Online banking, pshaw

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Much to the annoyance of some of my consultancy clients and my bank — and the amazement of friends (“What? Call yourself a technology columnist and not use Internet banking!!!”) — I don’t use online banking for the simple reason that I don’t think it’s secure. So this report from Good Morning Silicon Valley is grist to my mill.

The high-profile cyberattacks continue: Citigroup has been hacked, too, it told the Financial Times Wednesday. The May attack allowed hackers to access the names, account numbers and contact information of about 200,000 North American customers of the company, according to Reuters. Citigroup says other information such as card security codes, expiration dates and customers’ Social Security numbers are kept elsewhere and were not accessed.

While the FT quoted a Gartner analyst who said that “for the actual breach to happen at a bank is a very big deal,” because banks’ online systems are usually more secure, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Sheila Bair said this morning that banks are frequent targets, according to the Reuters article. Bair said the FDIC may push banks to improve their online-security measures.

On a related note, and in case you missed it: What does happen when your bank gets hacked and your money is stolen? According to a judge’s ruling in one case in Maine, the bank can only do so much. Wired’s Threat Level blog reports that a construction company that fell victim to a password-stealing Trojan on an employee’s computer is out of luck in trying to recover about $300,000 from Ocean Bank. While Magistrate Judge John Rich agreed that the bank could stand to have a more secure authentication system, he said the law does not require it to have such a system, and that its system is comparable to that of other banks.

The New College of the Old Elite

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Nice LRB blog post by Glen Newey.

The New College for the Humanities must have looked like a winner on paper. A higher education Britain’s Got Talent fronted by celebrity academics not just on the payroll, but taking a dividend. Financiers on board. Mayor BoJo’s blessing. Saudi princes by the tanker-load offering their custom. And then the project has seemingly shrivelled faster than a LibDem campaign rosette. Birkbeck swiftly distances itself from the NCH and parts company with its founder. The college’s financial, fiscal and institutional status prove foggy. It turns out that the Cannadine-Colleys are only showing up for one lecture each a year. Poor A.C. Grayling gets ambushed in Foyle’s and smoke-bombed when all he wanted to do was puff his college and shift a few copies of his rewrite of the Bible. Is nothing sacred?

[…]

The problem with the NCH is not that it is ‘elite’, or that several of the big names are getting on. The problem is that it epitomises the worst features of the 2012-spec UK higher education system: it amplifies rather than damping down inequalities inherited from UK schools’ state/fee-paying apartheid, and makes ability to pay a further necessary condition beyond academic ability for admission. It also doubles students’ indebtedness and it’s not yet clear – as became plain in an interview Grayling gave this week – that NCH students will be eligible for a loan. The big-ticket professoriate will exemplify trends in the HE sector generally, where salaried faculty’s research time is bought out with low-cost teaching by casual staff.

Economic indicators and the 2012 Olympics

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Strange goings-on with Olympics tickets.

Probably the most complicated system for buying tickets ever thought up by man is in a new phase. The London Organising Committee (LOCOG) has run the initial ballot and assigned the first round of tickets. They've now taken money out of the accounts of those who were successful in the ballot and had a functioning visa account.

There could however be another chance for people who were unsuccessful as there are thousands of transactions that LOCOG have been unable to process because people's accounts have not had the money in or because the bank details have been incorrect for example. There are numerous reasons why a transaction could fail but if they try three times and it still fails, then the next person on the ballot waiting list gets the tickets.

I wonder if there might be another explanation. Could this be a reflection of a downturn in people’s economics circs? Maybe they’ve been forced to tear up their credit cards? Or have simple maxed out? Hmmm….

Doesn’t affect me. I propose to leave the country while the games are in progress.

What London University thinks about Grayling’s ‘New’ College

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From the University of London’s web site.

About the New College of the Humanities

The University is aware of the intention of the New College of the Humanities NCH to provide tuition to students of the University of London International Programmes. There is no formal agreement between the University of London and the NCH concerning academic matters. As with any other Independent Teaching Institution, a dialogue will be maintained about when to apply for recognition under the Institutions Policy Framework, but normally a track record is required. To avoid any confusion, it should be made clear that NCH is not, and will not be, a part of the University of London. Meanwhile it is legitimate for NCH, as an entirely independent institution, to provide tuition to students of University of London International Programmes as other institutions in London and around the world do. These students’ applications for registration for degrees would be made individually with the University of London International Programmes.

No agreement has been concluded as yet regarding access to the Senate House Libraries by NCH students, but financial terms exist for the payment of fees for access by any students of University of London International Programmes and this would, of course, apply to students of NCH. The position is similar for the University of London Union, and it should be noted that all students of the University of London International Programmes are eligible for associate membership for a payment of £20 per annum, but are not eligible to compete competitively in University sports teams.

Quite so. Just in case there might be any misunderstanding, m’lud.

Thanks to Doug Clow for spotting it.

When Social Networks Become Tools of Oppression

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Good post by Jillian York.

When Syria’s government unblocked Facebook, YouTube and Blogspot in February, many activists saw the move as an overture to protesters, possibly one offering a semblance of the freedoms won by insurgents in Egypt and Tunisia.

Others saw it as a potential means of surveillance. They were right: Within weeks, reports began to emerge from detained Syrian activists who said that authorities had demanded their Facebook passwords. Others inside the country noted that their friends’ Facebook walls had been compromised and now contained pro-regime sentiment.

On Twitter, Syrian protesters have noted the emergence of pro-regime “spambots”: accounts set up with automated feeds that post benign content, including links to attractive photographs of Syrian landscapes, to the hashtag used by protesters and supporters, presumably to flood it with contradictory information. Activists believe the bots have been created by regime supporters, paid or otherwise.

The potential for authorities to use tools like Twitter and Facebook to track down insurgents is very real. Many demonstrators chose early on not to hide their identities, emboldened by the success of Egypt’s mostly peaceful uprising. When coupled with Facebook’s requirement that users create profiles using their real names, pro-democracy activists are at risk of being unmasked on social networks.

iCloud roundup

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The combination of iCloud with Apple’s coming mobile operating system will allow make its mobile devices more like standalone computers. Users will be able to activate and operate iPads and iPhones without ever needing to connect them to a computer running iTunes.

“We’re living in a post pc world,”said Scott Forstall, Apple’s SVP for iOS software, who shared the stage with Jobs, “if you want to cut the cord, you can.”

Forstall said that many of Apple’s customers were now people without computers who wanted their iPad or iPhone to be their only device.

(Emphasis added.)

[Source: Technology Review.]

The “post-PC” claim was made when the iPad was launched, but seemed idiotic at a time when the only way of activating the device was to hook it up via an umbilical cord to iTunes running on a PC. The surprise is that it took Apple this long to get around to it.

LATER: The NYT reports it like this:

Mr. Jobs said people will no longer have to manually sync mobile devices with their PCs, an approach that he said has become too unruly now that millions of people own music players, smartphones and tablets, each with photos, music, apps and other types of documents.

“Keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy,” Mr. Jobs said, speaking on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference here. “We have a great solution for this problem. We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.”

“Everything happens automatically, and there is nothing new to learn,” he added.

STILL LATER: I love the Register’s headline over its report on the WWDC presentation:

Apple opens iCloud to world+dog

Jobs: ‘It’s not as crap as MobileMe. Promise’

EVEN LATER: Nieman Journalism Lab has a useful analysis of the iCloud announcements.

Webs of deceit

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Fascinating research using network analysis of email communications.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Political thrillers that portray a “web of corruption” get it all wrong, at least according to an analysis of e-mails between Enron employees. The flow of the famously corrupt corporation’s electronic missives suggests that dirty dealings tend to transpire through a sparse, wheel-and-spoke network rather than a highly connected web.

Employees who were engaged in both legitimate and shady projects at the company conveyed information much differently when their dealings were illicit, organizational theorist Brandy Aven of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh reported June 1 at an MIT workshop on social networks. The distinction is visible in the network of e-mails among employees, which takes the shape of a wheel with a central hub and isolated spokes when content is corrupt, rather than a highly connected net of exchanges.

In the chart, the network of email communications about a corrupt project came out looking like the left-hand graph.

So network analysis tools are useful in forensic examination of communications. But so also are less sophisticated tools. Prosecutors in a recent big insider trading investigation in New York found that a key phrase to look for in email communications was “phone me”.

Personalisation and its discontents

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I’m reading Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. If you haven’t got time to read it, then his TED talk is a pretty good summary. He covers some of the same ground as Cass Sunstein did in Republic.com 2.0. This is a worrying and under-discussed unintended consequence of what seems like a useful affordance of networked technology. And ultimately it’s about politics.

So will Google’s Chromebook transform how we think about computers?

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My Observer piece about the forthcoming Google netbook.

On 15 June, Google will officially take the next step on its road to global domination. From that day onwards, online shoppers will be able to buy the Google Chromebook, a device that the search giant hopes will change the way we think about computers – and in the process rain on the parades of Apple and Microsoft.

On the face of it, the Chromebook seems an unlikely game-changer. Its first two manifestations – from electronics giants Samsung and Acer – look like any old netbook: thin (0.79in) clamshell design, 12.1in screen, standard-sized keyboard, trackpad. At 3.2lb, it’s not particularly light. The claimed battery life (8.5 hours for the Samsung version) is pretty good, but otherwise the Google machine looks rather conventional.

The surprises start when you hit the on button…