It's not often you get to have a good old belly laugh in this job. Not unless you find the likes of front bus ends and clocks speeds particularly hilarious, in which case I'd recommend psychiatric help, or working for one of our competitors. But the recent AOL debacle raised a few titters around the office and even teased a smile out of the most stony-faced, seen-it-all, heard-it-all hacks on the team.

Apart from adding fuel to another data breach roundup story (of which we could probably do one a quarter on Ernst & Young alone) the AOL data breach, or rather information disclosure mistake, revealed the internet's dirty, sordid underbelly in all its seedy glory.

Better than fiction, this was: judging by this particular set of search terms, one female AOL user in New Hampshire seems to have been involved in a bad relationship and so decided to find solace in the arms of another woman… and God:

• revenge tactics
• the woman's book of revenge
• dirty tricks for chicks
• how to humiliate someone
• how to get revenge on an old lover
• i hate my ex boyfriend
• how to really make someone hurt for the pain they caused to someone else
• advice from women who have seeked revenge on old lovers
• makehimsuffer.com
• how to say goodbye hurtfully
• free articles on gay life that can be mailed to me
• free christian things
• free gay magazines
• free angry stuff to send to an ex lover
• how to permanently delete information from your hard drive
• makehimpay.net
• women's harley davidson boots
• the worst thing to send someone via email
• thong dancewear
• locatecell.com
• what can i do to an old lover for revenge
• mean revenge tactics
• death records in hampstead new hampshire

Another has road safety "issues" and might have problems finding suitable mates:

• cocaine in urine
• asian mail order brides
• states reciprocity with florida
• florida dui laws
• extradtion from new york to florida
• mail order brides from largos
• will one be extradited for a dui
• cooking jobs in french quarter new orleans
• will i be extradited from ny to fl on a dui charge

Privacy activists had complained that although usernames were omitted, the data could have ID’d some of the users in question. I can quite believe that, unless there are a lot of horse-fancying motorbike enthusiasts living in Pennsylvania... well, on second thoughts, maybe that was bad example:

• homes for sale in pa
• where to get certified nurse plate license
• homes for sale in morgantown pa
• legends night club reading pa
• beasteality
• inceststories.free-beastiality.name
• hourse f***ing free
• progressive motorcycle insurance
• circumsize pictures
• all inclusive trip to las vegas
• mustang svo 2.3 fuel pressure
• mustang cobra chrome roll bar
• beastiality
• harley performance cafe
• mustang sally gentlemans club

I'm sure there was a serious point in here about privacy and the amount of our information search vendors should be able to keep and use for their own purposes, but I'm afraid I couldn't see it for the tears of laughter.

August 10, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Online fraud eh... tricky problem innit? Depending on who you listen to though, it could be a potentially crippling problem for ecommerce if consumers are scared away, or an over-hyped inconvenience, far outweighed by the millions being lost through card-not-present fraud in the offline world. But a fairly good barometer of the risk level is the stance taken by our beloved financial institutions. I reported in May how Barclays is now offering antivirus and anti-spyware tools to all its online banking customers, but now it seems the world has gone completely mad; the bank is about to give away two-factor authentication devices too. Is this the same stone hearted institution that laughed in my face when I tried to extend my student overdraft? Surely not.

For eagle-eyed visitors to this site, and no I'm not talking to you Aunty Nelly, you might have spotted my off-the-cuff remark that it would be a cold day in hell before banks started to roll out these devices in earnest... well that muffled gagging sound is me eating my hat. Of course the litmus test will be whether Barclays now has the balls to ask its customers to foot the bill for any fraud if they fail to implement these freely offered security services, as many have predicted. Now I'm not one for predictions, but...

August 4, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's one that seems to have slipped under the radars of most of our competitors, but not IT Week's eagle-eyed news editor. It seems that .eu registry Eurid has suspended thousands of domain names, due to suspicions that they may have been registered in ways that contravene its rules. The company is also suing 400 registrars after it allegedly found a shadowy syndicate of registrars had been involved in warehousing, or buying up names with the intent of selling them on at a profit. Although that sounds like normal registrar practice, making money out of domain names, it is actually a breach of contract for registrars to buy domains that have not been directly requested by real customers.

One man who must be shouting "I TOLD YOU SO" from the rooftops is GoDaddy chief Bob Parsons, who I reported back in April as kicking up a fuss over this in his blog. With entries like, "The .eu landrush fiasco", "It's worse than we thought" and my favourite, "Eurid denies .eu landrush abuse. These guys couldn't spin a top", Parsons uncovered the whole sticky mess that threatened to make a mockery out of the domain, but Eurid was having none of it.

Fast forward a few months then and a bit of humble pie is perhaps in order for the registry, who in April claimed, "We are not doing anything because we don't agree with what [Parsons is] saying... We don't see why we have to restart the [registration] process."

No word yet from the Bobster, but you can bet his blog will be lighting up pretty soon.

August 3, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the benefits of working at IT Week, aside from the fact it is undoubtedly the finest and most insightful technology publication for IT decision-makers on the planet, is its Soho headquarters. Now, summertime in Soho has numerous benefits, you just have to pop down to Soho Square of a lunchtime and do a bit of sunbathing to see that, but as we all discovered last week, there are downsides too. After the events of the Sunday before last, when Électricité de France (EDF) suffered power substation problems which in turn affected datacentres, which in turn affected IT Week’s website, as well as something called Yahoo, we breathed a sigh of relief. Pity those fools in the US, we chuckled, they can’t even cope with a bit of heat before their servers are dropping left right and centre. Should have proper disaster recovery processes in place, we opined, and so did the experts.

Yet no sooner had I finished my piece of work, nay art, on business continuity for page two, then the lights went off and we were left high and dry in London’s bustling Soho district on press day. Of course, the core editorial staff did the only thing highly-trained journalists do in this situation... down the Dog & Duck to set the world to rights. But sitting in the dark as the minutes ticked by the irony was not lost on yours truly... a little bit of heat and it all goes t**s up – perhaps we should have practised what we preached in this case.

August 1, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Covered an interesting story the other day about a new device designed to turn your car into the office of the future, or something like that. According to its maker - comic-strip-baddie-sounding Intelligent Mechatronic Systems - the iLane system is the world’s first hands and eyes-free email solution. This basically means that it will read aloud via a Bluetooth headset or in-car system, any new corporate emails, picking them off your mobile or PDA as you enter the car and thereafter while in transit.

And you can reply by composing an audio message, which will be sent as a .wav file, or by choosing from a set of pre-defined templates. These could include, for example, “Leave me alone, I’m driving you idiot”, or my personal favourite, “Do you want me to die?! I’m doing 80 down the A1 and it’s raining; at this moment in time I’m trying very hard not to lose control of this death wagon and plough into the central reservation, so you’ll just have to wait for that update on this quarter’s sales figures.”

As you might have twigged, I have reservations about the manufacturer’s claims that IT managers will embrace this device because of the safety benefits. Now I would love to see certain sales staff killed or maimed on Britain’s roads, I really would. But I think the jury’s still out on whether having a hands-free phone, let alone an eyes-free email system, is any less dangerous than sneaking a look at your BlackBerry while the lights are red.

July 28, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

The events of last weekend's Black Sunday, when several high-profile sites and services fell over due to power cuts in key datacentres, have again highlighted that when it comes to business continuity, global enterprises can be about as effective as the continuity team on Blake's 7.

Teenagers across the globe were sadly forced to get on and do their homework for once, as popular social networking site MySpace went down; Yahoo email users threw stuff at the screen (oh, just me then?) and our own publisher's data host suffered a power outage, with vnunet's loyal follower reportedly "slightly irritated" at the site being offline for nearly 12 hours.

In the case of MySpace you could argue that firms as big as this – especially with the backing of a media empire – should really know better. Although you can never make a datacentre 100 percent reliable, there are means to mitigate the risks of downtime, especially on this scale, as much as possible. A schoolboy error then, that MySpace doesn't seem to have had a back-up plan, in the form of another centre somewhere else (preferable not in a region beginning in Cali and ending in fornia).

But to give it the benefit, in many ways MySpace is the victim of its own success as popularity has sky-rocketed faster than it has perhaps had time to restructure its systems to ensure its millions of users are not left in the lurch. That said, any site responsible for the musical aberration that is Sandi Thom deserves all it gets in my book.

July 26, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)

The news that Paris-based Yorkshire lass Catherine Sanderson was sacked - allegedly - due to comments made anonymously in her personal blog won’t surprise many who dabble in the art, and it is an art let me tell you, of weblogging. She can probably feel fairly hard done by, having remained anonymous throughout, although crucially she posted a pic of herself on the site. But if you're attracting around 3,000 visitors a day, you can probably expect your boss to find out eventually, and it was an accounting firm she worked for too, not a liberal, media-friendly post-production company.

Still, it's probably going to take something like this Bridget-Jones style blogger winning her test court case in France for firms to actually get their fingers out when it comes to communicating corporate blogging policies. Just do the maths - there are x million bloggers out there, and I can wager that most of them have a job, and that they at times talk about their working lives in said blogs… ergo they are disseminating content to a potentially huge audience, content which their employer might rather they didn't. Yet research suggests most firms have yet to wake up to this fact.

She comes over as very naive in the stories that have been reported about this case, but some onus should fall on the blogger's side too. Sometimes we want all the glory but none of the responsibility, but it's time to wake-up to the fact that these little online diaries are potential PR time-bombs. And with great power comes great responsibility...

July 25, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was trying to explain to my parents the other day about the wonderous nature of the world wide web; about how having internet access is like having a virtual library in your front room, containing answers to all the questions you'd ever wanted to ask, and many more that you'd never even thought of. About how you can communicate across tens of thousands of miles in seconds, reach out to communities of like-minded people, and even (maybe) find love.

Anyway, it didn't really work as they still don't have anything resembling a PC and probably never will, but undeterred, I rooted around to find further fuel for my argument, and came up with the heart-rending story of densha otoko, or train man. For those of you unfamiliar with the tale, it goes something like this...

A couple of years ago a visitor to a popular Japanese forum for single males known as 2Channel wrote an account of how he was sitting on a train next to a beautiful woman when a drunkard started hassling her. Summoning up reserves of courage he never knew he had, he confronted the troublemaker who was eventually expelled from the train.

But what happened next, I hear you ask? Well, in true Hollywood fashion the woman fell on her knees (sort of) in admiration and gratitude at this bemused otaku (geek), who then went home and shared his experiences in the aforementioned online forum.

Days later the woman contacted him again, sending a selection of fine cups and saucers by Hermes to show her gratitude (it's a Japanese thing), and once again the otaku, now known as "train man", turned to his only friends, his online chums, for comfort and advice. In the weeks that followed the couple met several times, densha otoko all the time harnessing the power of online collaboration by seeking counsel with the geek collective at 2channel, and eventually the two expressed their undying love for each other. The end.

The story, although it might be a load of Japanese hokum, has nonetheless been made into a Japanese TV series, manga and anime (comics and cartoons to you and me), although the identity of the train man remains a mystery. But what it shows beyond doubt is the awesome power and influence of the net, not only in that this story swept rapidly through the online grapevine to TV and other media, but also in the way our hero, Mr Train, sought solace and advice from those at 2channel (which by the way is widely regarded as the world's largest internet forum).

I suppose it also shows lonely stalkers everywhere that there's always hope.

July 19, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Still awaiting my Pulitzer, The Guardian has since jumped on our software piracy bandwagon, half-inching bits from my reports on the Fast organisation as well my colleague James "Jimbo" Murray's BSA investigation. Far be it from me to have a go at a respectable national publication, especially as IT Week's name is mentioned several times in the piece, but... well, no buts actually, I'm going to leave it there. I'm just bitter cos my name was never mentioned, with the prefix "hotshot reporter" or similar in the copy.

As for further developments on this theme, well the story just runs and runs since our first reader wrote in all those weeks ago to complain about Fast's business practices. Now an ex-Fast employee who left because he wasn't happy with the way things were going has spoken to me about his time there. Basically his insight was a validation of most of our readers' letters and their complaints: aggressive sales techniques, poorly-trained staff, too much selling and not enough focus on the core mission of copyright protection. That was the general gist. Plus a whole host of unprintable stuff.

It's always frustrating to have to leave the best stuff out, but it's necessary from a legal standpoint, or next week I might be knocking on The Guardian's door looking for a job.

July 17, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another week, another issue goes to bed. And our campaign around software piracy rumbles on. This week we led on comments from The Corporate IT Forum's chief exec who is backing our piece alleging heavy-handed tactics by the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast).

From what I hear our stories about Fast have drawn some of the most impassioned responses from our readers ever to be seen by IT Week's crack editorial team. Hitherto Fast have been very accommodating when I've asked if they wanted to put forward their side of the case, but as of this week they've all clammed up.

It's a tricky one, that "no comment" defence. The police have obviously got around this years ago by putting in enough caveats to that 'right to remain silent' spiel to make silence appear like an admission of guilt. But is it?

On this occasion I'll maintain my journalistic integrity and give Fast the benefit of the doubt. There'll be plenty of people, of course, thinking Fast have basically nothing to say because they've been rumbled, but it'd be fairer to wait and see what happens. Maybe they've all gone away for a well-earned break.

July 14, 2006 in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)