Posts by Anthony

Online crime maps go live

OS data on Google Maps

The Met's map is of particular interest to people mapping things in the UK with Google maps: the Met are clearly displaying area boundaries that are based on Ordnance Survey data, and this currently falls foul of the combined OS and Google Maps API licences (OS claim Crown Copyright on all derived data, Google requires rights to the data that OS refuse to give it).

Will the OS sue the Met before the government's threatened changes to OS derived data rules in the next budget?

Police vet live music, DJs for 'terror risk'

Word macros

Tried the Word document, and OpenOffice warned that it was a security risk as it contained macros (which it kindly disabled for me). I wonder whether the Met show me their risk assessment for using Microsoft Word as a document creator?

OMFG, what have you done?

Fluid width option, please?

For those of us with big screens, please could you provide an optional fluid width layout? The news items on the front page could flow to fit a wider space with ease (well, inline-block and some fiddling for IE and Firefox). After some time you could count how many "votes" you get for the default fixed width and the optional fluid layout.

Net shoppers bullied into being Verified by Visa

No additional security with Barclays VbV

Barclays Verified by Visa allows anyone who has the credit card in their hands to set a new password for VbV with just the card details and the card owner's date of birth. Since the latter is trivial to discover for most people, this adds almost no additional security to the process.

http://fonant.blogspot.com/2008/06/verified-by-visa-barclays-style-zero.html

And, of course, the whole secure-page-in-an-iframe thing makes it pretty difficult to check that the form you're typing your card details into is legitimate.

Dixons admits 'it's even worse than you thought'

Some things never change

Many years ago, when I were a lad in school (late 1970s), extremely thick people were commonly referred to as "Dixons rejects".

New taskforce to discuss why more people aren't turning to digital

Pips are late

The hourly time pips are always late on DAB :(

Lost HMRC discs pop up on eBay

Backup copies?

Ebay seller should have made backup copies of the CDs before they got lost/damanged.

Hmmm... what about the CDs with HMRC data on them sent in internal mail that _did_ arrive? Someone in the know could have copied them en route and then put them back into the mail system... so similar data could have leaked a long time ago...

Microsoft stuffs Sage with free accounts software

UK version

http://www.msofficeaccounting.co.uk/express.aspx