Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Monthly Archives: April 2010

Travel Tech when in Peril

The last few weeks has been interesting for International travellers with the Icelandic volcano, even more interesting than the Christmas with the disruption by snow. Both events caused strain which, unless you had tech with you, monumentally knocked you down.

The combination of Tripit, Flight Stats, iPhone, 3G, Wifi and Laptop saved my bacon in both instances. The Christmas Weather cancelled my flight on the day before Christmas with just four hours notice, but tech allowed me to book an earlier (and running) flight, and refund my cancellation so I was on my flight home less than an hour and a half later.

With the Volcano, the effect was much more disastrous. Tech allowed me to determine that I had no way of doing the return trip home for the weekend without spending most of it travelling. It then allowed me, through the excellent booking.com, to find a hotel room for the weekend just with the right timing after all the cancellations were rolling in but before everyone else had realised they were going to be there for some time and booked all the rooms!

Not everything was good however and both Easyjet and BA got bad marks this time. Easyjet for not allowing the simple cancellation claim online, and BA for allowing only the cancellation of Both legs of a journey which had necessarily became only needed one way. Very poor IT systems in fact.

Other than that though, I’ll bet you it was much better than what it was like pre-Internet and Mobile access. In fact, that probably would be much like my siblings experience being trapped in New York with only a standard mobile phone.

Till the next time.

The Pain of Password Changes

Loved this article (click through) about the impact of regular password changes on businesses.

Big enterprises that force their workers to change their access passwords on a regular basis, and adhere to complex rules when they do, might be their own worst enemy.

via Mandatory Password Changes Costs Billions in Lost Productivity – Security – Lifehacker.

The presumption of most security policies is that changing passwords increases security, which is not strictly the case in my view. Most of the time, forced password changes result in written down passwords or easily guessed repeat passwords, or even trying to beat the strict rules that are required (like ‘must contain a number, a letter and at least one upper case letter). All this does this is give a crib to breaking the system. The other thing to say is that password changes like this assume that the password is guessable, you have been overlooked or that the system is insecure (like when you used telnet which sends passwords in the clear). Now with strong encryption, good personal security/awareness and a good sound none-word password, then the need for changes should be more based on education of staff to understand password changing in response to insecure behaviour instead. Like being overlooked, a security weakness being identified etc.

At least that is my view, what is yours?