Zentelligence

Homeless Tony

Outside it’s snowing and then some. I was caught by a blizzard of sleet on my motorcycle this morning. Wearing only jeans and a jacket, I can still feel the consequence of the biting cold eight hours later. The visor on my crash helmet froze shut in the sudden drop in temperature.

I had planned to go flying this morning and it’s a good thing I changed my mind after a talk with the tower and a quarter of an hour looking at the clouds coming in from the North Sea. It was surprising how fast the weather changed from blue skies to a frozen grey-out.

Later on, before sunset, I managed to lift off for thirty minutes but the visibility wasn’t good. So much cloud was around that my aircraft GPS gave up trying and decided that I was suspended somewhere above Herne Bay. I’ve only seen this happen once before in a thunderstorm and it’s a lesson to anyone who might start relying on a GPS in bad weather. Don’t.

From television and The Sunday Times today, we learn that the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, once lived on the streets around Euston. “I know what it’s like to be homeless”, say Tony. “Sure”, say the electorate "We believe you". For many people, including Clare Short and the British taxpayer the sooner Tony is out selling the Big Issue again, the better.

Internet is a new target for crime and terrorism

Interesting piece from a Russian publication,. It points out that Hacker activity directed to break in bank automated systems concerns law enforcement most last year.

In November 2003, Ukrainian hackers attacked computer payments system of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group was put out of action. The Royal Bank of Scotland took measures to renew the computer system of retail payments. By means of this system The Royal Bank served 27,000 clients by WorldPay and accepted payments on Visa, MasterCard, Diners and Eurocard in more than 27 countries all over the world. Annual losses from illegal activity applying new Internet technologies are over $ 80 billion. Manufacturers and bankers spent about $ 30 billion on fighting hackers and viruses last year.

The full story can be found here: Internet is a new target for crime and terrorism

Actions Speak Louder Than Keystrokes

With media coverage very much focused on the first day of last week’s eCrime congress, day two almost passed unnoticed.

The release of the NOP poll examing ‘The Impact of Hi-tech Crime on UK Business’, had revealed, as expected, that the problem of eCrime continues to grow at the expense of business but its most revealing ‘bombshell’ statistic, was the news that at least three companies had, between them, experienced losses in excess of £60 million. Just as revealing perhaps was the figure for the number of businesses reporting hi-tech crime to the police. Less than 25%, a troubling statistic which strengthens the hands of fraudsters, phishers and extortionists.



On the second day of the conference, Assistant Chief Constable Jim Gamble of the National Crime Squad argued that the National Hi-tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) is everything that SOCA, the new Serious & Organised Crime Agency should aspire to. “Every police officer”, said Gamble, “Needs to understand that eCrime is not just paedophile crime. The police need to be more informed and educated and must realise that the convergence between old and new crime has already taken place. “There is”, he said, “A danger of undermining our own credibility. Talk is cheap and money buys whiskey”, said Gamble and “If we have to find a solution, it may have to be in the absence of government support if necessary”.

He concluded his conference summary by adding,” We don’t want people saying of our hi-tech policing capability, we knew who they were but not what they did”. “Instead”, said Gamble, “We need to be asking what we can do for you”.

On the first day of the conference, Home Office Minister, Caroline Flint MP, gave a well-polished performance, which appeared to reiterate the Government’s intention of throwing legislation and consultation at the eCrime problem and the promise of a strategy to appear very soon.

Jim Paice MP, the shadow police and legal affairs spokesman. Offered a very different impression of progress on day two, quoting from Winston Churchill: “So they, [the Government], go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent”.

“The Conservative Party”, said Paice, “Believes that confidence in the Internet is essential to the future of this country and that the race to deliver 100% eGovernment by 2005 and through digital inclusion, achieve the maximum Broadband penetration among the population without considering the potential impact of eCrime is unwise. This parallels Labour’s race to build the council tower blocks of the 1960’s without giving any thought to the social consequences that accompanied them”.

“We would”, he continued, “Like to call today not only for the swift publication of the Government’s long overdue eCrime strategy document but also for a much broader review of the nation’s eCrime strategy and how Government imagines it can resist the approaching tide of digital crime with the overworked resource at its disposal”?

With four hundred delegates from across the world in the audience eager to express their own views on the problem of hi-tech crime, the conference heard from CitiGroup’s Director of fraud management, Joe Triano, a call for a truly international Hi-tech Crime Agency and once again, from UK delegates, representing the largest institutions and businesses, there was a call for a single organisation in government with authority for all Internet security and crime issues, instead of the present “Home Office problem”.

Delegates agreed that the law is not tough enough on offenders who are invariably punished less than speeding motorists and that the criminal justice system needs to treat more seriously a criminal process that is increasingly threatening brand confidence and the commercial viability of digital business.

Somehow, it was agreed, that business, government and the police must find new ways of sharing information that can lead to a partnership against serious and organised crime on the ground and in cyberspace. “This”, said Jim Paice, “Demands trust and mutual confidence” but how it can be achieved in a practical sense may be a question that is still being asked at next year’s eCrime Congress.

No Callers Please

The efficiency of any technology or service is, I believe, inversely proportional to the size of the investment in the call-centre or the chief executive’s salary.

That’s my theory at least in a world where responsibility for such vague outdated abstracts as customer service, are increasingly passed to pre-recorded messages or outsourced to one of the new silicon sweat-shops in Mumbai.

This morning, a pre-recorded message at the station is apologising for the delay to a train, due to arrive one day soon on platform two and the BBC tells me that computers are much better at sending ‘spicy’ SMS messages than people; effectively passing the famous ‘Turing Test’ and leaving me to wonder why anyone would wish to spend fifty pence a message flirting with Jordan, a large dual processor unit on one of the domestic cellular networks.

Last week, as I stood outside an office block in Kent, I realised I was early and so, I called 118500 for the business’s number. “We have no record of that company”, the operator told me. “But I’m outside the building”, I said. “I’m reading from the sign”. “I’m sorry sir, there’s nothing listed”.

Ironically, this didn’t surprise me. Last summer, I conducted research into the business impact of directory services deregulation. At the time, 118500 were quite unable to find Price Waterhouse Coopers in London. Wearily, I tried another 118 service, another forty pence plus mobile connection charges and the telephone number I was searching for was returned in seconds, confirming that directory enquiries has become an expensive lottery where considerable effort is devoted to giving native Indian operators convincing Geordie accents. Telephone numbers come second.

Thousands of people, I’m assured, are now ‘Coming back to BT’. Wonderful news I’m sure but why did they desert the company in the first place and indeed having left, what kind of appalling service level experience elsewhere convinced them to return? It’s much the same perhaps with electricity or gas although it’s increasingly hard to determine which is which unless you use a match.

In pursuing technology-driven solutions to CRM and overall customer service, society appears to have lost track of its original purpose. Most recently, unable to get through to electronic superstore, Comet’s customer service, I tried calling the Chief Executive’s office several times to complain and on each occasion I was transferred back to the same unavailable customer service line to deal with my complaint.

Most of us have had similar experiences and the larger the business, the more likely it is that any attempt to connect with any other service except sales and new business will shunt you into some pre-recorded backwater with no means of returning to the unhelpful automated switchboard options, which all rather explains why more and more people are using the Internet, only to discover that the quality of customer service on offer there, can be worse than what we have come to expect from a call centre.

Finally, a technology services offshoot of the company that manages our domestic railway infrastructure proudly demonstrated a new voice automated system to me recently. Written by their offshore software development team, they believe it’s head and shoulders above anything else on the market. Like the famous Turing test, I found the conversation with the computer to be seamless and in fact, I couldn’t tell that I was talking to a machine which was obligingly tracking a parcel for me.

Just imagine then, a future, where like those saucy SMS messages, every unhappy customer call will be answered in three rings and dealt with, using the appropriate level of sympathy and a flawless regional accent. There may be absolutely no connection with any system capable of processing a complaint to any sensible conclusion but at least it will create the illusion that large businesses have an interest in keeping their customers happy in a world where many companies demonstrably use the technology of the call centre or the Internet as a barrier to keep them at arm’s length.

Middle Ground

The Middle Ground Magazine is also acting as the programme for this year's ecrime Congress in London. Below you can find links to four of the principal features on ecrime in the magazine in Adobe PDF format.

It's also worth noting two features in The Observer newspaper today. The first is on computer viruses and the underground that writes them and the second is from my old friend John Naughton who believes that a victory in the fight against Spam is wishful thinking.

The full version of Clive Thompson's piece on the Virus Underground , originally from The New York Times, can be found on his weblog.



Cyberchology of Crime.pdf
Fighting Back Against eCrime.pdf
On Line and Vulnerable.pdf
Partnership and Perspectives.pdf

A Sea View of Progress

Winter has returned and with it, the howling North-easterly wind which is swirling the exposed edges of my two hundred year old home.



The house was originally the local Coastguard Station as far back as 1791 and in those days, the view of the sea was uninterrupted by the row of later dwellings closer to the beach. In fact, before this very Georgian-looking structure appeared, there was no town, nothing but a track down to the beach and before that, a stream that once fed an iron- age settlement, the muddy remains of which are sometimes exposed at very low tides.

Once upon a time one could gaze out of my study window and see history sailing past. At the beginning of the century, what was to become Manston airfield was a seaplane station in front of the house and all that remains now is a single aircraft slipway on the beach and what was the Officers Mess, is now the site of the tennis court.

I think we’re all set for the eCrime Congress on Tuesday. As I type this entry on my lap in the living room with my wireless connection giving me the kind of mobility I only dreamed of ten years ago, the occasional email appears from conference delegates about to leave for the airport on the other side of the world.

It’s ironic, that I can’t depend on a train from Margate getting me to London’s Victoria in time for a meeting anymore. A hundred years ago, when they layed the tracks to the coast, running the trains on time was a matter of pride. Today, it’s a matter of luck.

So on the one hand, you can instantly correspond with anyone on the other side of the planet and on the other, basic infrastructure, trains, planes and automobiles are becoming increasingly less reliable. It’s called progress of course and it’s a wonderful thing don’t you agree?

United We Stand – Digitally Divided We Fall

In the coming week, London witnesses a gathering of experts from business, finance, law-enforcement and industry from every corner of the globe. They are here to explore the growing problem of hi-tech crime and what can be done to combat the threat it presents to individuals and a fragile digital economy.



The eCrime Congress has been organised in partnership with the National Hi-tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) and for two days, the Hong Kong Police, The ‘Mounties’, the Met, Interpol, The Department of Homeland Security, FBI and many others, can exchange ideas and information with the Chief Security Officers of the largest international banks and hear both Government and opposition views on the subject.

Can such a gathering make a difference? EURIM’s Philip Virgo has wryly commented, “The only thing saving the information economy from complete collapse, is that organized crime wishes to milk the cow and not kill it” and it is this concern over the growing involvement of organized crime on the Internet that now unites law-enforcement and business across the world.

In the face of fraud, extortion, ‘phishing’ hacking, viruses and worms, the concept of ‘partnership’ has become the watchword in 2004. Chief Superintendent Len Hynds, Director of the NHTCU believes that “With the Internet privately-owned, it’s absolutely essential that a partnership between Government and industry exists to respond to threats from the electronic frontier”. In expressing this opinion, he is finding support from business. “The only way in which we are going to make a collective impact on eCrime”, says Paul Wood MBE, the Managing Director and Chief Security Officer of UBS Investment Bank, “Is when government and industry really start working in partnership rather than in isolation”.

On the opposite side of the Atlantic the experience is no different and Chris Painter, the Deputy Chief - CCIPS, (Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section) at the US Department of Justice argues,” A partnership between the government and the private sector is essential to any effective response to the growing threat posed by electronic crime. Given the speed of advancing technology and the unique and often differing skills law enforcement and industry bring to the table, cooperation expands our tool set and maximizes our chance of success. In addition, partnership fosters trust, the foundation to any program to combat e-crime”.

But can partnership prove effective as a defence against a largely unrestricted environment of the size of the Internet? Bill Thompson the information security investigator at Orange PCS believes “Industry and law enforcement see eCrime from different perspectives but sharing experiences and information are of vital importance if we are to succeed in fighting this new threat”.

Looked upon from the outside however, partnership against crime on the Internet may offer sound common sense, a circling of the wagons against a largely unseen enemy but it also conjures up the proverb, ‘United we stand. Divided we fall’.

With 2004 expected to prove the worst year to date in the story of rising of crime on the Internet, we can only hope that through the exchange of intelligence, ideas and techniques, business and law-enforcement, can find the common ground that will one day lead to a safer and more trustworthy Internet environment. It has never been more urgently needed than it is today and tomorrow may be too late.

Take Two Aspirin

I always believed that a monoculture preceded a dictatorship, at least in a political sense but perhaps I was wrong, because it is a term now increasingly connected with Microsoft by those who fear a future of cascading failures brought about by our reliance on the closed genetic sequence of the Windows Operating System.

Biology teaches us that species with little genetic variation, called monocultures, are the most vulnerable to catastrophic epidemics. Populations that share a single fatal flaw, such as the lack of immunity to smallpox, can and have been wiped out by a virus capable of exploiting that flaw, as happened in the Americas following the arrival of the Columbus. Genetic diversity in the population increases the chances of survival and the same can be said of software in today’s increasingly connected but hostile environment. A PC sneezes in China and twelve hours later, 100 million computers decide to call in sick with the flu.

When copies of the Windows source code escaped into the wild last week, observers started to worry that the stolen code would provide a potential springboard for even more serious virus and worm exploits than those we have witnessed over the last twelve months. It’s possible, as the records appear to show that a great many people are showing remarkable interest in the code but at the same time, Microsoft’s so-called ‘proprietary code’ isn’t as close a secret as many people think it is. After all, it’s been shared with partners and governments for a long time now and this is of course how some of the code entered the public domain, for the benefit of the curious, this month.



Back to the argument then. Unless instead of Windows, you happen to be using a Macintosh or have hand-coded and installed your own Linux PC, then the end of the world is near or to quote Dad’s Army’s ‘Private Frazer’, “We’re Doomed”.

But are we, I’m not so sure. Information security is not just a simple matter of increasing biodiversity in the software industry. If we remember back to the 1980’s then biodiversity was a problem in its own right, particularly among network Operating Systems and the industry has a habit, over time of moving towards a tighter and smaller set of standards and protocols that everyone eventually subscribes to and which in turn, creates its own ’Achilles Heel’.

If we concede that all software is vulnerable to attack and some software is more vulnerable and more popular than others then the biological model should in theory have Windows superseded by another and more resistant strain of software and when that one catches cold another follows. But life doesn’t work quite that way and security represents a complex mixes of processes, technologies and human factors. Neither Windows nor Linux are standing still. Patches and products such as Windows Server 2003, are the equivalent of antibodies and over time, what we are likely to witness is the arrival of a living Operating System, which increasingly responds to threats through anti-virus software and patches until the arrival, one day of the perfectly secure software environment, the foundation at least for Microsoft’s own Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB).

Let’s face it, Windows is getting hammered by one attack after the other but talk to most CSO’s and they’ll tell you that since Blaster, most attacks are bouncing off much better security processes that have locked-down the Windows environment.

This month Netcraft report that the number of hostnames found by its Web Server Survey running Windows Server 2003 overtook Windows NT 4.0 and that over 1.25 million hostnames are now running on Windows 2003, a 283% increase since August of 2003.

Comparing this with September of last year also shows the majority of the sites to have migrated from Windows 2000 (534,000), but also 55,000 of the sites to have migrated from Linux, 56,000 from FreeBSD and 8,000 from Solaris, with 272,000 of the hostnames running Win2003 new sites not previously running a different operating system.

So while viruses and worms proliferate, businesses are not standing still and are taking their own evolutionary approach towards better security. The Microsoft monoculture may prevail and faced with this fact of life, businesses are increasingly growing a much thicker skin to protect their information assets, which makes the presence of a software monoculture less of a doomsday threat than we might think it is.

Own Goal

Feet back on the ground after an afternoon of very murky, low level approach practise with a new pilot and I’ve been watching a programme on the Munich Olympic tragedy. I was suddenly reminded that those same games were a turning point in my own life too.

I remember the Radio Times carried a special feature on the Soviet sprinter Valeri Borzov; "The fastest man alive" it asked?



That was enough for me as an energetic sixteen year old in urgent need of a hero. I resolved to become the world’s greatest sprinter and although it never quite happened that way, it did help make me pretty much uncatchable as a rugby winger until I gave up on running fast . As I got older, I concentrated first on making a living from tennis and then on running longer and longer endurance races, finishing my career with an attempt at the eighty mile World Trail Running Championships six years ago. To be honest, I collapsed after forty miles of non-stop running, proving conclusively that if you want to travel eighty miles in a single day, it’s better to take a car or a bicycle.



Actually, my advice to anyone taking-up running is keep the distances short and the effort high or risk a very sore middle age. Trying to run across exotic places such as the Sahara Desert is completely daft and one look at the hospital tent during the Marathon Des Sables is evidence enough. There’s a great sequence in a National Geographic documentary ('Running the Distance') of a miserable, exhausted and dirty wretch being interviewed with a saline re-hydration drip hanging from his arm and if you look closely enough, then beneath the stubble of a week's beard growth and layer of dried white perspiration, it’s me.

But without the example of Valeri Borzov, I would never have discovered competitive athletics or achieved some of the things that I’ve done in different sports and it finally taught me that personal goals don’t always have to be reached but we all need them to aim at.

Borzov thrashed the Americans, won 'Sprint Double' Olympic gold medal, married the world's greatest and prettiest gymast and became the Ukranian Minister of Sport so who says that dreams can't come true?

Number of Sites Running Windows 2003 overtake Windows NT

Now that's really interesting given the security push behind Windows Server 2003. But note that a proportion of those sites moving to Windows also came form Linux and Solaris!

See the complete story at Netcraft: Number of sites running Windows Server 2003 overtakes NT

Workplace Data Theft Runs Rampant

According to the BBC in a story BBC NEWS | Technology | Workplace data theft runs rampant

Employees often steal data when leaving their jobs and office technology makes it much easier for workers to steal important information from their employers.

Research into intellectual property theft found that almost 70% of people have stolen key information from work.

The most pilfered items include e-mail address books, customer databases as well as proposals and presentations.

Many of those questioned said they used office e-mail to get the stolen information off company premises.

But is anyone surprised. I'm not.

Final Approach

An early start to buy flowers for my wife but a disappointingly overcast and damp today, which put an end to my plans for a day’s flying. At least yesterday, I managed to find the time to fly over to Rochester for lunch and found myself temporarily stuck there while they towed another aircraft off the runway where it had become stuck.



One thing I’ve learned about flying is that it’s not unlike driving, in that the idiots, the aged and the acutely inexperienced can be found on the road and in the air as well. How the old duffer managed to skid his aircraft off the runway as he taxied, did rather baffle the rescue crew and the tower but fortunately, no damage was done except to the pilot’s pride.

Local airfields can be ‘interesting’ at times and you’ll find other pilots occasionally ‘cutting-in’ on your approach instead of waiting their turn in the pattern. Clearly against the strict rules of the air, it’s dangerous and rather like undertaking on a motorway and yet it’s not uncommon.

Another flying irritation, as happened yesterday, is the pilot ahead who travels miles downwind before making his or her turn onto final approach. In my case, it was a microlight, capable of tuning on a pin, which forced me to extend a long way out to avoid overtaking him on the landing approach.

On a good day in the area of Kent between Herne Bay and Dover you really have to keep your eyes on the sky. Lots of aircraft fly across the Thames Estuary and off towards the Dover VOR beacon on the way to France for lunch. This brings them straight into Manston’s airspace, which can be busy with cargo 747’s coming and going, so in principle and for the sake of common sense, they should be working the Manston approach frequency. Many in fact don’t bother and stay with the overworked and distant London Information instead and so, as a consequence, seeing an unexpected aircraft zip past you that Manston knows nothing about isn’t unusual.

Anyway, it’s Valentine’s Day and I’m reminded that I was in Budapest on an eGovernment visit three years ago. A beautiful city, that looks very much like Paris with its grand architecture and worth visiting if you can on Valentine’s Day or at any other time come to that.

World Wide Winston

It was of course Winston Churchill who once said “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”, But then Churchill was fortunate enough to live at a time ‘BC’, before computers, when the bombs fell and not your broadband connection and smoking cigars was good for you.



Sadly, if the last few weeks are any measure of what is yet to come in 2004 we have also witnessed the end of the beginning and not the beginning of the end. There was MyDoom followed by Microsoft shooting itself in both feet at the same time – no mean trick – on ‘Patch Wednesday’ with the worst and most critical update yet. This was so secret that the Chief Security Officer of one bank found out about the problem in the newspaper on the way to work and it only came to my attention when the BBC telephoned me over breakfast asking how bad it was. “How bad is what” I asked sounding less intelligent than usual?

Other people feel hard done by this month as well. Alan Mather, at the Office of e-Envoy writes in his private Web journal:

“I'm in the middle of advising my uncle, who recently got broadband, how to protect his PC better. Broadband should perhaps come with a health warning for the IT un-educated along with a set of tools (a first aid kit?) to repair damage caused already and a set of inoculations to prevent further damage. I would have thought that BT or any other provider would have insisted that appropriate technical contraception is in place before allowing a connection to their proxies - after all, if people using their services get infected, the load at their end is increased and therefore their costs are higher. So it should be in every provider’s interest to provide firewall and anti-virus (AV) software for everyone, with the AV running at the server end eliminating viruses on the way through”.

Alan’s right about this as he is about most things and if ISP’s aren’t going to offer such a facility voluntarily then it’s reached the point when Government should step in with a little arm twisting.

My own ISP, Nildram, offers a good DSL service with free spam filtering but anti-virus and a firewall on the Server side are optional extra costs. Nildram, who have a large ‘technically-minded’ subscriber base believe that their customers prefer the flexibility of choosing where to place their security, on the Server or use their own Firewall and AV solutions on the PC side.

The trouble is, as Alan Mather points out, is that his uncle and my father-in-law aren’t as security savvy as you and I and as a consequence, need to be advised. Government has known about the dangers that would accompany rapid broadband growth for over two years and perhaps we have now reached the point when Server-side AV and even Firewall security at the ISP should be a default. ‘A La Trustworthy Computing’ and not an option?

If your uncle or father-in-law wants to install his own security, a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, then he can simply switch-off the service through his Web browser, alongside anti-spam, which has now become common but it should, I believe no longer be a chargeable extra, like a virtual condom machine at your ISP.

Two weeks into February of 2004 we all know that Blitz has only just begun and perhaps our Government should be considering what the cost of business interruption to the economy will be if we continue to stagger along between virus and worm attacks in the way we have done up until now. It’s time perhaps for the Prime Minister to come to the rescue of Broadband Britain and at the very least take-up smoking Churchill cigars.

Men in Black

Any suggestion that the UK is to have its equivalent of the FBI, may be an exaggeration, but SOCA, the new Serious & Organised Crime Agency will still have to prove that it can redefine policing in the 21st century, particularly in areas that touch the Internet as a channel for serious and organised crime, presently the remit of the NHTCU, The National Hi-tech Crime Unit, which last week received a visit from Mr Blair, Mr Blunkett and of course Sadie the Labrador.



Having recently met with the chief security officer of one of the country’s largest financial institutions, I’m told that the constant battle against eCrime, scams, phishing, fraud, extortion and money laundering are an expensive headache and present a growing and serious challenge to any fond ambition of becoming the showcase information economy described by the Chancellor in his business leaders summit last month.

One obstacle is that some politicians and many Labradors lack the appropriate frame of reference to grasp the nature and size of the problem confronting society. Serious and organised crime can at least be written into the script of East Enders but the ‘phishing’ threat isn’t so easy to understand or explain to the audience and neither is the evolving shape of an economy increasingly reliant on ICT and TCP/IP and which lies under the constant threat of compromise.

Britain still remains at heart “A nation of shopkeepers” and Parliamentary group, EURIM, in publishing its e-crime defence recommendations for small business, points to the fact that there are 2.6 million sole traders and 1.2 million businesses with less than 50 employees in the UK. “This”, writes EURIM, “Accounts for 99% of the country’s businesses, employing over 40% of the entire UK population. Many of these companies provide services within the supply chains of larger organisations, linked together by an increasingly inter-connected online world”. “The lack of effective secure computing within these SMEs”, says Philip Virgo, Secretary General of EURIM, “Presents a risk not only to the firms themselves, but also the larger organisations they serve and, consequently, the entire UK economy”.

Frustrating the rise of serious and organised crime on the Internet may require more than the arrival of the ‘Men In Black’ (MIB), although it’s a step in the right direction. It needs a sensible budget and a revolutionary kind of working partnership between business and the Police built on mutual confidence and information sharing, in conjunction with evidence that the vital connection between a trustworthy Internet and the new economy, is grasped by more than one Minister and isn’t lost by others among the sound bites and photo opportunities.

The Conservative opposition may have a valid point when James Paice MP, the Shadow Home Office Police spokesman says of SOCA, "We broadly welcome the Government's plans but have reservations about how they will be carried out in practice”.

Paice points to a problem that already worries Police officers in a country where the separate constabularies are operated as virtual fiefdoms under their Chief Constables. He remarks that the government must address many aspects. These include the current boundaries between forces; the regional structure of this new unit; the current rivalries between departments the sharing of intelligence and information and the cost implications.

There is little doubt that ecrime is a poor relation when it comes to overall allocation of the policing resource. You and I are far more worried by the threat of real crime and the threat from the world outside the front door as opposed to the risk from the world behind the firewall. The problem however is that both are becoming increasingly connected at least at the serious and organised crime level and this in turn, is threatening to undermine confidence in the Internet as a viable commercial medium and eGovernment channel.

Is there a solution? The BBC identifies the provision of a traditional police service in a digital age as one of the biggest challenges facing forces across the country”. It still seems to me that even with the announcement of SOCA, Government lacks real answers to the twin problems of rising crime on the Internet and crime on the streets. Politicians have a habit of looking uncomfortable around keyboards and mice but continue to enthusiastically promote the vision of Britain as the best possible place to do eBusiness. You and I know this can’t happen unless Government stops kicking at the tyres of the Internet and starts understanding that business confidence in cyberspace is starting to rival national confidence in the railways and as a result the future, presently undergoing maintenance work, courtesy of Microsoft and others, may find itself subject to delay.

Blogged Out

I feel I’ve been neglecting this journal. Too much work of late.

Today, I’m writing as the train shudders over the Medway Bridge at Rochester. It’s moving around far too much for me to do any real work this morning, which is annoying, as I had planned to use the hundred minutes between the coast and London to do some real work.

I suppose I’m lucky. It’s almost Spring-like this morning. The last time I tried taking the train two weeks ago, I got nowhere. The wrong kind of ice you know or was it pollen or leaves or any other excuse that suits. The truth of the matter is that trains in the Britain of the 21st century are an unpredictable and frequently uncomfortable and overcrowded means of travel; laptop unfriendly as well to add to the bargain.



Stop to pause for a mile or so to keep my PC from sliding around. A wireless link would be good. One day perhaps or more possible half way through the century before the rail operators catch-up with the idea of adding wireless access points to every train. They need to solve the suspension problem first, after all, if Eurostar can do it why can’t Southern Rail?

I’ve been experimenting with the Linked In network. At first I was dubious or suspicious about its value but my own ‘Trusted Network’ of contacts is growing nicely and I’m starting to see some value in the idea, not just for me but for those people that I know who can see who I know as a route for introductions. Sort of six degrees of separation or a case of “I didn’t know that Simon Moores knew so and so, he’s just the person I need to ask about wireless widgets or government policy”.

If you see what I mean.

Last week, I received an unexpected call from one of the ‘Big Six’ consultants. – Are there still six? Apparently the second-stage of an eGovernment project in the middle-east is up for tender and I’ve been asked if I would be interested in acting as a kind of lead consultant if they win the deal. Why not, I thought, it’s one of the few countries I haven’t explored in the region from an electronic government perspective and the last time I was there, it was on a bicycle.

I’m wondering how the announcement of a new police agency, The Serious & Organised Crime Agency, (SOCA) will impact the fight against Hi-tech and eCrime in general. I watched Blunkett and Blair doing the rounds yesterday and visiting the headquarters of the NHTCU, possibly to suggest that between them they could spell ‘asymmetric warfare’. Frankly, I would put more faith in the Home Secretary’s Labrador but it was amusing to see the people I knew at the NHTCU with their faces blanked-out for security reasons and of course, the television reporter, who couldn’t reveal the confidential location in Docklands, standing outside the building, which rather gave the game away.

Changing the subject, yesterday the hurricane finally blew itself out and I found that the grass runway at Maypole was dry enough to allow my fully fuelled aircraft enough distance to leave the ground. I wandered around Kent enjoying the view, Leeds Castle, Dover, and Broadstairs and so on. What I did notice was that the light and soil conditions were such that one could easily see the shadows left be archaeological remains in the fields, the circles left by the abandoned round huts of long forgotten medieval or older villages.

I’m becoming nauseous trying to write this entry. It’s like working on an aircraft in turbulence. I give up; maybe the train home later this afternoon will be a little more keyboard friendly.

Hurricane Season

I think I should point out that I won’t be applying for the role of Director General of the BBC. It’s disappointing news, I know but I suspect the odds are stacked against me, in that I’m in favour of abolishing the license fee and cutting the corporation down to a size which doesn’t attract threatening letters from the TV Licensing Authority to my London house, which has no television.

I’m tempted to add my name to the candidates list for the constituency of Thanet South. Again, very little chance of success but then I’m a local boy and here, I think I could make a small difference to the future of North Kent, which needs all the help it can get from central Government, if the size of my poll tax bill is any measure.



Ironically and after last week’s news of the tragic deaths of the Chinese cockle harvesters in Morecambe Bay, I can throw my mind back to last summer when I spotted a group of Chinese ‘harvesting’ shellfish from the beach in front of my house.

“I wouldn’t risk eating those if I were you”, I told one of them or anything from this beach, alluding to the fact that the sewage slick from Margate, frequently hits the edge of our bay when the wind is blowing in the right direction. The Chinese woman looked blank, possibly because she spoke no English and both she and her friends carried on prising cockles from the rocks regardless of my warning.

Outside, there’s a small hurricane blowing and threatening structural damage. A little imagination could have turned my small dog into a kite on its walk this morning. I’ve noticed over the last year that the winds are becoming fiercer in the winter, a consequence of global warming perhaps as different fronts collide over the country. Yesterday, I was outside in a t-shirt, tonight the forecast temperature is minus four and tomorrow, plus six Celsius, the weather is all wrong for the time of year.

The Future of Ideas

I’m depressed. I have been reading Lawrence Lessig’s ‘ The Future of Ideas’, his sequel to ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’ and it seems much of what he predicted and warned against at the start of the Internet revolution is slowly coming to pass, regardless of the march of Open Source computing.



Lessig, who I met at Cambridge in the summer of 2000, argued in his first book, that the common belief that cyberspace could not be regulated, “That it is, in its very essence, immune from government’s or anyone else’s control”, was a fallacy. His thesis was that “cyberspace has no nature”, it has only code which can on the one hand, create a free environment and on the other a place of “Exquisitely oppressive control”.

In ‘Code’, written in the heady days before the Internet bubble burst, he warned that we would have to choose what kind of Internet we wanted and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices he wrote are all about architecture and the code that will eventually govern the world of the Internet and who will control it and for what purposes?

Four years on and Lessig is back. He argues that free resources are crucial to innovation and creativity but that the revolution that produced armies of dot coms, has produced a counterrevolution, a post-modern protectionism, which is stifling innovation as large corporations use their influence to ring fence their intellectual property, manipulating the law and undermining the open technology of the Internet to suit their own purposes; rewriting copyright and patent legislation to rigidly tax and control the flow of ideas and materials.

As one of the world’s most respected law professors, Lessig is remarkably well qualified to deliver an opinion and we are seeing the evidence all around us today. Large IT vendors are falling over one another to re-engineer any concept of free expression out of the Internet in Asia, while in the United States, a government, hypnotised by the lobbying influence and funding power of big business is sleepwalking into a future defined not by information wealth but by digital rights management.

Inevitably, I suspect, in Lessig’s work we can also witness the future of the Open Source movement, a taste of which we have seen in the recent SCO legal action over Linux. ‘Open’ and ‘Free’ are no longer expressions that sit comforatbly in the minds of the legislators on Capital Hill or with the companies that fund Presidential elections. Already, Microsoft has sought patent protection in Europe and New Zealand for word processing documents stored in XML format. Microsoft argues that there is nothing sinister in this move , explaining that it well "innovate above the standard just as other companies will do in an effort to seek differentiation, address customer needs, add competitive value, etc.," and pointing-out that other companies, such as Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett Packard all have done the same.

However, I thought XML was an ‘Open’ W3C standard and perhaps moves like this go some way towards supporting the suspicion that expressions such as ‘Open’ and ‘Free’ may prove ambiguous and have a rather limited shelf life on the Internet of the future and may be replaced at the very least by a form of patent supported DRM-driven taxation or restriction outside of a pay per view digital economy.

One of Those Days

Which started with my HP ze4300 laptop deciding that it would start up to the splash screen but no further. I tried everything, Safe Mode, Norton, the lot but nothing worked and in the end I decided to pull my 'spare' ze4300 out of its box and completely reinstall all my files from my desktop PC. This took twelve hours and I'm almost done.

I'm lucky. At least I have a spare, thanks to HP not having collected the unit they left with me last month. What frustrates me though is that this is the third lethal Windows XP crash I've had. Look back in this weblog and you'll find references to two previous rebuilds and at least three major Operating System crashes.

What causes this? God knows. I've heard one Microsoft techie alluding to 'Cumulative patch fatigue' but all I know is that I've lost most of this week's work from my stay in London and that hurts. At least the critical files find their way onto my USB drive. I've learned a hard lesson as a Windows XP user over the last two years. Always back-up to a USB drive, carry a copy of Norton Systemworks and don't lose your original XP CD - Which I have done today -.

If my experience is anything near normal, then assume the worst will happen and make sure you are fully backed-up. Few of of us ever are but at least try. You won't regret the effort when your turn comes.

Question Time

Computer Weekly reader, Michael Fabricant, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Lichfield and Shadow DTI spokesman has started the New Year with a series of Parliamentary questions which are exploring the depth of the Government’s grasp of the issues surrounding electronic crime and protection of the critical national infrastructure.

Lenin pointing the way to eGovernment

With Britain reportedly sliding down the list of international ‘e’ rankings and with the Government still looking for a successor to e-Envoy Andrew Pinder in the shape of a ‘Chief Information Officer’, Michael Fabricant asked Minister for The Cabinet Office, Douglas, ‘Douggie’ Alexander “What the role of the Central Sponsor for Information Assurance (CSIA) will be when the e-Envoy's responsibilities are re-assigned in accordance with the e-Envoy 2003 report”? In reply, he received a classic ‘Yes Minister’ reply, from young Douggie, that “The re-organisation of the e-Envoy under a new Head of e-Government will incorporate the continued role and responsibilities of the Central Sponsor”. No clues there then.

Fabricant followed his first question with a second that reflects concerns expressed in Computer Weekly last month, “What steps the Minister has taken to identify points of vulnerability of and prevent damage to the critical information infrastructure for public sector networks”.

Once again, the civil servants had been working on the perfect Ministerial reply that “The UK Government has a continuous programme of work that identifies vulnerabilities and prevents damage to the critical national infrastructure, public sector networks and other inter-dependent information systems”. However, “For security reasons it would not be appropriate to discuss specific vulnerabilities which have been identified, however the CSIA and its partners continue to work with owners of critical national infrastructure to mitigate risks”.

For you and I, this roughly translates into “It’s a secret and we won’t tell you” or “Don’t worry, the Government has everything under control” or potentially in the wake of Blaster, Sobig and MyDoom, “We haven’t a clue but we can’t tell you that”.

It’s encouraging that both opposition parties, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, concerned by the huge cost of failed public sector IT projects are now taking the offensive, testing the Government’s grasp of new technology and insisting on far greater accountability.

Liberal Democrat MP Richard Allan has now tabled several Parliamentary questions on the cost savings made by departments since introducing their procurement and project management Centres of Excellence last year. Those that have responded have said it is too early to measure out the savings.

Finally, with the eCrime Congress taking place in London this month Michael Fabricant has asked the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, whether the plans for a criminal justice skills council include computer forensic and security skills. In a digital age, the rules that govern the provision of expert assistance to law enforcement are still governed by Victorian regulations. As a consequence in a rising climate of ‘organised’ electronic crime, a civilian computer expert in a wheelchair could not become a ‘Special’ constable, because he or she is not capable of wielding a truncheon in a brawl.

IT has always been a poor relation in Parliament. At long last perhaps, we are seeing greater opposition recognition of its importance to the shaping of tomorrow’s society in regard to outsourcing, crime, procurement and social inclusion. These aren’t platforms upon which elections are won or lost but at the very least, some of our Parliamentarians are grasping that a strong digital economy isn’t simply a by-product of making knights of rich Americans.

Rough Justice

I’ll confess, MyDoom is now getting on my nerves. I’ve just started Outlook and there are at least fifty copies of the virus in my mailbox and I’m guessing I’ve received five hundred to a thousand since Wednesday of last week. It’s chewing-up my time and I’m sure that it’s doing much the same to you.



There was an extended panic yesterday when I thought I had the virus on my second laptop. A file associated with My Doom (on the Kapersky antivirus site) appeared to be sitting in my Windows Directory and it took the entire day and virus scans from Norton, MacAfee and GeCad to convince me that the machine was clean. The result, a lost Saturday.

How we stop this plague other than very publicly hanging the next convicted virus author from the nearest lamppost I don’t know. All I can tell you is that each incident is becoming nastier than the one before it and the cost to the economy and society in general is fast becoming unacceptable.

Any clever solutions on a postcard please.