Was Natwest Bank hacked last week?

Last Friday night I popped out to the local cash machine to get some money. Lo and behold no cash! - but I got this message displayed instead stating "PRS Shutdown November 16" with a timestamp, and strangest of all what looked like a weird graphic of an ATM seemingly stripped back with gunshot effects overlaid. The graphic in particular, if it isn't a hack, looks like it's been designed to look like one.

Now I think we've all seen this with ATMs down before, usually it's a simple "out of service" message, and I've seen other run-time type errors - my favourite being what looked like a Visual Basic error dialogue I once saw on an HSBC terminal.

However, this one is a little strange - if it isn't a hack (and somehow I can't convince myself it was), it raises the spectre of a graphic designer somewhere in the depths of RBS being asked by his manager to design a holding page for system outage and coming up with something that is more inspired by Banksy than Natwest Bank brand manifesto.

Just what was the brief for this then - "Ok, the banking industry is suffering a bit of lack of public confidence at the moment, can you just knock up a quick design that looks as if the ATM has been broken into? That'll reassure people that their money is safe."

Remarkable.

Should we trust the home office with our data?

My first reaction to the sheer scale of HM Revenue and Custom's loss of 25 million child benefit claimants bank detail was one of amazement, but I have to confess it was the number of records that amazed me, rather than the fact that some of it went missing.

It's an uncomfortable truth within the new information economy that often data security is frequently treated in a cavalier and slack fashion. From my personal experience I have worked in organisations that would be quite happy to fling fifty grand at a new firewall, but would also allow thousands of unencrypted customer data records to be biked around on recordable CDs.

Similar instances are abundant.

Hollywood studios agonising over DRM schemas and anti-piracy clauses in their contracts and yet happy to be letting their master tapes be transported around Soho in plastic bags carried by temps. Or the Natwest bank clerk in the Victoria branch who left me in his office with a pile of other customer's address and balance details face up on his desk the other day. Or the receipts from shops with the full credit card number printed at the top.

From big to small the list goes on, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realise that your data is no longer either safe nor private. Not because the technology is inherently insecure or vulnerable to interception, but because the technology makes no allowances for the society in which it exists.

Private information just isn't treated as the gold-dust that it is. We would never dream of transporting bank notes by courier, but data is often a different matter.

Now that a quarter of the nation's information security is compromised perhaps it's time to consider just how far out of the bottle his particular genie is.

Consider for a moment the digitisation of police, financial and educational records. Consider perhaps most importantly the upcoming placement of your medical records on the NHS "spine". There will soon be almost no part of your recorded life that will be susceptible - maybe not to deliberate attack, but definitely to the certainty of release by cock-up.

Throw in to this mix the myriad amount of other information that we've ourselves slung up on flickr, facebook and youtube and it's clear we have blundered into a new age of accidental freedom of information.

Will this lead to a dramatic re-evaluation of e-government, with a corresponding rolling back of centralised access to information? Somehow I doubt it.

However I think that this calls the whole concept of an ID card system into doubt. Whereas before we may have worried about abstract notions of our liberties being infringed by such a scheme, now we have the irrefutable truth that having that much data on so many people in one place is almost certainly going to get leaked someday, if not by design then certainly by accident, and we have to seriously plan for the impact of this.

If that impact is irrecoverable then we should can the whole shebang now.

Why the chasm between the study and the lounge chasm saves Hollywood from meltdown

There was something faintly ludicrous about Warner Music withholding their content from the launch of the Nokia music service this week. The supposed reason for Warner's unexpected coldfeet was Nokia's other interests in the file-sharing site Ovi which is laughable but from my experience not at all surprising.



The short answer of course is that the whole music business is just a wafer away from total disaster. If you think the adjustments and consolidations we've seen so far are significant then just wait until the generation that grew up not paying for anything hits their thirties.



The video industry, while probably equally shafted in the long-run, is on a slightly slower time-line and in the short-term it's sheltered by the fact that nobody has yet put together the killer combination of hardware, software and ease of use that brings free file-sharing into the living room.



The study/lounge chasm is what keeps the DVD industry riding high. It goes like this:-



1. Most people have PCs and broadband on a desk in one room - that's where we watch Youtube and do our file-sharing. It's easy to get free files to here.


2. Most people have TVs and DVD players in another room - that's where they watch movies sat on the sofa.



Bridge rooms 1 and 2 and you have a winner and you can wipe 50% off Warner Video's next profit statement. Currently it's just too hard to move that movie from the study to the lounge. So people rent and buy DVDs, watch Freeview, and the Warner Video christmas party is still on.



Some people will say "Windows Media Centre!" at this point, and while it's a steadily improving piece of kit, it falls down on the facts. Using a PC with a remote is like typing with boxing gloves, and sitting with a wireless keyboard on your lap is a recipe for RSI. I've seen some studies that show that the majority of people who buy Media Centre PCs stick them in their studies anyhow and use them as high-end desktops.



Maybe two computers linked by wireless is the answer - but that's economically unfeasible at the moment for many people - and this has to work mass market to be a solution. The two computers option falls down again as anyone who's configuring a home network to link them together will tell you. It can be done. You just don't want to be the one doing it.



Intel had some interesting ideas here with Viiv, a flawed concept that had its heart in the right place for trying to make wireless networks easy to configure in the home. But Viiv has gone very quiet recently. Actually make that "dead".

Burning DVDs on your PC to play in the DVD player under the telly? For those with patience only and the industry obsession with CSS has next to killed this already for the legal download providers.

Some kind of smart terminal set-top box in the living room that can download movies and play them back may be the answer, and BT is probably nearest to this currently in the mass-market, but you'll still need a proper PC to do the file-sharing unless BT put Bit-torrent on BT Vision. They won't.



Media extender type set-top boxes are another option, but again currently the amount of configuration required both on PC and set-top box is too high a barrier - and they're expensive. And mainly crap.



But when some bright spark works it out, expect the end to arrive swiftly. What price a total collapse of the physical DVD industry? A return to reliance on theatrical income for major movies, and a slashing back of production costs for everybody else?



Unthinkable? Maybe - but then who would have predicted live performance being such a proportionately big part of so many music acts income 10 years ago? Radiohead giving their music away with an honesty box? Large parts of the population streaming music all day for free a la Last.fm?

And of course most of the people in the world are living in this copy-rightless free-for-all state already. As the picture shows maybe it's time for Hollywood to stop taking their public for a free meal-ticket and come back to the real world.

Is the game up for Babelgum and the video minnows?

Amid all the hype about Facebook recently it's worth a moment's thought about Bebo. According to Comscore the relatively under-exposed social networking giant still has a good few 10s of millions more users in the UK than either Facebook, or yesterday's champion Myspace.

Yet thinking about it I realised that not only did I not have an active Bebo account that I could remember, but neither did any of my friends.

Yet, Bebo is huge, and huge in a way that I suspect is ultimately more resilient than Facebook. I have a theory that Facebook for many is an online game, not about interacting online, or widening a social circle - more about collecting faces that you have known and sticking them like cards in an online album, to prove just how well connected you are. Certainly not true for all Facebook users of course, but I suspect for most of those caught up in the big wave that's jumped on board it is the case. In this you can see echoes of Friends Reunited - the mass wave, followed by the "OK, we're all here, now what?" question.

The answer to that question for Friends Re-united of course was "go do something else less boring instead", and I suspect Facebook may see this too. Not that there isn't a viable business model left behind, more that the mega-numbers, and infinite "facebook platform" possibilities bandied around currently may turn out to be cloud illusions before long. Rather like the college yearbooks it's based on, fun to turn to occasionally but ultimately stuck in the bottom drawer for most of the year.

Bebo on the other hand, and Faceparty and Myspace for that matter, seems to have its demographic roots in an audience that uses the web in a far less ephemeral way, a generation that is growing up entwined with online usage, rather than bolting it on to an existing social scene. The addition of video to Bebo seems a natural extension to this, and as well as boosting the stakes in the social networking game, it's likely that this will hoover a lot of traffic away from some of the fledgling video propositions. Babelgum, Joost and the like now look to be playing in a crowded space - with no users. Admittedly they may have a pile of cash, but it's a molehill compared to the potential raises of the social networking big-guns.

Where to next for them? I'd hazard a guess at early exits, increased specialisation, and rapid consolidation in the middle of next year for those left going it alone.

FTSE falls reveal the unspoken

This morning a large plume of smoke was visible from many parts of London. For about half an hour or so nobody seemed quite sure what it was - friends IMed me and we googled around trying to work out what was going on.

Across London traders made their own assumptions and the FTSE fell. A short while later it became clear that it was merely a large fire in a old deserted warehouse. The news machinery kicked into action and BBC 24 soon had a helicopter hovering overhead.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/player/nol/newsid_7090000/newsid_7091300?redirect=7091333.stm&news=1&bbwm=1&nbram=1&bbram=1&nbwm=1&asb=1

What was more interesting though was the almost unspoken default reaction of both my friends and the traders to any event of this kind - another terrorism attack. I think most Londoners don't so much as fear another attack, as expect it. We are resigned to the almost inevitability of something going bang near us at any time, and are quite willing to re-interpret quite mundane events into the possibility of the extraordinary.

But do we march on the streets demanding action? Do we lobby our politicians? Do we beg for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq? Do we go the other way and demand a bigger crack-down on terror?

No. We are simply resigned to it happening someday. Another inconvenience like a train crash, a tube strike, or a fire. The genie is out of the bottle and although we see it's shadow in the every-day, we are far to busy to spend our time chasing it down.

Robot cars fight it out in the ghost-town

There's no doubting the technical skill of this year's entrants in the US Military Robot Car Competition, but it's probably worth a little pause for thought about where this all leads.

On the plus side it suggests the possibility of some pretty advanced driver aids - maybe the cars of the future get pre-emptive collision detection, or some kind of auto-pilot that over-rides "user-error" in the supermarket car-park. A more sophisticated extension of the rudimentary automatic parking or emergency brake assist we're starting to see in top of the range Lexus's and Mercedes sounds like a good thing.

It'll also probably start removing troops from the battlefield - something that the pilotless drone planes of today are already starting to do for the airforce. This in some senses might be a good thing, but let's think out a couple of the aspects of this.

Firstly it'll remove US troops first - great for Congress fighting with TV pictures of body-bags being flown home from the dusty passes of Afghanistan. Not so good for those civilians on the ground - and there always are civilians in the mix.

Second, let's imagine that everyone else catches up. Wars fought by armies of driverless machines? More like wars fought remotely by teams of software engineers. Your war in the hands of the IT department - the geeks again inherit the earth. This time with guns.

Thirdly, the thought process behind this really belies the late twentieth century thinking here. Firstly what the hell would these things fight? The old notion of nation fighting nation seems frankly antiquated these days, more like nation fighting rag-bag group of guerilla fighters mingled in with an un-armed frightened population.

As Iraq proves it's now just not possible for a military nation to successfully occupy a modern country - the easy availability of low-cost, low-technology but highly effective counter-weapons means that although you can bomb out the traditional military infrastructure and then drive to the city-centre, you can't ever really win the war unless you've already won the minds of the entire population in advance.

And in what circumstances can this happen? The polarised geo-political reality in the world means that the US is so vastly unpopular overseas that it's just not in a position to ever do this.

So the minute you declare victory, the local youths pop down to the regional equivalent of B&Q, jump on Google - and half an hour later are planting a bomb by the side of the road.

Hence, the whole notion of fighting a "remote" war with automated machines is a sad reflection that the West, and the US in particular, still can't quite engage with the new reality of a world where you actually have to listen and engage with your perceived enemy off the battlefield if you really want to get along. An even harder pill to swallow is that the gap in ideologies we see today may not be bridgeable in the short-term, and that military intervention just widens this gap into a chasm in the vast majority of cases.

Spending mega-millions on developing techno-crap like this is paucity of thought on a grand scale.

Seeing as I'm covered in petrol...

www.blinkBox.com;

Despite the fact that we've parted company - this still made me larf.

V. funny Mr Sisam.