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Connect at mine free Wi-Fi! I would knew what I is do! I is cafe boss!
There's no security on holiday when you're a bellend
Something for the Weekend, Sir? Stop the digital presses, hold the home page – I have breaking news for you! An organisation somewhere in the world has NOT been hacked into today!
Of course when I say "been hacked into", I mean "allowed anyone with a computer and the slightest inclination to take an unauthorised copy of confidential customer records with the minimum of hinderance".
Feel free to add, as appropriate, "because customer security is not our highest priority". If you like, you might also wish to tag on "and is in fact a much lower priority than ensuring our IT directors receive their performance bonuses on time".
Usually after my summer vacation from Register Towers, I return to a bevy of emails referring to security breaches. This year, the bevy had swelled into a full-blown seasonal migration of entire species. No wonder everyone is in a flap (eheh). In my absence, the world turned into a live 24-hour hackathon.
I would have known about all this sooner if I had bothered to check my email from time to time between energetic bouts of striding across broken sun-parched pavements from one exotic Athenian landmark to another. My mobile phone provider seemed terribly keen for me to do this, too, having finally acknowledged that its data roaming surcharges were unwarranted and trying to spin its admission of guilt into "added value".
The hotel was equally keen for me to connect to its free Wi-Fi. So was the airport, the train stations and every cafe we stopped in for cake throughout our stay.
Mmm, cake.
"Great, they have Wi-Fi! I'm pretty sure the owner of this ramshackle corner cafe is fully competent in security basics and has implemented WPA2-PSK with AES encryption. What's that? There's no login required at all? Wow, he really must be an expert!"
Given so much opportunity for us to waggle our IT privates in public, it's no wonder mischievous self-taught coders who still live with their mums find it so irresistible to tag along to see what they might find. But is anyone policing this?
A think tank called Reform recently published a paper after speaking to a few police officers and staff in the UK with IT responsibilities. The paper calls for the establishment of a digital academy to train cyber specialists – or what I prefer to call a Cyber Police Academy.
Already I can see Steve Guttenberg enrolling and causing no end of madcap mayhem. Then they'll make him head of training, which will lead to even more hilarious antics. And seven more sequels. They could even call it the Guttenberg Project.
Also sitting in my mailbox on my return was an unreasonable quantity of promotional press releases for insane crowdfunding projects.
This is baffling, given that I only ever mention such crowdfunding projects here in order to ridicule them. Idiocy sells, I suppose, in all its hellish forms. Without wishing to help promote them any further than they deserve (i.e. not at all), two items did stand out from the bunch, if only for humour value.
One is for a "smart bulb" called Heelight, a lightbulb that can "hear the environment" and switch between 16 million colours "according to your preferences".
It's not just smart, this lightbulb, oh no: it's apparently "the world's most intelligent bulb".
Hopefully it's intelligent enough to take note that my preferences for lightbulbs is that they should produce white light when switched on, and not produce light when switched off. As far as I'm concerned, the remaining 15,999,999 potential colours can be safely stored up the developer's arse.
But wait! Even lightbulbs with PhDs pale into insignificance alongside my other pick of the summer crowdfunders...
The "smart doorbell".
I only have to read those two words and already I hate it. Then I read that the startup that invented it is called Ding, and now I hate it even more.
When a visitor presses the smart doorbell on your front door, it immediately calls your smartphone. Why it should do this remains a bit of a mystery, despite repeated attempts at having it explained to me. I try to imagine what it would be like to be a smart bell end user – a "bellend" for short.
"Hello? Oh, you've rung my doorbell. Well, no-one's at home at the moment because we're abroad on holiday. Are you a delivery man? No? What's that, you're a burglar? Oh, thank you for ringing. You'll find the jewellery on top of the wardrobe, a brand new lawn mower in the shed, and if you don't mind, could you put down a few kitchen towels before you shit on the bed?"
Evidently the joke's on me because Ding raised £269,664 on crowdfunding platform Seedrs while I was away.
It only goes to show how little I understand about the benefits to human advancement brought about by investing in disruptive technology. Here's me thinking people might put their money into something to do with healthcare nanobots or deep thinking by massive AI entities.
No, it's a quarter of a million quid for a fucking doorbell.
For any bellends reading this, please put your mind at rest. Or at least you can take your mind off the man currently ransacking your home 1,000 miles way by connecting to your hotel's hokey free Wi-Fi and logging in to every system at work while every keystroke is recorded by the seasonal slave behind reception.
He also has photocopies of your passport and preferred credit card, by the way. All he needs is the name of your first pet and he'll have a full house – which is ironic given that your own is now decidedly emptier than it was before someone rang your doorbell.
See? I bet you'd already forgotten about your smart bell woes!
See you next week! Ding dong!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
