prices do go up for some. It won’t take a criminal mastermind like Professor Moriarty to figure out how to exploit users’ willingness to expose their location.

Some people seem contented to live in a self-imposed Orwellian Nightmare, where not just companies and governments can track them, but basically anyone can, including criminals.

Location services themselves are not anathema to me, but the people who use them without considering the consequences irk me somewhat. What really concerns me is that they could give away others’ locations because of their own carelessness.

And if insurance companies start charging extra for anyone who uses a social networking service, then I will get really mad, as I’m sure will others.

Even though it makes no sense to do so, I’m close to siding with the criminals, so people learn why to value privacy.

Tablets: ready for business?

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Every couple of years a bandwagon comes along that every technology company wants to jump on and take advantage of. In previous years, this has been netbooks and smartphones. This year it’s tablet computers, thanks to the popularity of the Apple iPad.

It was impossible to avoid tablets, or slates if you prefer, at this year’s IFA technology trade show and conference in Berlin. From high-profile manufacturers such as Samsung and Toshiba to lesser-known names such as ViewSonic and Hannspree, everyone seemed to be showing off a tablet running Android.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Android tablet

Tablets are great for consumers who want to browse the web and check Facebook while lounging around on the sofa, but are they of any use for businesses? The increasing uptake of the iPad among businesses, at least anecdotally, suggests that they are. The lack of a built-in hardware keyboard, which is a disadvantage for some uses involving lots of text entry, has proven to be an advantage for other uses where the immediacy of directly interacting with content is more important. However, we have our doubts that tablets, especially Android tablets, will catch on with businesses beyond niche environments and early adopters without significant usability improvements.

The iPad currently supports features that we’d consider essential for businesses considering a portable computing device, such as configuration profiles, encryption and remote data wiping. Android 2.2 has finally added support for remote wiping, but Google needs to add and improve the others much more quickly if businesses are to seriously consider an Android tablet instead of an iPad or a traditional laptop, especially where security is a priority.

However, even when Google finally add these features to Android, there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to take advantage of them on whatever Android tablet you’ve chosen to deploy. At least some of the upcoming Android tablets, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab which was the most promising of the ones we saw at IFA, will have their own customised interfaces.

If our experience with Android smartphones is any indication, this means Android OS updates will only be released for these tablets very slowly, if at all. This could prove to be a support nightmare if you choose to deploy more than one model of tablet from more than one manufacturer. Although businesses will be less concerned than individual consumers with updating to the latest OS as soon as possible, businesses should be in control of when they upgrade to the latest OS and not at the whim of manufacturers.

The popularity of the iPad is no doubt due in part to the vast number and type of available apps on the iTunes App Store, both those designed specifically for the iPad and those designed for the iPhone but which will also work on Apple’s tablet. No matter what kind of app you want, there are bound to be several apps available for the iPad that could fit the bill. A tablet is nothing more than a glorified keyboard-less laptop for web browsing and reading emails unless there’s a compelling selection of apps to use on it.

Although the selection of apps available on Android is continuously improving, there are still fewer Android apps than there are iPhone/iPad apps. We’ve also yet to see or hear of any particularly compelling types of apps that are available for Android but not available for the iPad (although we’d love to be proven wrong). There are numerous things Google could improve about the Android Market to boost the number and quality of available apps, such as improving the layout of the store and combating app piracy more pro-actively.

Surprisingly, Android developers can only charge for apps in the US, Japan and a select number of European countries. Increasing the number of countries where developers can sell apps is almost certainly the most fundamental improvement Google can make. Without a bigger market for their paid-for apps, Android developers are less likely to develop the quality apps businesses will demand.

Android tablet-enthusiasts would counter this by saying that HTML 5 apps will soon supersede native apps, but this has yet to happen. We’re not entirely convinced this will happen soon either since, as far as we know, none of the stock Android apps are HTML 5 apps. If Google isn’t confident enough to publish mission-critical HTML 5 apps, we doubt third parties are either. This could change once ChromeOS is released, but the recently announced Android tablets have yet to be released, never mind any hypothetical Chrome tablet.

In a way, Apple has had a headstart on the various Android tablet manufacturers since it’s already been making a mini-tablet for several years now – the iPod Touch. Although sold as a MP3 player, it’s also able to run almost all of the apps available for the iPhone and it’s cheaper than the combined cost of an iPhone and a mobile contract too.

The latest iPod Touch has almost all of the same features as the iPhone 4. It’s therefore not a second-best substitute for most uses unlike some of the cheap but poorly built and specified Android phones and tablets. These are often poor relations to the more expensive and better designed Android products, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the HTC Legend.

This may change soon though, as several consumer electronics manufacturers, such as Samsung, Philips and Archos, have finally announced their own Android-based MP3 players at IFA. If designed and priced sensibly, these could provide both budget-minded businesses and consumers with affordable mini-tablets.

None of this should suggest that the iPad is a perfect tablet. Until iOS 4.2 arrives in November, clunky third party apps are required to print documents from the iPad. Office document editing and compatibility is poor judging from the apps we’ve seen and networking with local file servers is non-existent. Plus, the iPad doesn’t have any USB ports or a user-accessible file system, so the task of copying files to a USB flash drive, which is trivial on a laptop, is impossible on an iPad. It’s an obviously essential feature, especially when access to the internet and online storage services is restricted or totally unavailable.

Despite its limitations, the iPad appears to be making inroads among businesses. Any competing tablets, Android, ChromeOS or otherwise, therefore not only have to be as good as the iPad but have to be better with features and a user experience superior to Apple’s. Judging from our hands-on experiences at IFA, the first batch of Android tablets and MP3 players aren’t quite there yet but they’re catching up fast.

Making security pay (no bejesus required)

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Security vendors often stand accused of scaring people into purchase by publishing ‘threat reports’ that warn of impending doom, complete with statistics suggesting that the Internet is the modern equivalent of the Wild West but never quite add up when you think about it. So I was actually quite intrigued to find a report from an application security vendor which instead attempts to justify your spending by researching the return on investment rather than scaring the bejesus out of you.

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WYSINWYW or WYSYHYG

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

France’s Centre for Historic Mining In Lewarde covers a huge site close to the border with Belgium. The museum is done in the modernist chic the French can bring to architecture and civil engineering, with the exception of their own houses that look like they were designed with Lego bricks. (more…)

Hacking the car of tomorrow, today

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

Being an ex-hacker and current security journalist, I tend to write quite a lot about hacking. Not being Jeremy Clarkson, this doesn’t usually involve cars. Until now that is.

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Please don’t cut, Cable

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

I used to be a massive fan of Vince Cable. A colleague even photo-shopped a fantastic picture of him to put on my wall at work.

But since the coalition came into force, my love for the guy has waned. Yes, I know he may just be a mouthpiece now for Cameron’s Conservatives and doesn’t have the luxury of being the outspoken Lib Dem without the sword of power to wield anymore, but I genuinely cringe when I read some of his announcements or listen to his speeches.

The latest one to get on my wick is yesterday’s confirmation funding from the Government for science will be cut – along with everything else on the chopping block.

Cable claimed he supported “blue skies” research but believed a lot of money was being wasted on unnecessary projects at the cost of our country’s economy.

Look Vince, scientific research is not so easy to separate into worth it or not worth it. Discoveries are made by breaking a few eggs if you will and often, smaller projects can lead to bigger things, bigger finds and bigger impacts on the world as we know it.

It also does nothing to encourage children in schools to follow the scientific path. We have all seen the numerous reports showing interest in the sciences is falling at school level, but it is likely to fall further if there is no prospect of research jobs after graduation.

As a nation, the UK has revolutionised the world with some of its scientific discoveries – from Newton’s law of gravity to Tim Berners-Lee’s web. We should not only be proud of that, but also want to carry on the strong tradition of leading the way in certain fields, not fall behind because a cuts happy Government has come into power.

Wednesday, September 8th, 2010

Maybe you are more techie than me and aren’t impressed by
http://61226.com/share/hk.swf
but I think it’s pretty neat! Just move your mouse down the picture and the time changes – or maybe just the palette changes, someone can explain it to me if they know!