The Weekly Round-Up: 24.07.09

Phishing has become a constant nuisance for the good denizens of Planet Interweb. Rarely a day goes by when you don't get a badly worded email from a bank you aren't a customer of asking you to give up your personal data for some spurious reason.

This week it's the turn of HM Revenue and Customs, or at least phishing villains purporting to be HMRC. Warnings have been issued about the actions of a shadowy organisation that aims to drain our bank accounts of all our hard-earned cash without giving it a second thought.

The Round-Up's still on about the phishers, by the way.

HMRC, which knows a thing or two about not being extra-specially careful with personal data, has learned of a new threat to our bank accounts, other than its own operatives.

It warns that "criminal gangs" are running phishing scams that promise recipients a tax refund.

Surely one of the meanest scams ever, the Round Up reckons: your joy at getting a few quid back from the taxman turns to tears as you get fleeced anew.

Incidents of the phishing email, which typically starts "Following a review of your fiscal activity you are due a refund of tax of £XXX", have reached the thousands this month. The scam works by encouraging recipients to give their bank or credit card details in order to collect the supposed tax refund - leaving them open to having their bank accounts drained and the possibility of ID theft.

HMRC said it has received more than 15,000 reports of suspicious emails over the last 12 months and it is now working on trying to disrupt the gangs.

Presumably, as soon as they work out how many of the emails are actually scams and how many are actually genuine offers from HMRC itself to give back some overpaid money. It does happen, you know.

Still no sign of those CDs, by the way...

Meanwhile, the policy train-wreck that is the ID cards scheme got even more painful this week after it was revealed that the scheme to hand out the cards to airport staff has cost the taxpayer more than £12m. The plan had been to make the cards compulsory but following a rather embarrassing climbdown the cards for airport staff are now voluntary. And considering that pretty much nobody wanted them when they were compulsory, the chances of anyone volunteering for the cards is pretty unlikely.

According to the Identity and Passport Service's annual accounts, published earlier this week, £12.4m was spent on the Critical Workers Identity Card (CWIC) scheme last year.

That comes after news that the cards will never be made compulsory for UK citizens and huge question marks over how effective the scheme will be anyway.

If only the government would admit that it too is sick to the back teeth of the project, that it's scrapping the whole idea and has listened to the demands of the public as well as security and technology experts. Besides, the debacle is doomed anyway if the Conservatives win the next General Election.

It's the press officers the Round-Up feels sorry for.

"We believe that we can now achieve the objectives of CWIC just as effectively where airside workers apply for them on a voluntary basis," one said hopefully this week.

Give it up...

Who keeps the internet from falling over? ISPs? Google? Cisco? Content providers? It's an interesting question and one which, happily, was answered this week.

The Round-Up had a vague idea it was a group of high tech superheros with names like WebserverMan and Domain Name Administrator Girl who would fight their arch enemies the 404 Monster and Poweroutage Man. And it is heartening to discover this is not actually that far from the truth.

In fact, the answer is crack teams of anonymous volunteers who keep the internet running through "random acts of kindness".

At least that's the view of Harvard expert Jonathan Zittrain. Addressing the TED Global conference in Oxford, where leaders from technology, education and design gather to discuss the state of the world, Zittrain praised the work of these unsung heroes working quietly to allow the web to keep working.

Zittrain explained that the delicate nature of the web was based on the delicate nature of Internet Protocol, which breaks data up into packets and relies on being transferred across the network by different organisations and entities.

He likened IP to a drink being passed along a row of people at an event. "Your neighbourly duty is to pass the beer along - at risk to your own trousers - to get it to its destination."

"It's like dark matter in the universe. There's a lot of it, you don't see it but it has a huge impact on the physics of the place," he told the BBC.

"It's like when the Bat signal goes up and Batman answers the call," possibly over glamourising the work of a few network engineers. The Round-Up wonders what the bat-signal for this group would look like - a badly configured router? A pile of network cables? A sandal?

Anyway, when you read your technology news make sure you doff your cap to the many shadowy, network paladins who want for no renown or reward but are responsible for making sure the web is there for you at the touch of a mouse button.

Thanks, chaps...

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