what is security

I’ve read with interest the goings on with various government agencies ‘losing’ discs with tens of thousands records on them whilst quaffing a cheeky pims and lemonade.

I have also blogged my ongoing concerns over Google and thus by definition other cloud solutions’ security.

but my partners 11 year old boy has recently started to get interested in the whole internet thing, he wants a facebook account and has signed up for several other social sites despite my attempts to get him to check first. suddenly the whole ‘s the net a safe place has landed in my home, and I’m not so sure anymore.

now I have no problem with SN sites, far from it I have many accounts (too many) and have been in the SN area before the term ‘web 2.0’ even existed. it’s for this reason that I know that there is a lot of content on these site that even 13 year olds should not have access to. (I’m not going into the whole personal security issue here)

who has the responsibility to make sure our kids are safe and not accessing content they shouldn’t, as parents we have a duty to monitor their access sure, I have installed family safe on the boys machine and I get to see his activities and monitor his contacts on MSN.

but he has access outside of the home and that’s where the problem lies, (or does it)

take bebo, social site for children, has a standard terms and conditions that say no one under 13 may join. But does no checking to make sure this is the case, you can add a date of birth which clearly puts you under that limit and there is no problem.

another site asks that the child to enter their parents email address to check the parent is happy for them to join (if they are underage), but does not check to make sure the child doesn’t enter their own email address as the parents,  (though to their credit this was fixed after a short email)

footnote

facebook to its credit does stop you from registering if you are under age, but there is nothing stopping you adding a fake birthdates?

Simple IA - Captcha

I’ve been away for a while, BSOD and totally destruction of my machine redressed my priorities but all is now well.

As a result I’ve been re- registering for a number of service that I used to automatically log in to, and faced with various forms of Captcha interface, now don’t get me wrong any system that prevents and slows down the spammer is good BUT is Captcha really the best we can do?

I recently worked on a project for the science museum that needed to have a visitor registration system, they defined a Captcha service for that and I decided to have a look around and see if there were better options.

One that really caught my eye was the reverse Captcha method, rather that require the human user fill in a field that copies the obscure image, add a field that absolutely HAS TO BE EMPTY.  as the spam bot goes through the form it will fill in useless information including the empty filed. Advantage, inconvenience the spammer not the visitor/user whish is always a good thing, ‘don’t make me think’ right?.

it’s got to better than bizarre cats and dogs wrapped around gothic script ;)