Barrel Strength

U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague tells some startling truths about the net’s capacity for on-line pillage.

The intelligence reports I see as Foreign Secretary show that just one criminal computer programme can harvest over thirty gigabytes of stolen passwords and credit card details from over a hundred countries in a matter of days, causing millions of pounds worth of fraud. Over 40,000 pieces of sensitive information and financial data are traded on the online black market every day, amounting to 13.2 million criminal transactions every year.

Read more of his speech here.

What has always impressed me about the scoundrels I have met in the Internet world is the second by second automation of fraud and theft,  and the consciouslessness of its perpetrators. They go to sleep in well feathered beds and wake up richer, thanks to your and my poor computer security.

Sun-TV looks more like a PBS for conservative intellectuals than populist and right-wing. It had plenty of faults: people moving in the backgrounds, endless replays of stock footage, and not enough budget. On the other hand, it had people talking about issues that matter to conservatives: medical care bankruptcy, speech controls, and ludicrous lack of policy in Libya. John Robson’s comment that we did not have an entry strategy, let alone an exit strategy, was apt.

I look forward to more. Even the hokey advertisements for sole-inserts by Dr. Ho. I am ready to indulge it for a long while.

________________________________

An aside:

Ezra’s comments on the delicencing of CKLN in Toronto missed the essential point. The students of Ryerson were paying over a $100,000 a year to a group of self-selecting radio-heads who had lost any connection or accountability to the students of Ryerson. The fact that CKLN was riven with fratricidal fighting – three rival Boards of Directors- for over three years was a sure symptom of people fighting over an income stream that would not stop, no matter how badly they mismanaged. It was so bad, even the CRTC finally had to take action. CKLN will be replaced by people able to file an annual return and logger tapes, trust me.