Category Archives: internet

Magnus Carlsen being hacked?

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Magnus Carlsen the reigning Chess World Champion has called in Microsoft security experts to ensure he is not hacked ahead of his forth coming World Championship match with Sergey Karjakin. It is reported that Magnus has spent the past few months perfecting his strategy using highly powerful computers and is concerned his analysis could be compromised.

Only recently Microsoft blamed a hacking group previously linked to the Russian government for recent cyber attacks that exploited a newly discovered Windows security flaw. Recent attacks using a technique called spear phishing is thought to have been behind the compromise of the WADA database and subsequent publication of Athlete theraputic use exemption (TUES) records.

the end of the road for bhs?

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British Home Stores (BHS) the high street retailer has entered into administration with a risk to ~ 11000 jobs. The store founded in 1928 and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 until 2000 when it was purchased by Sir Philip Green and taken private it later became a member of Green’s Arcadia group. In 2015 BHS was sold to the consortium Retail Acquisitions Ltd for the nominal value of £1.

Only last month there were reports of financial difficulties and the company sought a CVA (company voluntary agreement) It was said to have renegotiated its rents with its landlords. It had already in previous months closed stores in several major cities. It is rumoured to have a pension deficit of over £200 million .

This is the highest profile high street administration since the administration and closure of the Woolworth chain in 2008.

So what went wrong? From various reports I have heard today it seems that people fell out of love with BHS, they did not have a USP one person even said that the British in the name was a barrier. People only really shopped in the concessions. Their perceived main competitors are Debenhams, Marks and Spencer and Next, John Lewis, Heals and House of Fraser were seen as more up market high street competitors and Primark as a lower end rival. Presumably the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury could be see competitors.

In todays world of online shopping how did they compete. The main website does not appear to be responsive, though they do have a separate mobile website that kicks in when browsed via a mobile device. The mobile site does not have a friendly URL structure and does not translate when moving between mobile and desktop. They do appear to have an ios and android app.

The sites have the standard ecommerce look and feel. There is nothing unique in the design and like a number of sites the layout mimics other ecommerce sites. They do offer click and collect plus the usual delivery options of standard and express , payment methods are card based and paypal.

Intereseting today when I was looking at the checkout process I got the following page

bhs-checkout

This was prior to administration being formally confirmed so perhaps they had taken the site offline or as sometimes happens the site was overloaded due to sudden interest due to press attention. It would be interesting to see their visitor stats for the last couple of days and compare them with previous periods.

Interestingly they have not updated their twitter page since the weekend, and what will happen to the new Eastbourne food store that was annunce on twitter to have opened on 21st April.

Should you still buy whether pnline or instore is the question? Even though the site states they are trading as normal there has to be some question mark over goods being delivered at a later date and there would also be no guarantee you could return items. Filing for administration unfortunately must mean sales could be further impacted due to confidence in the offering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

the tax year change and other stories

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so in the early hours of the 6th april I wonder how many other people were busily runnig update scripts on their company databases  to ensure the next tax year figures came into effect and no doubt how much searching of emails and file shares occurred to try and work out what you did the year previously or the person that carried out the task has left and the first you know about it is either a calendar entry pops up to remind you or sometimes its too late and the data coming out the system if found to be in error.

why does this situation occur? too often project budgets do not allow for maintenance screens and routines to be built or the project has overrun and cost cutting forces these tasks to be removed and be deemed a bau support process. quite often design decisions fail to recognise that certain key information may change on a set date , even worse are the cases where by  values are hardcoded into an application meaning the application has to be modified and redeployed.

examples i have seen of hard coding have been VAT rates who would think the UK rate would change from 17.5% to 20%, obviously the millenium example of upper date checking against 31/12/1999 and where a structured numeric identifier is used to identify a category or type i.e. 200000 to 299999 is crime novels; 300000 to 399999 is graphic novels unfortuantely what happens when the numbers are exhausted.

you would hope that this would not occur in todays system solutions but i have seen that this not to be the case. cutting corners and lack of forward planning are still very evident in enterprise solutions

privacy, social and search

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Once again a high profile celebrity has been granted a court injunction to stop the reporting in the uk of details of a threesome his partner was supposedly involved in. the injunction only applies to the UK. A US news publication has named the celebrity and his partner and given details of the infidelity.

Almost immediately and namely the social media networks were awash with the names; google and bing searches were just as fruitful. As with other high profile celebrity injunctions and more serious criminal cases such as the recent adam johnson case anomonimity if granted cannot be guarenteed. Naming such prople in the UK granted anonomous status in the UK can result in prosecution of the person that releases the details though how many people have been prosecuted I am unsure.

Obviously one could argue that injunctions surrounding celebrity relationship scandals just show that some people have too much money; quite often the same celebrity is quite happy to sell stories of their life to magazines for vast sums of money but are not so keen on scandal appearing in the pubic domain even if their partner knows the details.

Where as victims of crimes committed against them who have been granted anonimity should be allowed to remain anonomous,

So how do Social Media and Search Engines fail to protect the victims.

If you take google and bing as search engines the search pages as part of the search result have content sections that show related searches that have been carried out by other users. The search boxes themselves show drop downs of related searches. Quite rapidly the names of people granted anomonimity appear in these sections. From these names it can be quite easy to find more personal information of these people.

Even twitter and facebook have similar search functionality where related results and searches are shown. Quite quickly innocent names can on twitter appear in the trending section.

Obviously quite quickly the results are adjusted and names are removed by moderators but one would presume this would only occur after a complaint has been made. The alogorithms dont seem to stop everything and perhaps only the link to the content that has been complained about. It is quite easily to spoof your location and search in countries where the data has not been removed to find the details that have been surpressed in say the UK.

More should be done to stop victims names from becoming known in the public domain; the internet has no borders and court orders in one country do not apply in other countries.

Friends Reunited – The end of the road

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Back in 1999 a husband and wife plus a friend conceived an idea based on the US website classmates.com. This idea was called Friends Reunited and was launched in July 2000 after lots of media interest in the year that followed from a base of a few thousand members the site had 2.5 million registered users. The idea of the site was to link people via their schooling, all of a sudden you could look through list of people and old mates that were at your school and see what they were now up to. When I registered I recall seeing names from my school days 14 years previously that turned on a dim lightbulb of memory from my distant past. It seems others were able to rekindle romance from previous teenage encounters and supposedly the site was a cause of numerous affairs and divorces.

Today its been announced that due to lack of active users making the sites upkeep and running non economical the site would close. An awful lot of the 2.5 million members that registered in the early days probably cant remember their sign on details and probably did not even realise the site was in existance. I personally can’t even remember how long after registering I ceased to even view the site.

So what happened to the site born in Hertfordshire? It seems that by 2005 there were around 15 million registered users; a similar site from Australia and one from New Zealand were merged into the site. ITV purchased the site for £120 million with further payments based on its performance up to 2009 which supposedly were £55 million. Quite a success story though even though its founders no doubt became miillionaires overnight its not obvious whether they had gained funding from Venture Capitalists to keep the site afloat and running one would hazard a guess of yes. Though reports suggested they recieved £30 million from the deal.

Interestingly in 2005 News Corp International bought the social network myspace for $580 million; myspace was the largest social media site in the world for the next few years.

Why did ITV acquire the site; It seems combining ITVs userbase would make the user base the 8th largest online presence of unique users which would provide attractive advertising prospects.

By 2009 things had gone sour and ITV sold the site for £25 million ITV had made a loss as a company for the previous year and advertising revenues had collapsed. Even though MySpace had a large user base the newly launched websites of Facebook ad Twitter had overtaken it in terms of users and use. ITV sold the site including Genes Reunited to a company called Brightsolid who already owned fingmypast.com which contained the census from 1901 and 1911.

After a rebranding exercise a few years back Brightsolid no longer considered the site to be integral to its business. It will now close.

Friends Reunited was a site that delivered what was misisng at the time but never really reinvented itself to compete with the multi functional new generation sites of Facebook, Bebo et al.

No visitor number have increaed substationally since the announcement. So what does it mean for the data it holds; analysts believe the data is outdated and no longer relevant as the majority of people have not kept their cotact details updated for many years. It would be a shame to see the  site go offline completely and the school data lost. Perhaps it can be kept alive by an archive site. We will see.