Apparently it’s possible to use them to hack into ATMs, as well as to annoy your fellow passengers.

Laptops can contain confidential information, and are inherently less secure than large machines: it is easier to take physical possession of them.

Nationwide building society recently had one stolen that contained customer information; and 3 laptops containing police payroll information were stolen from LogicaCMG, the UK IT services firm.

You have to wonder whether it was absolutely necessary for this information to be on the laptops in the first place. It appears that it may not have been, as Nationwide are saying that the employee who had the laptop stolen may not have been complying with the firm’s security policy. Of course, it’s one thing to have a policy and another for it to be complied with.

Firefox 2.0 is better than Internet Explorer 7 at preventing phishing, according to a study commissioned by Mozilla. A study commissioned by Microsoft found that IE7 is better than a range of 7 third-party security applications. The Microsoft study didn’t include Firefox.

It’s been reported that yet again sensitive information has been posted on the web because people don’t understand the difference between what you see and what you get. A pdf document posted by the Civil Aviation Authority contained blacked out sections that were about airport security. However, the sensitive sections could be read quite easily: they just used black on black, or something similar.

Pdf documents contain all the text that was in the document from which they were produced; just because it’s not immediately visible (black on black, or a black block superimposed) it doesn’t mean that it’s disappeared. Just select the text to see it, or if necessary copy and paste into another application, or view the pdf file with a text editor.

IE7 was released last week (while I was on holiday). It’s the first new version of Internet Explorer for five years. It’s really catching up with Firefox and Opera, with a host of new (to it) features. It’s also meant to have much better security than IE6. A shame that a security vulnerability was discovered within about a day of its release.

I haven’t tried it yet, but, however good it is, will probably stick to Firefox. Most security attacks are targetted at the platforms used by the most users, so even if Firefox isn’t inherently more secure it’s likely to be more secure in practice.

Emails: love ‘em or hate ‘em, they’re here to stay. And that’s the point. Many emails are written as if they are ephemeral, and then cause problems when they turn out to be permanent. It’s so easy just to dash something off, in the same tone as if you were chatting to a colleague at the water cooler.

A recent piece in the FT discusses how the message just doesn’t seem to have got through to many organisations and their employees. Most organisations have appropriate policies in place, but do little to enforce them, whether through training or otherwise. There is software available to check outgoing emails (a bit like reverse spam filtering) but it isn’t widely used. It also suffers from the some of the same problems as spam filtering: in particular, people don’t like it when a perfectly acceptable email doesn’t get through

So you do what everyone says you should do: don’t tell anyone your passwords, don’t write them down anywhere… and then you die. Your grieving relatives can’t get access to your online address book, so can’t notify your friends. Or your colleagues can’t get access to the vital work you were doing the day before you were hit by the bus.

Personally, my memory is really bad so I do keep records of all my passwords, whatever anyone says—but certainly not in plain text. They are safely encrypted, so there’s only one master password that then provides access to all the others. There are a number of applications out there that you can use for this: just search on “password storage” or “password manager”. I use SplashID, because it works on my pda as well as my laptop. Which reminds me… I should write down that password in a safe place, where my family would find it in an emergency.