Bob Browning's blog

I have just received (second time this week) a ‘survey’ form from a charity. Both ‘surveys’ are similar. They start out like a regular market research survey. The last few questions are along the lines:

Do you think this is worthwhile work (Y/N)
Do you realise we are reliant on donations (Y/N)
Are you willing to donate (Y/N)

The moment I see one of these so-called surveys any sympathy I might have for the charity goes straight out of the window. These things are dishonest and sorry – I am not interested.

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There is a planning document issued by the land registry aimed at solicitors preparing for e-conveyancing. Section 3 goes like this

Our preparatory research has identified that there are five possible stages in the development of IT systems in organisations.

1. You have PCs on desks which are not yet linked to each other
2. The PCs on your desks are networked to each other
3. Your business processes have been redesigned to benefit from
   networked PCs
4. Your system plugs into a network external to your organisation
5. You have redesigned your business to reflect the interaction of networks

The “Realisation of potential benefits” is identified as going from low to high as you progress from 1 to 5.

This is not the first time I have seen nonsense like this coming out of government. It is misleading on so many levels. Primarily however the assumption that connecting your internal systems to an external network (i.e. the Internet) is a ‘good thing’. Actually it is something to be done only if there are business benefits that over-ride the huge risks – which are not mentioned anywhere in this document. As this is aimed at conveyancers whose systems control millions of pounds of their customer’s money this becomes a far from trivial issue.

The document comes from a web site where for example we see this phrase

The central service will provide for automatic exchange of contracts relating to all transactions in a property chain. For this and other purposes, conveyancers will need to have electronic signatures.

As we all know an electronic signature is something attached to a document and is unique to that document. What conveyancers will been is a certificate. In security terms this is a schoolboy howler that has been repeated in various documents since 2002. It indicates to me that the people over there have only the slimmest grasp of security theory. A truly frightening prospect when it seems that they are controlling the most valuable asset that any of us owns.

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From the Land Registry web site

“The central service will provide for automatic exchange of contracts relating to all transactions in a property chain. For this and other purposes, conveyancers will need to have electronic signatures.”

Repeat after me. Electronic signatures are things you attach to documents, one per document. conveyancers will need to have certificates.

For a simple explanation of all this see my piece on e-conveyancing.

The thing is that anyone with even the slimmest of understanding of the technology would not make such a schoolboy howler. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

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A few years ago I wrote a couple of semi-serious piece about the latest (at the time) government folly – e-conveyancing. The thing I objected to is the idea of storing legal documents electronically, digitally signed to guarantee authenticity. I decided to use this piece as an exercise in search engine optimisation and lo – it is number 2 now if you search in google for e-conveyancing!

From time to time I look at the land registry site to see if their grip on reality has improved. The latest is the e-conveyancing planning book.

Typical questions.

2.1 are your clients e-enabled

What in blue blazes is this supposed to mean? I looked it up in wikipedia and it aprently means:

“E-enablement is the transformation of a business system or process to make it streamlined and render it accessible via the Internet. “

Are your clients accessible via the internet? I guess if they have email they are. But see section 3 below this – there is some help.

2.2 Do you know how your clients will want to do business with you in the future (eg face to face, online, phone)?

How can you answer this question?

2.4 Are you ready to take full advantage of evolving e-systems to add value to your services?

What is an e-system when it is at home? Wikipedia is of no help here. I have no idea what it means and I have been in the IT industry for many decades. So how is the poor solicitor supposed to answer it.

3 E-enablement

Now I understand. E-enablement means you have your systems plugged into the Internet. Which you need to have “high realisation of potential benefits”.

NO!

It means you have high risk of someone breaking in to your systems, which in a business dealing with millions of pounds of clients money is no small risk.

This stuff is complete rubbish.

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How much would a company like EDS charge to strip personal data from the database that was sent by CD and lost in the post.

The telegraph reveals that this would ‘only’ be £5,000.

HOW MUCH!!!

This would take most competent database administrators, say, a couple of hours – let’s be generous. Five grand – that is daylight robbery. How much of our tax-payers money is being squandered on these people.

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There seem to be a number of red herrings in the CDGate scandal. Firstly we are asked to believe that a 23 year old clerical officer was (a) able to and (b) did download the primary database onto a CD and send it to the audit office.

Has anyone asked how he did this. Is there a button on their system saying ‘download to a CD’? I hardly think so.

Secondly it seems some senior staff were copied on emails.

Irrelevant.

It is common practice in large organisations to copy director level on everything for just this purpose – to protect someones backside. As a result senior staff get bucketloads of mail every day. If they read it all I would be asking why are they being so unproductive as 99.99% has no business in their in-tray. Sort of internal spam.

Better questions are:

1) Who asked this guy or gal to send the data on – pesumably his/her direct supervisor.
2) What exactly did they ask him/her to do
3) Who else was involved in creating this disk

I think we would be getting closer to finding out who should get fired.

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I got called out to a meeting with a client on Saturday evening, and it turned out at the bottom of it all was this: They had turned on Verified By Visa a few weeks ago, and on Saturday morning the MD of the company plus the designer tried to make a paid registration and just plain couldn’t figure out how to get past the VBV screen.

If you have ever tried this you will understand this, as it is a text-book example of bad useability. Initial indications are that the level of registrations has halved since they switched it on.

I know that some firms are being pressurised by their banks to implement VBV but am very concerned about the effect this will have on business. A partner company in the US has told me that it has pretty much died over there.

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Next time you tell people about your ski trip on your social networking site, don’t be surpised if a ski supplier advertisement pops up. It is called hypertargeting and Myspace, facebook etc are all going in for it. They will use all sorts information about you, including messages and interests to target you with advertisements.

Good thing? I don’t know, it seems sort of spooky but I guess we will get used to it. It is only a computer after all, it is not as if a human is eavesdropping on our every move.

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Last night I went to an evening hosted by those lovely people at Rackspace at the Kensington Roof Gardens. It all came back to me. This was BIBA.

You can tell how old you are when you are the only person in a group to remember BIBA. In the 60’s it was the epitomy of cool. A department store like no other. High fashion sold in the exotic art deco surroundings of the old Derry and Tom’s store. A massive place, set like a stage with mood lighting and notoriously snooty sloan ranger assistants. An at the top of it all the 30’s roof garden where you could have a coffee and watch the beautiful people.

Why did it fail? A combination of things:

• The mood lighting made it rather too easy for shoplifters and ‘shinkage’ was crippling.
• It was a great tourist atraction and people came to look not to shop
• Accountants took over and drove it down-market, looting this fabulous brand until it died.

A lesson for us all. No matter how great it is, it has to work.

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Someone (at http://www.ampsl.com/) sent out a spam email with the addresses of the recipeints in the mail. This meant that everyone saw who it was going to. One of many – so I deleted it as usual.

However it started to get replies. Someone decided to mail everyone with their offer. Then spam filters started relying to the list with bounce messages. Then we got angry ‘please remove me’ messages.

All of these got sent to everyone, and we seemed to reach some sort of critical mass where I must have got about 50 emails.

This used to be quite a regular occurance before people understood how to spam, but it has been years.

The last mail said this. I like it.

“After receiving numerous emails from Ampsl Intl ltd with kind offers to buy their products I felt their sales staff would not mind considering products we offer to sell so I sent our marketing info to sales@ampsl.com.

I am sure their sales team sales@ampsl.com would like to hear from all their email friends as to what we as “the ampsl email database” have to offer them “

So lets all send them something…

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