The Child Benefit Agency – the UK organization for paying child benefit has managed to loss a couple of CDs containing enough information for various forms of credit and identity fraud to be committed.  The BBC NEWS cover the story in more depth.

This in my mind is an illustration of why national Id cards are so dangerously wrong.  One of the goals of the Id card is to make it easier to manage people’s Ids.  So if the Id data went missing and people rely and trust an Id card as they meant to be ‘safe and secure’ there is huge exposure to fraud and worse.

I’m sure that this story will run for sometime and we will see people blaming the IT, although tragically the problem is actually people, and organizational culture.

Wired have an interesting article on the arrival of a new application of the SD card (Eye-Fi: How One Little Chip Will Change the Way You Share Pictures). The combining of WiFi with an SD interface and form is a neat solution.  In terms of cameras, this is brilliant for those point and shoot moments (as you’re more likely to be in a location with WiFi readily available, not to mention not overly concerned about finessing your picture in photoshop).  Going from camera lens to your Flickr account in seconds.   For the pro photographer, the device still has huge potential if developed – imagine this partnered with an iPod like 80GB hard disk device – the need to buying ever larger media cards are gone as the photos can be transferred to a heavier large storage device in your camera bag.

But the application could easily extended to breath life into older PDAs without WiFi by presenting the receiving end of the wireless connection as a the content of a mass storage device.

Michael Geist has written a good article on the BBC news site about the ‘walled gardens’ of social network sites such as MySpace which at the moment means that to have a complete social network you’ve probably got identities on several of these sites which need maintaining, rather than one which can be linked or shared with the other services.  The full article is here : BBC NEWS – Technology – Pull down the walled gardens.

In addition to Michael’s point about interoperability is the information about which sites are most populate in different parts of the world.  For example Facebook is the leading site in the UK, but Bebo is in Ireland and New Zealand.

I’ve been having to sort out some websites after some ‘script kiddies’ attacked it.  My own fault really for not acting upon vulnerability announcements quickly enough (having been too occupied with other demands). Although to be honest I didn’t expect these sites to warrant such attention.

Up until now I’ve looked at hackers as at worst a mild pain (same as spammers) – when compared to say, virus writers.  If they get into your site, and make it clear to you that they can get in, you really can’t complain too much.  What really is annoying is when they destroy all your content, and then get their scripts to keep hitting you when you’re trying to identify and fix the vulnerability and restore things.

For me the worst aspect of it is that I’ve had to take sites down for a day or so, as I can only sort things out in my spare time. This means that mean time the innocent victims are the users can’t make use of the resource. Like many, aside from my own domain,  the other domains I run are done as a charitable thing, and I’d rather they didn’t lose out.