Aehso’s Output

aehso data, oauth, openid, portability

This story just gets worse – now BOI admit they have lost over 31k records. BOI need to answer a few more hard questions openly and honestly in order to stop me from closing my last remaining account with them:

• Is/was it routine for bank employees to bring laptops containing unencrypted data off bank property? Can you guarantee me that your employees never copied data off your laptops onto another machine at home or emailed it via SMTP servers in unencrypted email messages? I don’t really care what official bank policy (meaningless) is, I just want to know if your employees technically could do this.
• If the above is routine, how do they know that only 31k records were lost? After all, you don’t actually have the laptops so how would you know what is on them? Right now trust is gone out the window and you don’t have to give so much information that you would potentially compromise the security of live systems. Technical details on the auditing capabilities of your laptop/mainframe data synchronization tools would be great – just to give me that warm fuzzy feeling.
• If the above is routine, how many of your employees recently sold, dumped or gave away PCs that they might, at one stage, have been editing bank data on while working at home?
• When was the last group hardware audit completed and are any other laptops unaccounted for? Not necessary stolen, just not where they are supposed to be

Lastly, and this question stands, even if I do close that last account. According to the above referenced news story

In the unlikely event of a fraud arising as a direct result of the theft of these laptops, the customer will be fully compensated.

(also stated here though I can’t find an official statement)

What will BOI do if my credit history is destroyed by someone who steals my identity via the data you so kindly made available to them? What if that person is never caught and therefore I can never prove that their data source was the hard drives in those laptops? What was that? Did you say ‘nothing’ or was that ‘prove it’? I thought so.

Data is such a genie in a bottle isn’t it.

aehso boi, data, identity, ireland, irish, theft

Unbelievable potential data breach in the UK:

…the names, the addresses and the dates of birth of every child in the country are sitting on two computer discs that are apparently lost in the post, and the bank account details and National Insurance numbers of 10 million parents…

This is just staggering – UK families are “urged to monitor their bank accounts”.

Instead of sticking a few secure APIs onto the HM Revenue & Customs data they courier around database backups where access to the data cannot never be logged or traced. It would seem IT departments have a long way to go to evolve their thinking…

aehso data, government, privacy, uk

A while back I posted about Vodafone Ireland offering 500Mb for EUR9.99 per month. Some interesting comments on that post prompted me to followup with Vodafone to clarify a few things. Unfortunately I can’t print their response (it was ‘private’). However, I can clarify a few facts:

• The package can only be used to access Vodafone Live! content (i.e. data to/from the live.vodafone.ie gateway.)
• The package does not apply to use of your mobile phone as a modem (i.e. data to/from the isp.vodafone.ie gateway.)

With this package Vodafone charge an effective rate of €0.02 per Mb to download data from their Live service gateway up to 50Mb per day. If you go over 50Mb per day they start charging €5.00 per Mb.

With their “Modest” or “Medium” data service packages (see Vodafone pay monthly charges) they charge between €0.48 per Mb(€12/25) or €0.30 per Mb (€15/50) to transmit data via their ISP gateway (NOT the Live! gateway).

If you have not signed up for their “Modest” or “Medium” package then the data rate charge is €12.80 for the first Mb and €5.12 per subsequent Mb. (2c/KB up to 512 kbs and 0.5c/kb for any usage over 512kbs).

So Vodafone data rates vary from a minimum of €0.02/Mb (Live! data rate) to a maximum of €12.80 per Mb (general data rate) – incredible! If they had phone call charges like these the regulator would be all over them.

So mobile data via Vodafone remains potentially exhorbently expensive and confusing. The confusion is compounded by Vodafone’s use of the label “Mobile Internet” for this service. With this package a user can get access to reformatted versions of certain WWW sites. Calling that Mobile Internet is like calling a bicycle a supercar. The Internet, as in that series of interconnected tubes through which the worlds computers communicate over protocols based on Internet Protocol(IP), is completely out of bounds.

This service should be called the “Vodafone Network”. However there is nobody to regulate this type of thing, is there?

Vodafone do offer a 3G/GPRS broadband modem as an alternative but a) I need a service that allows me to use my existing 3G handset as a modem (so that my N800 can connect via bluetooth) and b) I don’t want to pay €30 per month for a service I’ll only use in bursts when on the road. They also offer a business email push service but this doesn’t cater for my ssh and http protocol access requirements.

So, we remain in the dark ages.

aehso data, internet, ireland, irish, isp, mobile, vodafone