Laptop repair shop exposed - essential viewing

In a long overdue journalistic endeavour Sky sent in an undercover reporter to several laptop repair shops with a simple known fault and a laptop loaded with spy software to see what the repair shops got up to.

It will come as no surprise that they trawled through files and folders, attempted to access online banking account and more.

There is something important to understand here. You simply cannot give a computer to an unknown repair agent. Your laptop is not the same as another appliance as it far more that just hardware. It is akin to inviting a person to repair your office, letting them take all your bank books, photos and diaries off premises for investigation.

So what can you do? Some ideas include: buy laptops where you maintain the ownership of the hard drive, so in the event of a repair you keep you hard drive; create a second login called 'guest' with no data on it and only allow repair agents to use this login (please note this is not foolproof); establish a relationship with a respectable repair company and have them sign a privacy/NDA type contract. If you need help keeping your data private contact FaberBrent.

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London Borough of Wandsworth has as many cctv cameras Dublin City Council, Johannesburg Police Dept, Boston Police Dept Sydney city Council combined!

A new BBC report on actual numbers of CCTV cameras in the UK makes for interesting viewing.

The much banded 4.4M UK cameras number is very questionable and is more like 3.2M (still quite a lot!). The original figure was calculated by using Wandsworth as an average!

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UK Phone Tapping plans prove unworkable under current legislation

During secret testing Gordon Brown's proposed use of phone tapping has shown to be unworkable under current legislation.

A mock trial was run and the validity was examined. Quotes attributed to Sir Paul Kennedy, the Interception of Communications Commissioner, said that under RIPA there were “real legal and operational difficulties” and would “welcome the Government’s acceptance that intercept as evidence should not be introduced".

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