Sonet Journal

I received a link from a friend and colleague Alan Hill to a news story on CNET about Paypal who will be offering some extra security to it’s users through a key fob that will generate a one-time password in the form of a six digit code every 30 seconds.
The “Paypal Security Key” will cost $5 for personal Paypal accounts, but will be free for business accounts… Paypal has been testing the device with employees for a couple of months and plans to start trials with customers in the next month or so…
The key fobs are based on technology by VeriSign whom eBay has had a security partnership for the last couple of years. eBay believe this will be another layer in it’s security to protect from phishing incidents.

It’s not an original idea the use of key-fobs has been around for a while now on other security protected areas such as large corporate IT firms that require it’s staff to sign in with a digital code. What is interesting enough is that eBay has now picked it up, while they claim it is to protect customers from the ever-growing and unstoppable phishing attacks it does pave-the-way for future digital identities of all Internet users.

Pros and Cons of Digital Identity
Will there come a time when all users of the Internet will have to sign in online with a digital signature, the pros for this are it would help in combating cyber-crime, virus deliveries, spam and hacking as the footprints would be traceable back to the users unique signature. The cons are that it would be an invasion of privacy as it would be easy to track a users habits online, know when a particular user is online and what they view etc. I know this is a hot and contentious debate over the future of security and citizens rights to privacy.

It’s all becoming a bit Orwellian and it’s easy to see why one is torn between preventing crime online with the right to remain anonymous.
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Related Reading

Paypal to Offer Password Key fob to Users - CNET
The Politics of the Internet - Search and Go

About a year ago we were working on a Government contract to deliver an accessible website and maintain the site with the view to building a larger and more up-to-date content management system (CMS) for the website in the near future. Six months into the contract and I was having a lunch with the burser who informed me he felt that the government would possibly be looking to close the site down and a few others in the future, he was not really sure if this would happen but indications told him it may be expected.

Reading the BBC news this morning and came across this article Government to close 551 websites caught my attention and there it was, the prediction appeared to be ringing true. Yes, the UK Govt does intend to close a lot of it’s websites and steamline through two central websites. The belief is that visitors prefer to find information quickly rather than surfing through various sites and links to find it.

While broadly speaking we are in agreement with this, and yes it is a good news as it shows that the Govt. are definitely evolving and listening to feedback online, it does leave the question open to doing business with the government. Who now is favoured to get the contracts to maintain and build these Govt. supersites? Before now departments and agencies were free to choose who they wanted building their sites as long as the web development company met the criterion to tender. This had it’s benefits, as smaller or medium sized companies were considered for choice government work. Now it would appear that the contracts may go to much larger corporate firms to build these projects. When this happens they usually tend to farm the work out at a ridicously low price to the small to mid-sized firms.

Identity & Individuality Questions

Another issue may arise about the loss of data and individuality. A lot of smaller government websites are clearly a labour of love and reflect years of effort to get the right design and information up for it’s visitors. Will this now be lost? By moving to supersites will we see a watered down version of information from these independent government websites, will the identity of these sites be affected?

I’ll draw a parallel here with what Best Western did to some of the sites under their control. So eager were they to implement their branding on other hotels that any hotel under their jurisdiction had to change their site to a Best Western styled site. A good example is the Red Lion in Salisbury a beautiful hotel with a long history, their site had to come down and be replaced with the Best Western brand. I believe the term is called steam-rolling.

Hoepfully whoever takes charge of the transition of these sites to the new supersites comes up with an architecture that allows for a certain amount of autonomy in the upkeep of these sites.