Afternoon:
15°c
I don't know what your all-time highest score on Sonic the Hedgehog is. But I imagine it wouldn't be very difficult to find out, since Sega, the Japanese video game developer that invented the irritating blue urchin, recently suffered the theft of 1.3 million users' personal details from its Sega Pass online database.
How? Well, the new old-fashioned way. A load of anarchic cyber-crims bust open a big company's vaults and made off with as much valuable gear as they could carry. Sega users' data is now circulating somewhere in the cybersphere, for the use or misuse of anyone who can be bothered to hang around on chat rooms sifting through porn and goatse long enough to find it.
The past six weeks have seen a flurry of hacking activity. Hackers have yanked down the virtual underpants of numerous big corporations and government bodies. Sony and Nintendo have been robbed. CIA and the US Senate computer systems have been disrupted. Last week there was a data dump of 62,000 random email accounts and passwords stolen from users of Yahoo!, AOL, Comcast, Hotmail, Verizon, Gmail and others.
Many recent hackings have been carried out by a collective known as Lulz Security, or LulzSec. (Lulz, for all you analogue cats out there, are what we used to call "shits and giggles".) Groups such as LulzSec create chaos and expose people's privacy because they think it's funny. Or, as they put it, because "watching someone's Facebook picture turn into a penis and seeing their sister's shocked response is priceless We release personal data so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it".
I admit, I sniggered when I read that, since any mention of turning a Facebook picture into a man's winky appeals to my inner Beavis and Butthead.
But there's also a serious point. The online world is moving unstoppably towards cloud-based computing, in which all your data, files and private personal information are stored on the servers of big corporations such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. We're not just talking about your Call of Duty password. It's everything.
A handful of companies will hold vital data about everyone on earth, barring those few communities who haven't got into social networking or multiplayer Gears of War yet (ie just a few Polynesian tribes, one or two Amish Mennonites and my gran).
That these companies have such slack defences is unacceptable. You wouldn't bank with NatWest if it was held up by the Joker every week. Why should you be expected to entrust your bank details, emails or holiday snaps to a company that can't protect you? The corporate world needs to tighten up its defences, fast. The first step should probably to hire LulzSec as security consultants.
Let's do the SW19 sun dance
It's 125 years since the first tennis championships were played at Wimbledon. A lot of things have changed; a few things have not. There was no retractable roof, HawkEye or Murray Mount at the inaugural 1877 tournament.
Indeed, there were only 21 entrants and 200 spectators at the final, in which the players used snowshoe-shaped rackets and hand-sewn flannel balls. But the main blight of the tournament was the same then as now: the weather.
It hooned down with rain all day on Monday July 16, when the final was due to take place, so the match was postponed until the following Thursday.
Will the 2011 version be a washout? Let's hope not - the scorching 2010 tournament was a delight. But who knows? I've hired my fishing galoshes and a two-man kayak for the fortnight. Just to be sure, like.
Dave wags a finger at our naughty dads
David Cameron's Father's Day sermon, delivered in a newspaper column over the weekend, implored Britain to view runaway fathers with as much hostility as drink-drivers. It's a piercing piece of rhetoric but it shows up the limits of the Government's ability to do anything about the fact that Britain has more absent fathers than any other country in the EU.
Before the 2010 election Cameron and the Conservatives suggested that they would use the tax and welfare system to encourage families to stay together. That idea seems to have disappeared into the big bin marked "Quietly Abandoned Reforms". Instead, Cameron is reduced to waggling his finger from Whitehall, encouraging the people of Britain to "shame" one another into action. It's a mode in which he appears to many people to be at his most out of touch, sanctimonious and infuriating.
Young are on top of forms
It's often said that exams are getting easier - usually by people who took them a very long time ago and still like showing off about how well they did. (It is rarely said by young people actually taking exams, since all exams, no matter how dumbed-down, are incredibly unpleasant and stressful.) But there's no doubt that young people are getting better at outwitting the idiots who set exam papers.
I recall my days as a personal tutor to GCSE and A-level students. I was amazed by the deviousness with which my students could study an exam board mark-scheme and work out every box that had to be ticked in order to get a top grade. Completing exams was, to them, a sort of elaborate form-filling - to do with points-scoring and playing the system, rather than intellectual flexibility or rigour. But hey - that's what modern life is, ain't it?
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Reader views (1)
"Online security is becoming a rather bad joke"
Dan, I could not agree more, but the pace of and will to change to a better alternative is glacially slow.
We have developed PixelPin and will soon be moving to Tech City Old Street to move the project forward, but almost all aorganisations seem to have a very great reluctance to change the weakest link in all transactions - PASSWORDS.
See how we do it differently using our online demo at . Naturally we would welcome feedback on our Patent Pending work.
Thanks
Brian
- Brian, Cheltenham, 22/06/2011 14:40
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