Older blog entries for hands (starting at number 1)

MBNA's lax attitude towards security

Today I received a copy of the PIN for my MBNA credit card in the post, despite not having asked for it.

In response, I've cancelled my account, and reported their incompetence to You and Yours.

I suppose I shouldn't be all that surprised, since MBNA have a habit of randomly sending out unsolicited cheques (which also has worrying security implications), but I actually found it quite shocking to see the PIN that I'd chosen printed in clear text.

Obviously, in the first instance they generate a random PIN, and print it out, but I was rather hoping that their systems would be set up so that that random PIN, and certainly any PIN subsequently selected by the customer, would not be available in clear text at any time. If I forget my PIN, they should generate a new one, not remind me of the old one. They should not be able to remind me of the old one.

The two people I talked to seemed surprised that I would cancel an account that I've had for about 13 years over a single PIN in the post, but given that that's their policy, I don't think it's a massive leap to think that a corrupt postman might be tempted to collect these PIN letters (which are pretty easy to spot and most of which are not being expected, so won't be missed). Then, assuming that a reasonable percentage of people will match MBNA's laxness by setting all their PINs alike, the criminals will be armed with all the information they need to do a targeted mugging for the card(s), with an average return in tens of thousands of pounds, especially if they hospitalise/kill the victim to ensure they don't get to cancel the cards.

Syndicated 2006-11-11 00:00:00 from chezfil

The wisdom of appropriate clothing

Yesterday morning I decided to wear my summer bike leathers, rather than my waterproofs, in defiance of the weather forecast's prediction of rain. About twenty minutes later, that decision paid off big time when my motorcycle was helpfully reconfigured into this new shape by an inattentive car driver: post-accident CBR600F motorcycle
(not a great photo, I'm afraid, but I was in mild shock, and failed to notice that my phone was still in only medium photo-size mode, but you'll note that the dangly bits used to be the headlamps, and that the handlebars are in the full-lock-to-the-left position, despite the wheel pointing slightly to the right of middle.)

Despite the fact that the bike is almost certainly a write-off, the main thing that's wrong with me is a slightly bruised ankle, and general soreness of all major muscles similar to that which would result from overdoing exercise a bit.

The driver of the car seemed more shocked than I was. He was a nice chap, and a practicing Muslim (or so I surmised given his comments about having done his prayers in the morning, and wondering what he'd done wrong to cause this to happen). I think he was expecting to see my mangled corpse in the road, as depicted in a recent government safety campaign. While it's nice to see that people are affected to some extent by such campaigns, I think I'd prefer it if they instead promped people to look where they were going.

Syndicated 2006-09-13 23:00:00 from chezfil

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!