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My attempt at simplifying the Data Protection Act.

My blog updates

  • Grand Central: Great trains, terrible terms
    Feb 26, 2010
    Recently I travelled to York on Grand Central Railway. I really like their train service because you pay the same fare whether you buy your ticket in advance, at the station, or on the train. ...
  • Filling cabinet breaches
    Feb 1, 2010
    I like to analyse the ICO's undertakings and enforcement notices to see whether there are lessons you can learn from other people's unfortunate mistakes. ...
  • Data Sharing and the Blue Badge Parking Scheme
    Jan 13, 2010
    Back in 2008 the government announced that they were going to reform some of the ways the disabled parking / blue-badge scheme worked to reduce the amount of fraudulent use. ...
  • The future of privacy talk at ORG
    Dec 6, 2009
    Bruce Schneier spoke on the subject of The Future of Privacy at the Open Rights Group on Friday. ...
  • Abuse of radio buttons and check boxes
    Dec 5, 2009
    I’m particularly sensitive to interface design and I saw a real horror this week. ...
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Users divulge their passwords to strangers

This won’t be a surprise to anyone who works in IT security, but last week the BBC reported how easy it was for an experienced security consultant doing some pretty basic ’social engineering’ to:

Walk into buildings unchallenged and steal data from a company
Get users to divulge their password over the telephone to someone who claimed [...]