Alex Reid

BBC reports that when a Lloyds bank customer chose “Lloyds is pants” (as in rubbish) as his password, he found it had been changed to “no it’s not” by a Lloyds bank employee.

“I thought it was actually quite a funny response,” [Lloyds customer Steve Jetley] said.

But what really incensed me was when I was told I could not change it back to ‘Lloyds is pants’ because they said it was not appropriate.

“I asked if it was ‘pants’ they didn’t like, and would ‘Lloyds is rubbish’ do? But they didn’t think so.

“So I tried ‘Barclays is better’ and that didn’t go down too well either.

“The rules seemed to change, and they told me it had to be one word, so I tried ‘censorship’, but they didn’t like that, and then said it had to be no more than six letters long.”

While the employee who changed the password has been let go and the bank has insisted they rarely look at passwords in a press release, the bank continues to be able to review his new passwords.

Frank McCourt:

I was already dreaming of a school where teachers were guides and mentors, not taskmasters.

A Judge in New Jersey has ruled that the Communications Decency Act exempts the Wikimedia Foundation from liability in a defamation suit filed by a literary agent.

The agent had found her name on a web site dedicated to bad agents and then from there anonymous bloggers had magnified the slander about her which had then spread to a Wikipedia article.

Section 230 of the act states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

(Source)

Business travelers have long been complaining that their electronic devices were being searched and seized indefinitely upon coming into the United States, and a July 16 document from the US Department of Homeland Security confirms just that; they now have the right to seize laptops at the US border.

What’s more alarming is that the laptops (or any sort of hard drive such as an iPod, flash drive or technically a camera – especially the hard drive video cameras) can be copied, shared with other agencies (foreign even) and if there is no reason to keep the information afterward, the data must be destroyed.

For companies keen on keeping their (or their clients’) data confidential, they can simply access important documents via the Internet.

A Canadian law firm has instructed its lawyers to travel to the United States with “blank laptops” whose hard drives contain no data. “We just access our information through the Internet,” said Lou Brzezinski, a partner at Blaney McMurtry. That approach also holds risks, but “those are hacking risks as opposed to search risks,” he said.