A couple of numbers that did jump out at me from that survey though were related to online voting and political websites: 77 percent wanted to vote online this year, and 56 percent had visited a political website already in the run up to the General Election. Eb Adeyeri, Digital PR Director at LEWIS Communications, reckons that many people believe this will be “the UK’s first “Internet election” with politicians exploiting channels such as Facebook and Twitter to convey their message” but warns that a “badly-focused social media campaign could do more harm than good as Gordon Brown discovered with his infamous YouTube appearance”.

The Labour Party is taking Twitter seriously enough to have appointed a ‘Twitter Tsar’ in Kerry McCarthy MP, while Tory leader David Cameron famously dismissed Twitter users on a radio show by saying that “too many twits make a twat”.

Certainly there are more MPs, and would be MPs, using Facebook and Twitter than ever before it seems to me. Of course, the cynical side of me does accept that the rise of the micro-blogging and socially networked MP and the forthcoming election may be linked. There’s even less doubting that Twitter has become politicised to a degree, and loosely organised Tweet campaigns can be more effective as a lobbying tool than many other avenues when it comes to getting massive media attention in the shortest timescale. We’ve already seen many such groundswell campaigns on Twitter, and as the election draws ever closer I expect we will see many more. Of course, with that election looming we’ll have to expect less of these campaigns to be true feelings of the people events and more of them to have the hand of The Party pushing them.

But how can you track and analyse party political activity on Twitter? Sense Internet reckons it has the answer with the newly released the Tweetlection tool which
claims to track comments about political parties on Twitter, providing a picture of those politically motivated keywords that are most active at any given time.

“While all parties engage in tweeting, until now it has been hard to get a real-time picture of what is being said on key issues, and by whom,” says Sense MD Aidan Cook. “Previously it was difficult to get an accurate view of just how much excitement or interest a specific event or issue was generating”. Cook reckons that users will be able to get at a glance overviews of “the frequency of tweets over time for each party and the common themes in those tweets” which could help political parties modify existing themes and messages, or even create new ones.

According to a question and answer session at the MIX10 Microsoft Developers Conference during which Microsoft stated that clipboard operations would not be supported in Windows Phone 7 Series, thatwould appear to be the case.

Now you may be thinking, no big deal as it took Apple years to get cut and paste onto the iPhone. But wait a minute, this is different isn’t it? This is Microsoft we are talking about, a company whose Windows Mobile software has included cut and paste forever. Heck, it’s an integral part of how people who have a Windows Mobile powered handset work.

Work being the operative word, on so many levels. If Windows Phone 7 Series is to be aimed at the work market, then surely cut and paste is somewhat vital to get quite a lot of work tasks completed? Not according to Microsoft which has apparently said that most Office users don’t need clipboard functionality.

Ah, right.

Just one more reason why Windows Phone 7 Series devices will remain on my do not touch with a very long barge pole list then…

You can, I do believe, file this one firmly under WTF? Apparently, forcing Microsoft into displaying the ballot screen and effectively giving them free advertising is not enough. Now six of the seven clients which do not make it onto the first screen of browser software choices, the so called second-tier browsers, are complaining to the European Commission for what they consider an even fairer slice of the pie as it were.

While the developers of the Avant, Flock, GreenBrowser, Maxthon, Sleipnir and SlimBrowser browser clients have petitioned EC vice-president Neelie Kroes to get Microsoft to change the ballot screen so that their somewhat obscure browsers are given a bit more prominence. The argument being that users only see five browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer itself) by default without scrolling to reveal the less popular choices. What the moaning minnies want is an indication that they actually exist, encouraging users to scroll right and reveal them.

The petition states that the design “leaves the vast majority of users unaware that there are more than five browsers to choose from” and complains that the browser developers “did not have the opportunity to offer any Browser Choice screen design feedback”. Well duh, why should they have had? Indeed, the petition suggests quite rightly that Microsoft has no intention of making any changes.

If I were those second-tier browser developers I’d be keeping quiet on this one. Heck it’s a pretty massive publicity boost that they have been included at all, considering that most users will not have a clue as to their existence and be even less bothered about using them. the way that the Internet works is such that if they were really that worthy then surely they would have floated like cream to the top, although still underneath the silver foil cap that it Internet Explorer of course. While you might argue that Chrome only made the impact it did on market share courtesy of being developed by Google, you’d be wrong. Sure, that did it no harm but if it were not for the fact that it’s so fast and fabulous (yes I’m an ex-Firefox convert in danger of becoming a Chrome fanboy) it would have sunk without trace in the market share stakes. And the argument falls apart entirely when you consider the share that Firefox managed to carve out on word of mouth alone.

So my advice would be to Shut The Flip Up and worry less about Microsoft being a big pile of poo pants for not giving your second-tier clients more prominence in this free advertising jamboree and worry more about improving those clients so that they become first-tier through functional merit.

The survey, undertaken by the BBC World Service, questioned 27,000 people in a total of 26 different countries including the likely suspects of Finland (which has already decreed Internet access a human right for its citizens) but also the perhaps less likely residents of Brazil, China, Mexico and South Korea for example.

A total of 87% of the Internet users questioned thought that the Internet should a fundamental right,while 70% of those not yet using the Internet also thought they had the right to access. Overall some 79% agreed that Internet access should be a fundamental right for everyone.

Leading the way in Europe was Turkey where 90% thought this way, while South Korea had the highest percentage of believers with 96% which is perhaps not too surprising as the vast majority of South Koreans already have high-speed Internet access.

Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News that “we have entered the knowledge society and everyone must have access to participate”.

I have been a professional Internet access evangelist for the best part of twenty years now, and have to say that I’m pleased to see organisations such as the ITU pressing the right to access issue. Like many others, I recall all those stories (and even wrote a good many of them myself) warning about the dangers of a digital divide. The introduction of broadband has, for a large part, helped to bridge this divide at home but the same cannot yet be said of many countries. Indeed, there is still an argument that the people who might benefit most in terms of cultural, educational and vocational exposure to the Web are the ones with least access to it in the UK - namely that section of our society which remains culturally, educationally and vocationally disadvantaged through poverty.

Has the BBC poll got it about right? What do you think, should Internet access for all be a basic human right?

That’s the striking conclusion of a new report from data security specialists Imperva. It even goes as far as comparing the emerging industrialization of hacking to the way in which the 19th century Industrial Revolution advanced methods and accelerated assembly from single to mass production. “The result” Imperva warns “is that today’s cybercrime industry has transformed and automated itself to improve efficiency, scalability and profitability”.

The ‘Industrialization of Hacking’ report has uncovered a plot to infect educational servers worldwide with Viagra ads that download malware to the victim when they visit the infected pages, hosted on otherwise legitimate educational sites.

This is just one example of the increasingly industrialised methodology being implemented by hackers to automate an as yet unreported search engine manipulation scheme which has already infected hundreds, and quite possibly thousands, of .edu and .ac.uk servers with these infected Viagra ads.

“This attack on academic institutions highlights how hacking has become industrialized infecting servers from major institutions including UC Berkeley, Ohio State, University of Oxford and more” explained Imperva CTO Amichai Shulman, who continued “ironically, this technique is the most prevalent method used to create havoc in cyberspace, yet remains virtually unknown to the general public”.

It would appear that over the years there has emerged a clear definition of roles and responsibilities within the hacking community. Think of these as developing to the point where they provide a supply chain resembling, in many ways, a drug cartel.

Indeed, you can see a division of labour within this highly industrialised hacking community that encompasses researchers, farmers and dealers. The researcher looks for vulnerabilities in applications and frameworks, selling what they discover to criminal groups and turning a profit in the process. Farmers, on the other hand, are primarily responsible for maintaining and increasing a botnet presence through the medium of mass infection, again looking to carve a profit and often working on a per infected zombie basis. Which just leaves the dealers who, just like their drug cartel counterparts, are tasked with the distribution of the end product, in this case a malicious payload, and who also earn their keep on a commission only basis. Everyone makes some money, the criminals running the gangs make a big one of course.

If these guys are, indeed, making educational servers a target now then it’s a worrying move and one which is likely to cause a headache for network admins across campus on a global basis.

Let us know here at IT Pro if you have seen an increase in malicious activity within your academic domain, and what you have been doing to combat it.

Not that I think that someone doing an online equivalent of the fat bloke in the all you can eat joint should pay the same as the healthy eater, that would just be unfair on the majority. However. I think that the virtual fat bloke should be able to stuff twenty burgers and fries an hour in his face if that’s what the sign on the door says he can do, without having a waiter watching his every mouthful waiting to pounce with the smallprint on the back of the menu in hand after burger number three.

Replace burger with BBC iPlayer or Spotify and all of a sudden you realise that there are more potential ‘fat blokes’ than you might imagine. Broadbandchoices recently undertook a survey of some 1400 broadband users and discovered a completely unsurprising fact: many people don’t have a clue when it comes to what fair usage actually is, what data caps their ISP imposes or even how much they themselves download in an average month.

Michael Phillips, product director at Broadbandchoices, reckons “the rules governing fair usage policies and download limits need to be taken out of the small print and made clear and easy for everybody to understand. Whilst we do urge broadband users to take responsibility for their downloading habits and find out what the rules are, ISPs also need to do more to raise awareness of this issue”.

If those sums make you barf, wait until you get a load of this. This same survey also asked if people were worried that their sensitive and confidential data might get into the wrong hands. Now given that we live in a fairly data security-aware world these days, courtesy of so many high profile cock-ups making the mainstream news broadcasts and newspapers, you might think that the numbers would be high in favour of those who were really concerned about the prospect. But, alas, no. The math shows that 46 percent did sorry but thought there really was no alternative, and 25 percent claimed that the “risk of a security threat is too small” to even worry about. But wait, here’s the really screwed up bit: 13 percent were actually quite willing to take the risk of loss.

Jan Gunner, a director at InvisiViewmedia comments “Considering how clued-up most businesses are today when it comes to the very real threat of data interception, it is quite alarming to discover quite a complacent attitude in terms of securing confidential information. More interesting is the belief that there is no alternative to sending such data securely and this is something we are very keen to educate businesses on”.

A group by the name of Forthehack has launched a website called Please Rob Me which serves to expose the security risk of location-aware online services such as Twitter and Foursquare. It has opted to do so by listing all the empty homes that are available to be robbed by publishing a live feed of those Foursquare players who automatically post location updates to Twitter.

As I write this there are some 180 ‘new opportunities’ to rob someone, with Twitter usernames displaying exactly when these people left home.

So why am I publicising this? Because it’s a really good idea in that it exposes the folly of sharing your location data, at all times, via services such as Twitter, Google Buzz and of course Foursquare to the world at large without a second thought to the security implications of doing so.

Some might argue that it is irresponsible to publish this data, but hang on a minute the whole point is that all this data is already in the public domain. The irresponsible action is being taken by those choosing to put it their, not by those opting to remind them how stupid they are being.

Seriously, would you put an advert in the local paper saying ‘I’m leaving my house tomorrow at 10am and won’t be back for 3 hours’ or such like? I’m guessing the answer is no, yet plenty of people are quite happy to do the equivalent online in the name of being social, or playing a game. It really does beggar belief.

Seriously again, things are even more problematical with geo-location aware services these days as they can actually post maps showing exactly where you are based on the GPS data of the mobile device being used to make your postings. So not only do people let the world know they are leaving the house empty, but they show them exactly how far away from it they are as well.

Here’s what the people behind the Please Rob me site have to say in defence of their actions:

“Don’t get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome. Services like Foursquare allow you to fulfill some primeval urge to colonize the planet. A part of that is letting everyone know you own that specific spot. You get to tell where you are and if you’re there first, it’s yours. O, and of course there’s badges. The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face. The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc. Because all this site is, is a dressed up Twitter search page. Everybody can get this information.”

That’s £64 for each and every lost customer record, and not the total impact upon the bottom line, I hasten to add. It’s a little less for public sector organisations at £54 per record, and a little more for the private sector at £69, but the average is £64.

The Ponemon Institute, together with PGP Corporation, has completed its third annual study into the costs that UK organisations will incur following a data breach and discovered that it’s gone up by seven percent, per record, on average during 2009 when compared to the 2008 figure of £60. Compare it to the 2007 result and the increase is even more dramatic as back then the cost was just £47 per record. It would appear that much of the difference can be absorbed by reduced consumer trust which contributes a whopping £29 of that £64 total.

“This third annual study shows that the financial impact of data breaches is hitting UK organisations harder and harder each year” Dr. Larry Ponemon, founder of The Ponemon Institute says, adding “In the commercial sector the costs associated with customer churn and attracting new customers are particularly acute, but our research suggests these firms are getting better at detection, remediation and customer communications. However, these efficiencies aren’t shared in the public sector, where the direct costs of a data breach are significantly higher. For example, the cost of notifying users that their records might have been compromised is more than four times higher for public organisations than for private firms”.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the average total cost of a data breach according to the report was a staggering £1.68 million.

With the release of OpenDNSSEC, software under a BSD licence which helps simplify the process of creating and managing DNSSEC signatures, that goal could have got a little nearer. Not least as the software can be downloaded and installed on existing systems, without interfering with existing infrastructures, and used to quickly set up and provide a secure DNS service without hassle.

What is DNSSEC do I hear you ask? Well DNSSEC essentially secures the data used to translate domain names by the addition of a cryptographic signature to that data and so providing proof that the query has not been modified in transit. This is increasingly important as the bad guys start targeting the data in DNS caches which, without such measures, is now hugely vulnerable to attack. OpenDNSSEC has been developed as an open-source turn-key solution for DNSSEC to secure zone data just before it is published by effectively taking in unsigned zones and adding signatures and other DNSSEC required before passing it on to the authoritative name servers for that zone.

Natalie Booth, organiser of the 360°IT infrastructure and security conference, is a fan of the open source initiative. She reckons that by allowing site owners and operators to download the OpenDNSSEC software, the open source initiative is paving the way for a new generation of Internet software and browser add-ins that uses this important new technology. “360°IT welcomes the release of the open beta of this BSD licensed software and expects to see a flurry of software arriving in the coming months that advances what looks like being a major evolution in Internet security” Booth says.