Money, made easy I was standing in the queue to pay at M&S food yesterday and noticed a leaflet for their new current account. 'The only trouble with switching current accounts is,' I thought, 'it's a pain.' And despite all supposed efforts to make it easier, particularly for business, this remains the case. All the more so now most of our payments are done electronically, so a change of account means getting the finance department of every client/customer to change their systems. And we know how good finance departments are at making changes. Yet we can switch mobile phone company, transfer our number and zingo! Calls still keep coming in. As long as you have your own URL, the same goes for email address - I've changed ISP twice, but my email address hasn't altered since 1994. So why can't bank accounts be like this? What we need is to model bank account access on the public key, private key encryption mechanism. In this clever security syst...

I have been the victim of a really shoddy bit of identity theft. Let me explain. A few days ago in the post I received two statements from a mail order company, one for more than £500 worth of goods, the other for more than £300. I had never bought anything from them in my life. I rang them up and it seems that someone had managed to slip through their anything but rigorous security checks. I'm really amazed that the company in question didn't have systems that could spot that this was a fradulent activity. They did a credit check on me to see if it was okay, but there were so many oddities in the application that it's bizarre nothing was flagged up. After all: Two accounts were set up for the same address (mine) on the same day One was for a Ms B Clegg, the other a Mr D Clegg, so neither matched me exactly for the credit check The date of birth given was wrong - again something the credit check should have picked up Two orders were place, each using up most of the cr...

Here's a true story. A few years ago, I was in London at a tube station. It was one of those with an office in the middle of the platform - I was probably 20 to 30 metres from the office. With nothing much else to do, I was watching a lively discussion going on through the office window. I was much too far away to see faces, but lively was certainly the word. Now here's the thing. I recognized one of the people in there, simply from the way he was moving. There were no contextual clues - this was someone I hadn't met for about 5 years, who had nothing to do with London Underground, or even central London in my mind. But I knew it was him. And when he came out, it was. He had been having an argument with the staff over something. So, why could I recognize this one person? A (as I shall call him) has a stunningly distinctive pattern of movement. It couldn't have been anyone else. Now, I'm not very good at recognizing people, in part due to short-sightedness and ...