Major Banking Sites Insecure

-
Sites do not use authentication technology to prove they are genuine, researcher says. Robert McMillan, IDG News Service Friday, April 21, 2006 Online bank customers may want to pay a little more attention to their browsers the next time they log in, because many of the most popular banking sites in the U.S. may be needlessly placing their customers at risk to online thieves, a noted security researcher warned this week.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Last Stand of an Utopian View: Net Neutrality

-
Image
"[IN the US] Both the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation are expected to review Net neutrality-related bills later this week. " In many countries (the UK is an exception) museums are not free: people pay to enjoy their culture. In many countries (the UK, again, is largely an exception), drivers pay tolls to use motorways. Sometime they can choose longer and slower but free routes instead, sometime they just have no alternative. In every country, people pay different rates for different postal services and for different flight routes. So why the Internet, whether you compare it to a motorway, to a museum, to ordinary mail or to aerial transports, should not be subject to the same usage-related rule? Users (read: companies) should be able to choose among ordinary (slower) and premium (faster) delivery services. What's wrong with this? Well, several things. Many of the social and economic counter-arguments are rather...
Read more

(revised on Medium) On Philosophy's envy of her four sisters (series: notes to myself)

-
Image
Philosophy has four sisters: Mathematics, Poetry, Religion, and Science. She envies all of them. She would like to be as powerfully abstract, and rigorously demonstrative, and practically useful, and timeless ... as she believes Mathematics to be. But failing, she ends up calculating the qualitative, formalising the undefinable, inferring the trivial, and missing the obvious: useless, empty, self-referential. She would like to be as delicately perceptive, and existentially fine-tuned, and meaningfully profound, and experientially rich ... as she believes Poetry to be. But failing, she ends up blathering obscure intuitions, prophesying in an esoteric language, playing with words while disrespecting facts and reasonings, obsessed with invented etymologies but oblivious of actual meanings: unhinged, nonsensical, unaccountable. She would like to be as methodologically driven, and systematically explanatory, and epistemically foundational, and progressively cumulative ... as she believes ...
Read more

Trusting trust the Ebay way

-
Image
Advertisement used to do exactly this: informing you that a lot of other costumers were trusting X, so you could as well. Then it became something else, but that is another story. There is a form of bottom-up advertisement, a sort of electronic word-of-keyboard, that the digital era has made possible again: customers' comments and feedback. Everyone has more or less learnt the lesson, from Amazon to Saynsbury's, but the master is Ebay. On Ebay, sellers and buyers need to build their reputation the hard way: by being good sellers and buyers. It is a reinforcing process: you are judged by the people you do business with; the better your reputation the more business you may have, the more likely it is that you will wish to do your best to make sure that your reputation, gained with so much effort, remains untarnished and may even improved, which means that buyers are more likely to do business with you, but the more business you are likely to enjoy... and so on. Some time ago, spe...
Read more

The Loebner Prize from a judge's perspective

-
Image
This year, for the first time in its history, the Loebner Prize competition was held in England, at the University of Reading to be precise. It was organised by Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah. Independently of whether Turing might have been pleased (he was not well treated in this country, recall?), there was a satisfying sense of “coming home” of the Turing Test (henceforth TT ). Expectations were high, and they very highly advertised too. The meeting was perfectly organised. Having been invited to play the role of a judge, together with several other colleagues, including two members of the IEG , Mariarosaria Taddeo and Matteo Turilli ( here are their pictures and Rosaria's interview ) , I enjoyed the opportunity to see from close-up the machinery and the TT . It was intriguing and great fun. Because there were interviews with the BBC and other things going on, and because we were also supposed to take part in the parallel AISB Symposium on the TT , I had time to test only...
Read more
-
I just published "On asking the wrong kind of questions (series: notes to myself)", happy 2024. https://link.medium.com/thDMgqTvZFb
Read more

On the importance of being pedantic (series: notes to myself)

-
Image
They say that to call someone pedantic is an insult. I'm not so sure. True, someone pedantic is obsessed with minor details, small errors, or tiny imperfections. And a pedantic is also someone who cares too much about all such things not to let you know about them, advising or correcting, disagreeing or disapproving. And yes, if you are a pedant, you are more than just occasionally pedantic. This can happen to anybody, the excessive emphasis on some narrow or boring detail being a tendency we all share when it comes to matters about which we care very much. But if you are a pedant, being pedantic is your daily stance, your intrinsic nature, your way of living. You are always, consistently, reliably, systematically pedantic, from the moment you wake up, about the exact place where the slippers should be next to your bed, all the way to the moment you go to sleep, and the exact place where the phone should be placed to recharge. If you are a true pedant, no detail is too trivial, no ...
Read more

On the value of taking care of the roses (series: notes to myself)

-
Image
They say that what matters sometimes is not the outcome but the process: not the success or failure of an action, but just the action itself.  Maybe. But I always thought it was a bit of sour grapes. Didn’t really want beautiful roses in my garden, kind of line of thinking. The important thing was gardening. Or so you tell yourself, trying to be convincing.  But I recite this loudly a few times and it still sounds quite lame. It's the philosopher's fault, because he asks the unpleasant questions. Would you have done it anyway, even if the roses had no chance? But above all, what if the process itself is also pointless? Perhaps the gardening is a failure too, like the dead roses.  So you pause, on your way to the roses, and think: if the outcome is not what matters, and the process is not what matters, why caring for the roses? Better stop, or kill the realist awareness that shows the worthless nature of the whole enterprise.  Is there anything left, if all is ...
Read more

The ethics of WikiLeaks

-
The Wikileaks phenomenon is intricate, but suppose we reduce its ethical evaluation to two questions: is whistleblowing ethical, even when motivated by resentment and the desire to harm its target? And is Wikileaks’ facilitation of whistleblowing ethical, even if it might put at risk innocent people? A deontologist, convinced that telling the truth and never lying is an absolute must, is likely to appreciate whistleblowing as the right thing to do, independently of the reasons behind it. And a consequentialist may support Wikileaks as a means to maximise the welfare of the largest number of people, especially if risks are minimized by censuring sensitive information. So current answers in the mass media seem to converge: Wikileaks is a good thing. I am not entirely convinced. Confidential communication is a three-player game – sender, receiver and referent – in which sender and receiver trust each other. The receiver, not the referent, trusts and holds responsible the sender f...
Read more