yet another blog

Bit of an “own goal” really… certainly won’t help the Government’s campaign to introduce compulsory ID cards…

And some more (re last post)…

Investors details stay in the post - Yahoo News UK
Confidential information on millions of investors is regularly being sent through the post to HM Revenue and Customs without proper security.
publicitéInvestment managers in the City are required to mail personal data on their clients to HMRC on unencrypted computer disks in spite of the recent outcry over the disappearance of two disks containing information on 25 million child benefit claimants.

HMRC said encrypting the data would be a “recipe for chaos”, as it would not be practical to decrypt information from thousands of different financial institutions using different coding programs.

But the body representing individual savings account ISA and personal equity plan PEP managers said the current situation was putting savers at risk of identity fraud.

Richard Saunders, the chief executive of the Investment Management Association IMA has written to HMRC, saying in the light of the child benefit data scandal, the sending of unsecured data could not be allowed to continue.

“We wrote to David Hartnett, the acting head of HMRC, to bring to his attention that our members were sending data in a form that we thought raised concerns about security,” IMA spokeswoman Mona Patel said.

“If they are not very careful with how they handle that data, investors are at risk of identity theft. Were asking HMRC to come up with new ways of sending the data so the individuals details are not compromised. There must be ways of doing this that are not onerous on the Revenue.”

Fund managers, who handle over 8 million accounts with a total value of billions of pounds, are required to send the HMRC the name, address, date of birth and National Insurance number of every one of their investors, along with how much each individual has saved in PEPs and ISAs.

The intention is to stop people exceeding tax allowances on their investment accounts.

A spokeswoman for HMRC said it would be impractical to ask investment managers to encrypt the data before they sent it. “Its not a question of cost, but practicality. You cant have one side having one encoding system and one having another - its a recipe for chaos.”

And we really want to trust the Government to safely and securely implement/maintain a National ID Card scheme?…

Benefit data discs held for year - Yahoo News UK
The Conservatives have branded a report that an ex-contractor at the DWP had two discs with thousands of benefit claimants details for more than a year “disturbing”.
publicitéThe News of the World reports that two discs were found at the home of a former contractor to the Department for Work and Pensions.

The worker discovered that she had inadvertently forgotten to return the discs when her work with the DWP finished - and expressed her surprise that no one had checked that she had done so.

The two new missing discs reveal what kind of benefits the people receive. The data on the discs can be accessed by any standard computer and is not encrypted or protected by a password.

The blunder comes days after the Government was forced to admit it had lost the personal details of more than 25 million people in the post.

That crisis was sparked when a junior official at HM Revenue & Customs official in Tyne and Wear sent two unencrypted CDs containing details of child benefit claimants by courier to the National Audit office in London. The discs were not recorded or registered.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Chris Grayling said of the latest blunder: “This is an exceptionally disturbing new development involving highly sensitive personal information.

“The fact that it hasnt been copy protected is further evidence of a cavalier attitude towards data protection in Government departments. Ministers need to explain urgently how they are going to put things right.”

On Saturday it emerged confidential information on millions of investors is regularly being sent through the post to HM Revenue and Customs without proper security.

Investment managers in the City are required to mail personal data on their clients to HMRC on unencrypted computer discs despite the recent outcry.

I’m not the first to observe this, and don’t doubt that I won’t be the last.
But its amazing how quickly we take certain aspects of technology for granted and how dependent we become upon them, without realising it.

I’ve had a broadband internet connection for just about a year now - maybe a little more.
Changing from dial-up to broadband made quite an impact on the way I use the ‘net, and particularly in how an “always on” connection has encouraged me to almost seamlessly integrate my online and offline computer activities.

Now I’m the first to admit that I spend rather more time at the keyboard than is probably healthy (certainly physically, and possibly mentally as well) but I truly hadn’t realised just what a large part of my life had become almost reliant on “being connected”.

Until yesterday!

On-line yesterday morning, no problem at all. Sit down at the keyboard again yesterday evening, only to discover that somehow I’d lost my connection.
Do all the usual things: reboot the computer; try different machine; check the LAN connections; reboot the router (several times in fact!); replace the router with a modem; change the microfilter… and on and on.

All to no avail.

So finally have to invoke the measure of last resort - phone my ISP’s helpline.
Negotiating the automated menus I end up talking to someone who I’m sure was the other side of the world. In any event, her voice was very faint and her accent was, um, not the easiest to decipher.
Couple that with rather rapid speech and my own dodgy hearing, and the entire conversation was not the most fluent in the world. I must have seemed like a right idiot to her, having to ask her to repeat virtually every other sentence.

Anyway, she seemed to grasp quite quickly the technical problem I was confronting and after running through what was clearly a checklist of standard questions (most of which I’d already answered in my preliminary description of the problem, but never mind) she said something about upgrading the fault report to the next level (or words to that effect) and that I could expect to receive a phone call within 24-48 hours.

Well, ok, not an entirely satisfactory resolution, but better than nothing.

So for the past day and night I’ve been wandering around quite disconsolately, running through my mind all the possible causes of the problem, each possibility seeming worse than the previous, and gloomily looking to a future with no ‘net connection.
The absence of ‘net loomed large in my mind regardless of how I occupied myself, and somehow my computers suddenly just didn’t have the appeal that they normally have.
Couldn’t check my mailbox; couldn’t do any website work; couldn’t upload any photos; couldn’t even do a bit of casual surfing or check the various news sites.

I’d been instructed to leave my machine on with the modem plugged in for at least the next 24 hours, so found myself almost hourly checking the indicator light thereon to see if my connection was live again.
Even after I’d gone to bed I woke up periodically throughout the night to check.
How sad can you get?

Then this evening, almost out of habit now, I checked the modem again - and hey! I’ve got a connection light showing!
Not quite believing it I rapidly call up my browser and see if I can access the web. Yep.
So just as rapidly whip out the modem and plug in the router.

Will it find the connection? Will it need a reboot? Will the entire event be purely ephemeral and I’ll lose the connection again?

But no. The router blinks itself slowly into wakefulness, and suddenly all’s right with the world again. I’m back online!

On reflection though, this habit we all have of becoming so dependent upon things that aren’t necessary to life and living is really rather worrying.

“The War on Consciousness” by Paul Levy

New article by Paul Levy posted to the main site. Well worth reading! Here’s the intro…

“We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself…”

Within the past few weeks my aimless wanderings around the web have caused me to stumble upon two absolutely excellent sites, well worth checking out…

The first is a sort of community news-sharing site, a bit like a social bookmarking site - but infinitely better. It seems to be aimed at established and wannabe citizen journalists, but there’s so much more stuff there as well that no-one should feel excluded. The appearance and features are excellent, all the interactive gizmos work amazingly well, and you really should pay it a visit.

So without further ado, go now to NewsVine

The other one I’ve discovered is Virtual Citizens

It presents itself as a sort of free news syndication site, containing a lot of articles relevant to US foreign policy, but not toeing the normal mass-media line.

I’ll be mirroring some of the articles on our own Tilting at Windmills site, but treat yourself to a few absorbed hours at the source.

Both sites highly recommended!

Aljazeera.Net - Pentagon unit to push US message

The US defence department is setting up a special unit aimed at influencing 24-hour news outlets and websites around the world to counter what it considers derogatory publicity, according to a memo.

In the continuing battle against internet censorship Amnesty International have launched a campaign, irrepressible.info, to combat the insidious encroachment on our freedoms of speech and communication.

Irrepressible Adj. 1) Impossible to repress or control.

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.

Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer UK newspaper, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.

Find out more about this campaign

Now Europe Targets Bloggers As Terrorists

Against my better judgement, thought I’d try out one of those “social bookmarking” services - y’know, the ones where you upload all your fav bookmarks and share ‘em with other folk.

As there’s a Firefox plugin for del.icio.us (another Yahoo connection here - apparently it was bought out by Yahoo) seemed worthwhile to go with them, so I signed up and then uploaded all the bookmarks from my browser.

Ok, perhaps that was a bit of a silly way to do it, but there’s an option the site provides for doing that, and no attendant warnings that anything can go awry, or even friendly cautions as to what not to do.

Well, I’m now faced with the task of trawling through all of them, selecting those to share, deleting the rubbish ones, tidying up the tags, and generally making them presentable. In other words a fairly intensive bit of processing involved.

Get about two-thirds of the way through when the whole thing freezes on me an’ I’m presented with an error page that advises me either there’s been an error in the program or that I’ve not been “gentle” enough in my usage! In any event, I was locked out and, here I am some eight hours later, still locked out. Ho hum! I’m beginning to think that anything with a Yahoo connection might be worth avoiding.