Your ID Card details are safe with us (snigger)

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From The Register…

Australia’s identity card system was routinely searched for personal reasons by government agency employees, some of whom have been sacked.

Police are now investigating allegations of identity fraud resulting from the security breaches.

There were 790 security breaches at government agency Centrepoint involving 600 staff. Staff were found to have inappropriately accessed databases containing citizens’ information. The databases are part of a massive federal Government smart card project which will link medical, welfare, tax and other personal data on Australia’s 17m citizens.

In total, 19 Centrepoint employees have been sacked and 92 others have resigned. Police are conducting investigations into five employees, they said.

The man charged with protecting citizens’ privacy in relation to the project said that the government must do more to prevent this kind of security breach when so much vital information is gathered in one place.

“The Centrelink revelations are deeply disturbing,” Professor Allan Fels told Australian ABC radio. “I take some comfort from the fact that the government has caught them and punished them, but there is still a huge weight now on the Government to provide full, proper legal and technical protection of privacy with the access card.”

The police have confirmed that investigations are ongoing after five referrals were made to it from Centrepoint. At least one of the cases is believed to involve allegations of the establishment of fake identities to be used to receive payments.

The investigation took two years and involved the use of sophisticated spying equipment. Union officials said staff had repeatedly been warned about the inappropriate accessing of records…

I expect the UK Home Office will issue a statement saying that it couldn’t happen here because it will be in charge of the proposed system. No wonder satirists are having a thin time at the moment. It’s hard to keep up with reality.

Thanks to Bill Thompson for the link.

Google to become an investment bank?

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Poor Google — you and I should have such problems. The search sovereign has amassed so much cash that it is in danger of possible reclassification and regulation as an investment firm. In its most recent quarterly financials, Google listed assets totaling $14.4 billion, including $4 billion in cash and $5.8 billion in marketable securities. Under guidelines set by the Investment Company Act of 1940, companies with more than 40 percent of their assets in securities are to be regulated as a mutual fund. Google clearly falls into that category at the moment, so it asked the Securities and Exchange Commission late last month for an exemption. “Google states that it is not in the business of investing, reinvesting, or trading in securities,” the company told the SEC, adding it has no plans to invest “for short-term speculative purposes.” The SEC hasn’t yet responded to the request, but most Wall Street types I spoke with feel approval is likely. “They will probably get the SEC exemption — but if they didn’t, its fascinating to think of what the boys could do with that $10 billion in cash (and securities),” said Barry Ritholtz, chief market strategist for Ritholtz Research. “I strongly doubt we will see a big buyback or a special dividend from them. And there’s only so many jumbo jets anyone really needs. So that makes a major acquisition the next option. Hell, they could buy Tivo, XMSR, half of Amazon.com — and still have a few billion dollars left.”

The Economist and the dim future of newspapers

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Hmmm… The Economist has an oddly unsatisfactory article on the dim future of newspapers. “Newspapers”, it concludes, “are making progress with the internet, but most are still too timid, defensive or high-minded”. The associated Editorial is more succinct:

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on- and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meagre editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.

Four years on

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It’s four years today since my lovely Sue died. This is one of my favourite photographs of her. She’s feigning astonishment at one of Tom’s tall stories, narrated with the all the wonderful exuberance of a four year old. It was taken in a restaurant after a happy Sunday morning spent browsing through the market at Camden Lock in London, until I had put my foot down and loudly demanded lunch.

A few weeks ago, sitting on a beach in Donegal while the kids fooled about in the waves, I fell into conversation with a woman who was also watching her children, similarly engaged. “So”, she said, after a time, “you have sole custody of the children?” — and was mortified when I explained that their mother had died. The poor woman felt that she had committed an unforgivable gaffe and it took a while to reassure her that it was ok.

Brooding on the exchange afterwards, it occurred to me that, in a way, she had hit the nail on the head. The thing that most agonised Sue about dying was that she was leaving her children. She felt that she was failing them, letting them down, abandoning them. The only way I could comfort her was by promising her that, for as long as they needed me, nothing would come between me and them.

It was the most solemn promise I’ve ever made and, as I unearthed the towels that they had forgotten (and I had remembered) to pack for the beach, I persuaded myself that I’m doing my best to honour it. But I also started thinking about the etymology of ‘custody’. In law, it has negative (“detention: a state of being confined”) as well as positive connotations. I like the US legal system’s definition: “the right to or responsibility for a child’s care and control, carrying with it the duty of providing food, shelter, medical care, education and discipline”. In that sense, the woman on the beach was right. I’m not sure about the discipline, but I can tick all the other boxes on that list.

One unambiguously positive thing about the last four years is that the children have always been able to talk openly about their mother — something I attribute in part to the fact that they explicitly gave her their permission to die. In the car on the way back from visiting their grandparents last Sunday, they told me about how they make decisions as to whether to explain to new friends why they have only one parent. It transpires that they operate a “need to know” principle; only good friends need to know; everyone else is left to infer that, somehow, their dad made a mess of his marriage!

In his thoughtful little book, A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis says somewhere that you never stop being married to a spouse who has died. What I’ve learned from the last four years is that he was right.

One born every minute

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This morning’s Observer column — on the profitability of spam.

So who were the schmucks buying this stuff? It seems that among those who responded to Amazing’s spam – under the subject line, ‘Make your penis HUGE’ – was the manager of a $6bn mutual fund, who ordered two bottles of Pinacle to be shipped to his Park Avenue office in New York. A restaurateur in Boulder, Colorado requested four bottles. The president of a California firm that sells aeroplane parts and is active in the local Rotary Club gave out his American Express card number to pay for six bottles. And so on.

So pharmaceutical spamming is profitable. What then of the ‘pump and dump’ variety? A new study by Jonathan Zittrain of the Oxford Internet Institute and Laura Frieder of Purdue University in Indiana provides persuasive evidence that it, too, is profitable – though probably less so than penis-enlargement spams…

Downloading for dollars

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Useful piece in Slate by Edward Jay Epstein…

Once upon a time—two generations ago—the movie business was about making movies. Nowadays, it is about creating intellectual property that can be licensed in a raft of different markets. The Hollywood studios still make movies, of course, but by 2005, only 14.2 percent of their revenues came from movie ticket sales, while 85.8 percent came from licensing or selling their products for use in the home. (Click here for the studio revenue numbers.) Until 2005, the studio’s principal access to the home market came through pay TV, free television, video rentals, and DVD sales. But now, with products such as Apple’s video iPod and TiVo-type digital recorders becoming widely available, Hollywood is inching toward an even more lucrative way of exploiting the home market…

The Echo Chamber Project

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Here’s an interesting project.

The Echo Chamber Project is an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq.

By developing collaborative techniques for producing this film, then this project can potentially provide some solutions for incorporating a broader range of voices and perspectives into the mainstream media…

Quote of the day

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Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.

Tim Berners-Lee, in a fascinating interview (transcript here) conducted on 28 July, 2006 and published as an IBM podcast.

He goes on to talk about his original concept of the Web:

And the original World Wide Web browser of course was also an editor. I never imagined that anybody would want to write in anchor brackets. We’d had WYSIWYG editors for a long time. So my function was that everybody would be able to edit in this space, or different people would have access rights to different spaces. But I really wanted it to be a collaborative authoring tool.

And for some reason it didn’t really take off that way. And we could discuss for ages why it didn’t. You know, there were browser editors, maybe the HTML got too complicated for a browser just to be easy.

But I’ve always felt frustrated that most people don’t…didn’t have write access. And wikis and blogs are two areas where suddenly two sort of genres of online information suddenly allow people to edit, and they’re very widely picked up, and people are very excited about them.

And I think that really for me reinforces the idea that people need to be creative. They want to be able to record what they think. They want to be able to, if they see something wrong go and fix it…

Cheney thinks US economy’s going down

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Well, well. Interesting report…

According to Kiplinger’s, the Cheneys, who may be worth close to $100 million, have invested the vast majority of their wealth overseas, in markets that do not fluctuate based on the U.S. dollar: Vice President Cheney’s financial advisers are apparently betting on a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies. That’s the conclusion we draw after scouring the financial disclosure form released by Cheney this week.

The Cheneys’ money is not in a blind trust but, according to his advisers: “the vice president pays no attention to his investments.”…

Oh yeah?

Slivers of time

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Now here’s a really good idea.

Slivers-of-Time is a new way of working. You list the hours you would like to work and local employers buy them.

New web sites are making this way of working easy to organise and less likely to go wrong. They remove all the overheads of booking top-up workers at short notice, for short periods. The web technology to achieve this is only now viable.

The Slivers-of-Time programme is funded jointly by the UK government and private companies. It’s low profile at the moment but working with far sighted government agencies, employers and recruitment agencies to launch a new way of working for the UK.

The interesting thing is that it’s funded by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. So that’s one thing John Prescott is good for, then.