UK EMEA Lab Notes - January 2011 - Ian Hyndman

The pitfalls of social networking

Social networking sites are big at the moment. Almost everyone I know has at least one account - whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or any of the multitude of other options. Social Networking sites are a fantastic idea and offer something to all types of users.

This new craze has allowed old friends who live on different sides of the world to get back in touch. Friends who live next door are, of course, even using them to chat instead of using the phone (or getting off the settee to visit).

While these sites have been provided by reputable companies who are doing all they can to ensure online safety, there are still dangers that everyone should be aware of when using social networking sites.

A vast number of social site users are more than happy to enter all their information into the ‘about you’ information fields on these sites. “I had to log in - it’s safe isn’t it?” Well, the new friend you made using that chat application last night can now see everything about you - name, address, date of birth, next of kin, etc. Incidentally, this is all the information needed to open a bank account; do other people really need to know all this about you?

A big problem that appeared a couple of years ago was that people were putting all this personal information on their profiles, then broadcasting upcoming family holidays through their status updates and were returning home to find they’d been burgled.
Identity theft is not the only pitfall. Malware has been specifically designed to exploit social networking sites. How many times have you had an email from your friends’ social network account asking if it really is you in the office party video?

Or perhaps a video link tells you that you require a Flash upgrade, but instead of installing any upgrade it installs the Koobface worm. The fun part about the Koobface worm is that it sends messages to all your contacts (making you very popular) as it tries to infect their systems as well.

It is not only individuals that can fall prey to the pitfalls of social networking, businesses have seen the problems too.

As people become more obsessed with social networking sites, gaming with their friends on Mafia Wars or Zombie applications, businesses have started to feel the strain. Employee productivity plummeted and the increased usage often strangled corporate bandwidth. Most companies have now banned these sites.

Social networking sites are not bad for companies per-se, they can be used as a great promotion and engagement tool.

Social networks have also caused their share of curly management issues; such as employees ringing in sick, and then update their Facebook status claiming to have the mother of all hangovers. Awkward if you’ve forgotten you added your boss as a friend.

All in all, social networking is a good thing – a great thing. It has opened up the internet and communication in a whole new way. The thing to remember is to always be mindful of what information you put out there for the world to see. While most people are mostly nice, there are others that will have ulterior motives and the internet offers enormous reach for those that are hunting.

Australian Lab Notes - February 2011 - Steve Turvey

Grumpy old Men and the “Good old days”

I’m sure it’s a law of nature that the older generation always laments the good old days. I’m sure we inevitably view the up-and-coming younger generations to be in some way inferior and spoilt when compared to ourselves.

Monty Python summed it up perfectly in their Four Yorkshiremen comedy sketch when, explaining how they once had it tough, one man “lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank,” you can see the full transcript.

In some ways, sadly, I have to agree - but, and it’s a big BUT, the blame lies squarely at our own feet!

I look around at kids today, especially those in early primary school with mobile phones - in 99 percent of these cases I’ll argue it’s a load of tosh that these kids have a phone for their “own security”. These children have phones because somewhere along the line, one kid that really needed brought one to school, and it quickly became a “must have” status symbol with the other kids.

One of my own kids - at the grand old age of 8 was complaining that everyone else had one. He was called “lame” and other less kind words because he didn’t have one yet.

The list goes on, of course. If you don’t have a PS3 or Wii, you’re lame. If you have Target-brand runners rather than Nikes, you’re lame. If you don’t have customised handle bars on your scooter and some sort of branded hat, you’re lame as well.

I constantly come back to the fact that these kids would have no impetus, and would not even ask for any of this stuff, if no parents bought their kids this stuff.

And the problems that go with this new technology driven stuff has become a lot more complicated. Bullying is no longer just physical bullying, but now it’s via TXT, Twitter and Facebook. It goes outside the school yard now and reaches right into the home, 24 hours a day. It’s well documented how much teenagers struggle to manage their digital persona, let alone an 8 or 10 year old who is far more emotionally immature.

I’m concerned that in a bizarre way, we are actually dumbing down our kids. Sure they will be wizards with computers and electronic gizmos, but I’m suspicious they might not have an opportunity to develop simple patience and imagination. How often have you heard a kid say “I’m bored”, and your suggestion that they read a book or go outside to play is met with “you’ve got to be kidding”.

I know how this sounds, but I’m adamant that reading a book or playing outside with imaginary space aliens does in fact fire up and develop a child’s imagination, creativity and flexibility. It’s something I feel is lacking in many children. A great example is the average car trip made without an iPod or a DVD player. So many kids today are bored out of their brains. What happened to the skill of just looking out the window and imagining?

Personally, I make an effort to spend time with my kids and try to manage the time they spend in front of the TV, PC, Wii and other gadgets. Thankfully, it has now reached the point where they can self-regulate and choose to play outside on their own. They also now read and can happily sit in a car on a long trip, enjoying the scenery and their own musings.

I know this all sounds like a case of “when I was young”, but the point is that amongst the vast benefits of technology are many less obvious drawbacks. When the impact of technology is social, and when it affects our children during such formative years, the cause for care and careful parenting just has to be greater.

Australian Lab Notes - January 2011 - Steve Turvey

As I await the paperless office, a prediction that was made decades ago, my desk remains stacked high with paper documents. Another similar prediction also rings in my mind - print is dead. It’s not, but the evolution of consumer computing from devices such as the iPad and Kindle has made inarguable steps towards this end.

Now I love reading, and I do have a respectable library at home. But it is finite, it is full to overflowing and certainly has no Tardis-esque capability. I won’t be able to fit any more books on its shelves, so I’ve joined the movement and purchased the latest Kindle.

I love reading a physical book. If its good I will re-read it several times over the years, but the Kindle is smaller, lighter and can hold up to 3500 books. That’s quite an impressive library right there in the palm of your hand.

I’ve also been playing around with an iPad (more on that later) but it is the size, weight and display that favours the Kindle. The display is really the clincher; the electronic ink display is wonderful and, quite frankly, it does look like a printed page. My only criticism, and it’s a small one, is that the background is not as white as paper, so contrast is not as good. Then again, many of my older novels are yellowing so much that they are far worse than the Kindle’s display – perhaps it’s just a preference.

In bright light the Kindle’s display is perfectly readable, providing you don’t hold the screen so as to actually reflect the light. iPads are great indoors but in strong light or outdoors, its readability is quite poor. Of course, the iPad is much more than a simple book reader.

While the Kindle might save trees, the iPad has the potential to save forests given its enormous potential.

Both the Kindle and iPad can be used pretty much anywhere, the Kindle in particular, has great battery life (you could take it on a camping holiday for a couple of weeks and not need to charge it). If it’s a book, PDF or other document, the Kindle has you covered and, I would argue, it is just as easy to use as a sheet of paper. The iPad, while not as simple and convenient as the Kindle, covers more bases. The iPad gives you the majority of PC and Internet resources in an eminently usable form factor.

Why do we really print documents when we are simply going to read them? Probably because paper is always available, always reliable, light, and can be taken anywhere. Certainly there are still many reasons to print, but the Kindle and iPad are chipping away at them.

I have found, of late, that I’m constantly using the iPad - what’s on TV next? Look it up on the iPad. Need to read a proposal document? Straight to the iPad (no need to print). Wondering where Olympic Dam is? Forget the atlas, the iPad is faster and not only tells you where in SA you would find Olympic Dam, but all the background detail and how to get there.

With the increasing usefulness of portable devices such the iPad and Kindle, maybe some of our forests will get a stay of execution, but I have no doubt that as sales of these devices grow, another part of our environment will be impacted.

UK EMEA Lab Notes - February 2011 - Ian Hyndman

PCI Compliance In The UK

Hands up any who still uses cash for most of their purchases? Hmm, very few.

Nowadays the majority of people pay for everything by debit or credit card. Paying by card is so easy that you can walk in to a corner shop, pick up a couple of chocolate bars and use your card. The ability to walk around without having to worry about cash or change is a great feeling. As anyone will testify, when you don’t need a cash machine they’re everywhere, but when you do need a cash machine…

With all this new found freedom and everybody willing to swipe my card, are my details safe?

The banks and card providers have been asking the same question and, as a result, have come up with PCI Compliance. PCI stands for Payment Card Industry, and every single business that takes payment by card will have to become compliant. That’s right, not just the Amazons and PayPals, but your local take away and corner shop as well. Everyone will have to be compliant.

Why?

The banks and card providers are fully aware of problems such as customer’s card details being sold or stolen. For this key reason (and many others) PCI regulations have been brought in to ensure that any company holding card data has proven - through audits - that the data they hold is secure. As it currently stands, we consumers don’t know if a company has a secure server behind a firewall or whether the data is simply held on the store owner’s home computer - with a weak password. The banks and card providers are hoping that these measures will mean consumers have the confidence to use their cards. This is a problem that these organisations are taking very seriously. If consumers don’t have faith in using their cards safely, they just won’t use them.

When?

The original deadline set for all businesses to become compliant in the UK was September 30th 2010. The aim was to ensure Level 1 businesses were compliant first, and then all other level businesses meet compliance thereafter.

A level 1 business refers to Amazon-type companies with over 6 million transactions annually. At the other end of the scale are level 4 businesses, local shop less than 20,000 transactions annually.

In September 2010, Tripwire published a white paper that revealed the readiness of UK businesses for compliance. Below are the key findings from that report.

KEY FINDINGS

• Only 12% of United Kingdom (UK) organisations processing credit and debit cardholder data are currently certified as being PCI compliant.

• 58% of Level 1 merchants have been audited and certified as compliant. This falls to 6%, 8% and 4% for Level 2, 3 and 4 organisations.

• Over half (57%) of retail organisations admit to not fully understanding the requirements of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

• Brand awareness and fear of reputation damage is a significant driver for achieving PCI compliance.

• Over three quarters (77%) of organisations have had no difficulty in securing funding and resources to ensure PCI DSS requirements are met.

• 88% of organisations have senior management on the PCI DSS team or working group — a figure that is 100% for Level 1 organizations.

Whilst currently, there is a short fall in compliant businesses, the vast majority of these see PCI compliance as an improvement and have gained the necessary funding to implement it. They have seen what can happen to large corporations such as RBS WorldPay and TJX who both lost vast amounts of card data through breaches, and understand how PCI compliance can improve their security.
This can only be good news for us as consumers as we need to trust our data is being stored securely.

Australian Lab Notes - December 2010 - Steve Turvey

Ever since watching the children’s cartoon, The Jetsons as a child, I have always wanted a video phone. (Truth be told, I have always wanted my own robot and flying car that folded into a suitcase too.) We have been living and working with video phones for quite a while now in the form of video conferencing units and, of course, 3G video capable mobile phone.

As much as spin doctors at Apple Inc. would like us to believe otherwise, we have had the option of video calls on our mobile phones way before the iPhone 4. While the iPhone video call is undoubtedly better quality than a 3G video call, the iPhone actually cheats and places the call over any available local wireless access point and the internet. Essentially the iPhone is a hand held video conferencing unit.

We were recently testing dedicated video conferencing units at the TestLab. The reason we spend large sums of money on such technology is that there are sound business reasons for doing so. We would not go to the great trouble of face to face meetings if there was not such value in the relationship, in the expression and in the nuances that face to face conversations convey.

There is simply no way most of us would negotiate a pay rise, undertake a job interview or purchase a new house over the phone. Why? Simple because we are at a great disadvantage if we cannot be there to read the relationship we carry out with the other party.

Coincidentally, while musing over such drivers of video phone calls, there was quite a stir in the media regarding the wearing of religious garments in public, in particular the Burqa. The French were discussing the possibility of banning the garment and a similar debate emerged Australia concerning the moral, religious and security issues of the veil. I was fascinated by the arguments for and against the Burqa. They range, of course, across religious, cultural, sexual and individual grounds, but the one most relevant to this particular discussion was about its impact on a security-minded world. The argument follows that if you have to remove a motor cycle helmet in the bank or airport (it is a form of disguise concealing the identity) the Burqa, religious ramifications aside, also plainly hides the wearer’s identity in much the same way.

It’s not my place to decide on what is appropriate. But it does amuse me somewhat that my dream of a The Jetsons-esque science fiction future, one that is becoming a fantastic reality through high quality video conferencing technology, is still impacted by thousand-year old culture and tradition. Even so, I’m confident that video communication with, or without a Burqa, is still a science fiction milestone.