It's the only way to be sure.

Cormac Hodgkinson, Vodafone's "Director of Customer Service and Experience" fails to reassure me when he posts this:

You may have seen recent media reports in relation to customer information – please be assured that Vodafone takes customer information and data security extremely seriously. Customer information is not ‘publicly available on the internet’. Customer information is stored on Vodafone’s internal systems and accessed via a secure web portal, accessible to authorised employees and dealers via a secure login and password.

(from http://blog.vodafone.com.au/blog/news/vodafone-customer-data-security )

The "recent media reports" he's trying to defuse presumably include:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/01/09/3109067.htm

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/mobile-security-outrage-private-det...

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/security/vodafone-mobile-records-leaked-2...

and tweets like this one:

http://twitter.com/NewtonMark/status/23757107178246144

The big claims being made (at least in the SMH and Age pieces) are:

In this new saga for Vodafone, dealers have revealed that they are frequently asked to do ''favours'' and to pass on their login details.

Because the customer database is not an intranet (internal company system) and instead on the internet, users with a password can log in to the portal from anywhere, then access any customer's information.

Vodafone retailers have said each store has a user name and password for the system. That access is shared by staff and every three months it is changed. Other mobile dealers who sell Vodafone products also get full access to the database.

Anyone with full access can look up a customer's bills and make changes to accounts. Limited access allows searching by name, which takes much longer and is more involved but can be just as effective when done correctly. ''It's scary stuff in the wrong hands,'' one dealer told this website.

So, my questions for Vodafone are:

• Is it true that “accessible to authorised employees and dealers via a secure login and password” means “each Vodafone store has a shared login/password combination that is known/used by many staff members at that store”?
• Do these "secure login and passwords" only allow access from store-specific network connections, or do they work from any internet connection?
• Is there any audit trail that allows Vodafone to identify which individual staff member has made queries which reveal a customers personal information?
• Am I going to have to get replacement credit card numbers for the 5 or 6 different credit cards that may have been used in my household to pay for any of the 6 Vodafone SIMs we use?
• Can you assure me you haven’t potentially exposed my name, address, birthdate, and drivers licence number to anyone having access to one of those shared login/password combinations?
• Who's going to pay for the time/money required to monitor for identity theft and change credit card number and drivers licence numbers where required?
• And, the bonus conspiracy theory question, did you leak this yourself to distract the media from the ongoing network problems?

Dear lazyweb...

What are the current alternatives to delicious and Flickr?

Instapaper has for me replaced some of what I use delicious for, but it's missing the community/collaborative thing deIcious has, and the tagging. I suspect the collaborative part could be piggybacked onto a social network, some app that leverages my Twitter or Facebook social graph, and the tagging could be partially automated by using something like metaweb, perhaps Google is the right place to expect the solution from? (perhaps they've already solved it and I just dot know about it yet?)

Longer term, what are people considering (or using) in favor of Flickr?

If I just wanted to store photos "in the cloud" I'd just stick them into Amazon S3 and probably serve them out of Cloudfront, but I like a lot of the ancillary stuff Flickr provides, both the onsite stuff like tagging, albums, exif data display, geotagging, default licensing, stats, as well as integration with other tools - iPhoto, various iPhone apps, but also the social and sharing aspect.

I understand Facebook does that well, but I don't want to lock my pictures up with Zuckerberg any more than I want them to go dark when Yahoo needs to do their next round of costcuting layoffs.

So do I give up and admit the Google "wins teh internetz", and throw everything into Picasa ( hoping the Wave fiasco was a one-off, and that the community won't abandon it like Orkut)? Or is there some recently established service all the cool kids know about that I need to get in on? Or is here somebody working on a fascinating new startup that I should be an early adopter of?

I _really_ don't want the answer to be "Facebook", I think I'd rather secede from "Internet communities" than go there...

Big

Collected data available on Google Docs here.

Discussion in the comments welcomed and encouraged (but be respectful of differing opinions. Attack peoples arguments if you need to, don't attack the people...)

[Update: Bryan from Rankiac got back to me today (25Nov) apologising for their lack of response and pleading mail server / google mail problems. I've now managed to pay to extend the trial into a Pro account, and to their credit they've continued to collect the data I wanted between the free trial expiry and the purchase of a Pro account, so that's good. Now they just need to convince me 14 day turnarounds on critical service queries are not "the norm"...]

I found this really useful website - it's doing something I've been on-and-off working on for a while, in a much more polished and useable fashion than I've been planning. It's called Rankiac, and it does daily Google searches for your keywords and tells you where your website is ranking, and produces historical data of those SERPs. It also does backlink monitoring, both for your site and your competitors sites. It's surprisingly cool.

I grabbed the 14 day free trial, and it fully lived up to it's claims.

So I went to pay for a subscription:

only to be greeted with this:

Oops! I'm sure they'll _hate_ finding they've bungled such a critical bit of a web based business, I'l let them know right away so they can fix it! So I hunted and hunted and hunted, 'cause their only contact info is buried down on the privacy page, and mailed them when I only had 5 days of free trial left, and again 2 days later. I'm now down to one day of free trial left, I haven't heard back from them, and it's still impossible to pay them.

So now I'm looking around to see if they've got any half-way decent competitors...

The thing thats most amusing (perhaps even ironic) is that I found out about this service through a discussion post on a HackerNews article titled "Things you should do immediately after launching a website."

Here's my #1 "Things you should do immediately after launching a website." tip: Make sure your "Buy Now" buttons work! (and checking/responding to customer email in shorter than 5 day windows will probaby help too...)

Anyone got any good SERPs checking websites? Ones that'll actualy take my money?

So, now I've got a freshly minted Apple iOS developer key (yeah, I just paid $119 to be allowed to run code I write on a device i own... *boggle!*), I'm pondering an idea (since I'm officially an iPhone app developer)...

There's now old 3G iPhones available for a couple of hundred bucks. That gets you a reasonable size touch screen, a gps receiver, and the accelerometers. You also get 3G internet connection.

I'm imagining using the iPhone as a dashboard for a motorcycle - the GPS and accelerometers can measure my speed more accurately than my mechanical speedo, and the GPS would let it be smart enough to know what the speed limit is on the current bit of road, and even know where fixed speed cameras and the RTA's designated "mobile speed camera" zones are as well as other "known" speed enforcement areas or time-over-distance-camera sections of road, and warn me about them. With an internet connection it could also check the RTA traffic twitterfeed and warn me of incidents in my general vicinity, and possibly suck the traffic layer out of googlemaps and warn me of slowdowns ahead... It could connect to http://www.trapster.com/ to warn of user reported speed traps and roadwork. If it's possible to operate the touchscreen in gloves it could allow on-the-fly reporting back to trapster or recording in the local database.

It'd take some thinking/hardware to replace the entire dash, getting a tachometer input into the iPhone, and indicator lights for indicators, ignition, and oil pressure might be tricky (possibly something through the dock connector, or if the whole Apple insistence on complete control of interfacing hardware becomes an issue, perhaps some hardware than encodes those signals into audio and feed it into the microphone input in the headphone socket?) I'm not entirely sure I'd be happy with the oil pressure light being under (possibly buggy) software and (probably jerrybuilt) home made hardware control, but I could leave that alone (with it's almost steampunk level of "wire-pressureswitch-lightbulb" technology) - none of the rest of it is safety-critical...

Things to work out:

• Can I operate the touchscreen in bike gloves (and does that change in the rain?)
• Can I get signals into an iPhone app from the dock connector (without paying an Apple tax)?
• If not, can I cheat and encode data in an audio signal and process the info out? (Shazam does.)
• If I started my DashBoard app, could it run indefinitely, or will I need to be able to reboot and restart the app somehow? (which might be hard if I've made a suitable motorcycle dashboard enclosure for it)
• Can I build a water-tight enough enclosure which still lets me operate the touch screen? (is there ay "magic" about screen protector films?)
• Can I build an enclosure that disguises the iPhone-ness enough and/or secures it well enough that I could leave the bike parked and expect it to still be there when I returned?

I wonder if this would be of any interest at all to anyone else? Its more complicated than "just buy the app on the app store" since there'd need to be at least an enclosure/mount for it that'd require custom building for each person's bike, and extra hardware if you want a tacho or indicator lights to work on the phone screen. Maybe just adhoc distribution of the code would be enough (I think that limits me to about 100 other people), or perhaps go the whole hog and used jailbroken iPhones and ignore any of Apple's attempts to control what I do with hardware i own?

Now I just need to carve out some copious free time to build it...

But check out this asian inspired interior decorating...

When I grow up, I'd like to think I'd have a lounge room like that! (It's in the gallery at www.piprooke.com along with a bunch of other pretty Asian and Oriental furniture, art, and homewares...)