I was wondering how many website crashes there would be in the run-up to christmas this year now that shopping online is accepted by a much larger internet audience.
I got my answer this morning. I tried to order an item from Game and having put the item in the basket and clicked checkout, it allowed me to view my order but then clicking to continue the checkout procedure game me a ‘waiting for game.co.uk’ message in the status bar and…….. nothing. The connection timed out. I tried this several times throughout the morning and even tried IE in case Game’s website wasn’t being firefox-friendly, all with no luck. If Game were having trouble with their check-out server, the least they could have done was put a message on the front page explaining and apologising.
Next I tried the same with the Virgin Megastores website. This let me fill my basket and when I went to check out asked me to register as a new account which is, it seems, a two page procedure. The first page completed OK but when I tried to continue from the second page I got an error message saying that there was a problem and to please try again. From there it wouldn’t even let me view my basket without the same error message appearing.
It looks to me like the Christmas website wobbles have come a little early. I fully expect there to be a higher profile crash in the coming weeks.
Useless, incompetent, unbelievable, idiotic……… words fail me!
Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs have lost two DVDs burned with the (I believe) unencrypted personal records of 25m Child Benefit claimants and all of their children. The data included names, addresses, bank details, dates of birth, national insurance numbers and possible more. According to the government statement reported by the BBC, a junior employee was requested by the Audit Office to send them some data. He downloaded the entire database, burned it to two discs and just put them in the post via TNT. No recorded delivery, no tracking, nothing! The discs are now lost and while the police say that there is no evidence that they are in criminal hands, you can bet there are few criminals trying to find them as hard as the police are.
The government statement says that the records were ‘password protected’, which means that they were probably not encrypted and could be protected by something as simple as a ZIP password, easily cracked by any number of available tools.
I think there are some simple questions which need answers.
- How can a ‘junior employee’ have access to burn discs of the entire database?
- What security checks are carried out on these ‘junior employees’?
- Did the Audit Office actually request the entire database and if so, why?
- When the government has laws in place regarding data protection, why is every govenment and civil service employee not trained in the required procedures?
- Is there an encryption policy/procedure in place to protect files not on a secure server?
- Why is any data ever transferred via any means that has no tracking? Surely data of this importance should be hand-delivered?
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The government has advised people to monitor their bank accounts for unusual activity, but it is the unseen activity which poses the most threat. With the data that is on these discs, criminals with enough knowledge have the basics to obtain any number of IDs and documents. The only two things in their way are that they may create paperwork which will warn the victim and they may require extra evidence such as household bills. If the gain is worth the effort, there are ways they could obtain these with the information they have.
I hope that these discs are sitting in someone’s office or home having been delivered to the wrong address and that that person is honest enough to turn them in (and not make a copy first!).
The Civil Service as a whole needs to look at it’s data protection and training procedures and ensure a farce like this can never happen again. The fact that this govenment wants to link all of the data it holds together AND build a full DNA library just got a lot scarier since they’ve proved they cannot control the data.
I have mentioned recently that i’ve been transferring my DVD collection to a media server so that I can stream the films from a couple of clients around the house. My clients are Philips Streamium SLM5500 which so far have been pretty reliable. On the server side, I started out using FreeNAS, but it’s UPnP server is pretty bare and I had a few lockups so I decided to try Twonky which, while not free, is well featured and reasonably priced at €29.
Now, being a devout fan of Linux for all server requirements, I started out with a Debian installation and downloaded the Twonky linux setup package. Running the .sh script installed Twonky and started the server but from there I simply had no idea where to go. I needed to configure Twonky but that is all done through a web interface so I installed Apache and looked for the setup html file referenced in the Twonky files but a full search of the server couldn’t find it.
Now normally, I’d have persevered and got it sorted but my time on such things is limited these days with work and family commitments, and my patience when thinks aren’t working as they should is not so good. So I did the unthinkable……… I installed XP, downloaded the windows version of Twonky and had it up and running and serving my movies and music in no time.
Whether this lapse in my character is my fault or Twonky’s is up for debate but the usual motto I have with Linux, “It Just Works”, has flipped on its head for this project. I’m afraid, very afraid……..
In recent weeks there seems to be a steady stream of surveys and reports pointing out that the UK is apparently crap at everything. Just today over at the BBC we have the following:
Now, I don’t deny that we are getting things wrong in quite a few places, but there must be some things we’re doing better at? Where are the stories showing us leagues and tables where the UK is at or near the top? There have to be some? We Brits have a reputation for being pessimists, but this is getting ridiculous!
I’ve been looking at ripping my large DVD collection to a media server and streaming it to a couple of rooms in the house. Ripping the DVDs themselves has proved straightforward enough using DVD Decrypter but getting a useful encoded MPEG or AVI file via Xvid has proved a little elusive. Having tried several commercial and free programs and getting files which haven’t sized or clipped properly or have the sound missing or garbled, I came across a gem of a product.
Handbrake is a “open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows” and via a simple interface it allows you to encode a previously ripped DVD from your hard drive into a high quality AVI using several encoders, in my case Xvid/MP3. After a timely update by the author, a few bugs in the queuing system were fixed and now I can rip several DVDs to the hard drive and then queue them up to encode overnight.
It should only take a few months to get them all done 
One of my recent projects has been the transfer of a company’s data from an old Merlin accounts package (DOS-based would you believe?) into Sage Line 50. I had discovered by checking the contents of a few data files that the database back end for Merlin was FlexData so I located an ODBC connector for it called, appropriately enough FlexODBC. I purchased a copy and started working on my scripts to migrate the data. After side-stepping the issues with FlexODBC under Access 2007 I wrote about a while ago, I had my scripts ready so I left the project on the back burner until the company was ready for the switch-over.
The switch-over was scheduled for 1st November so I ordered all the server, client and networking hardware and set it up ready to go. I still had 10 days left so I thought for better flexibility, I could do with installing FlexODBC on my laptop instead of the office machine. I contacted Data Access in the Netherlands and was advised that I either had to purchase a second license or deactivate it on the desktop, wait three days and then activate it on the laptop. I chose the latter route and after waiting four days tried activating on the laptop. The software refused saying that the activation count was exhausted! I contacted Data Access again who had to email head office in the states. Next day the reply came back that I had correctly deactivated the installation on one PC but it was activated on another IP address which I didn’t recognise. I did a reverse DNS lookup and found the IP address allocated to a web design outfit in California, a good few miles away from me in the midlands, UK!
To cut a long story short, it took FIVE DAYS to convince Data Access to that I had NO installations of the software and that my deadline was looming for a project which required me to use it. In the end, and two days too late, they reset their activation system and I was able to activate the laptop installation. The deadline was missed and the whole migration project has had to be put back to 1st December.
Maybe I was over-confident that with 10 days to go, I could switch the license to the laptop, but technology should make these things quick and easy instead of standing in the way.
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