On a scale of one to ten, PayPal scores ZERO for breaking every rule in the book when it comes to understanding security and how hackers go about their business. For such a large company, always being attacked, I would have thought that PayPal would have scored more than zero. It sent this email to me last night. Everything about the email is wrong, bad, stupid, and paves the way for hackers to have a field-day with PayPal customers.

See the email below. If we were to start with ten points, we would subtract 5 straight away for PayPal’s inclusion of a hyperlink in its email. First, never never never (to the power of 1000) NEVER send out an email to your clients and include a hyperlink in it. Because hackers and phishers and scammers will do the same, and say the same thing, and show the same hyperlink, except that they will trick users into clicking onto the hyperlink which will take them to another fake site that asks them to enter their details. This email from PayPal is asking customers to click on the link and enter their details: being the user name and password. This loses another 4 points. That’s nine down. The email should have simply said, go to your PayPal account and log in. It should NEVER have provided a link, because a phisher (a thief phishing/fishing for information about you) could have said and done the same thing, in EXACTLY the same way, except that the link would have gone to a fake site, asking people to log in, while stealing the user names and passwords. Wow, there you have it. What a simple way to gather user names and passwords. Now go shopping! Mind you, a client of mine alerted me to some fishy activity last year, so we wrote to PayPal, to do them a favour, and let me know about the fraud, and it was like talking to a brick wall. With evidence, an IP address, and hard-core information furnished to PayPal, they did not understand enough to know what we were talking about. And we were just trying to help them out. Our bad, as they say nowadays.

Furthermore, customers have been trained to believe that www.PayPal.com or www.PayPal.com.au are legitimate sites. However, look at who sent this note: It came from e.paypal.com.au.  Who is ‘e’. This could be anyone. When and how were we told that ‘e’ is a legitimate address for PayPal? What if next week it says ‘s’ and so on? So how am I to know if this is real or not real? By training customers to accept emails from anything.paypal.com.au, PayPal is training its customers to not ask questions, and to surrender their vital details on a site. Which site? Look at the yellow highlighted box below. It shows that the innocent http://www.paypal.com.au does not go there at all. It goes to https://email-edg.paypal.com/r… etc. So in the future, a phisher can con customers by showing the same email, and having the link go to something random like secure-edg.paypalnet.com.

And who has signed this email? A complete no body. A faceless useless company with no names behind it. And what is the reply-to? Look at the ghastly reply-to. PayPal has no people to monitor emails. It says so. It says do not respond to us. This email is not monitored. Well dear people at PayPal, if you can send emails, but cannot receive emails, get out of cyberspace, and stay out! How disgraceful. That’s another 628 points lost, so really, this email shows that PayPal has no idea about security, about the risks, and about how phishers and hackers operate. If you do not know how they do it, you will not be able to protect yourself, so we can hold our breath and wait for another massive headline and a note from the CEO which would say, ‘Dear PayPal customer, sorry about the debacle last week, we are reviewing all our security protocol… and other such rubbish.’ Well Mr or Ms CEO, review them now before you end up on the front pages. But that might require some foresight.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: Another bizarre story I must tell you is this lady in the US who is going to sue Apple. Can you believe it?

Host: Yes, I was going to ask you about that. Why is that? Because of an RSI injury?

Jonar Nader: Now, normally people sue their employers and say “look I am having trouble” now this lady said to her employer “look I am getting RSI I need to slow down” so the employer said “okay, stop working on this machine” she then went to the employer and the employer gave her special privileges and the employer sacked her. So she instead of suing the employer she went and sued Apple and IBM and said you guys designed very bad keyboard, and she originally only wanted to sue them for $50 000 and she thought it would pass very quickly, little did she know that such a precedent would never be tolerated by Apple and IBM and the whole thing escalated to her suing for $1 000 000 and the whole court case went on for weeks.

Host: Eight weeks.

Jonar Nader: Exactly, but finally the whole thing was thrown out.

Host: So it was thrown out and she didn’t get anywhere with it?

Jonar Nader: Oh, well, she did make a bit of money because Apple lawyers made a mistake and settled outside of court, just before the jury dismissed it, so she did make a bit of undisclosed money and they wouldn’t tell anyone. Which reminds me, wouldn’t it be fun to hold a competition on radio to ask people what a great thing would be to sue on, for example, the steering wheel, I wonder if we can sue Ford or somebody, God bless them, for designing badly designed steering wheels, imagine the precedent for that.

Host: Should it give you a sore wrist. So what did she get in the end?

Jonar Nader: Just a few thousand dollars.

Host: Oh is that all, to cover court costs. I have been speaking to Jonar Nader who is the president of the Australian Information Technology Society and also author of Prentice Hall’s Illustrated Dictionary of Computing. Thanks Jonar.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Host: Jonar you have just come back from a week long tour of Malaysia’s technology offerings. What did you notice about Malaysia? What were you doing there?

Jonar Nader: Just a business trip. The beginning of the year chin wag. What the tax department like to call a junk it, no not really, it was lots of hard work and I have only just recovered, and apart from the heat, gosh it was hot, and I tell you the conference rooms were so cold that people were literally shivering and so you go in and out of this fridge and then out into the heat. Flying in to Malaysia, I noticed the wonderful architecture there it was the most wonderful place to see all these buildings. Some of the nicest buildings in the world there, I think Singapore has some nice buildings there too.

Host: Malaysia has got the worlds tallest building doesn’t it?

Jonar Nader: Yes, it is called the Kuala Lumpa City Centre, KLCC. They are a twin tower, 80 stories, and I bumped into them on accident, I was walking past and I thought wow, it looks like a chandelier by night, it is like the worlds biggest chandelier. It is on a 100 acre site, it is a convention hall, a concert hall, there are hotels etc.

Host: Shopping?

Jonar Nader: Of course. And it has these double decker lifts to accommodate people, it has about 29 lifts, and it says on the brochure ‘this lift can take you from the bottom to the top floor in super fast two and a half minutes.’ But imagine if you had to do a full stop run. It would take another ten minutes.

Host: I hate that. Did you notice anything in terms of the Malaysian economy, now that we hear that the Asian economy is not healthy?

Jonar Nader: Well, as you know, in times like this there are wonderful opportunities. The poor people who are suffering do suffer a lot. I heard one business man say to another “hey, listen, you owe me $200 000″ and the other said “look, I just can’t pay you. So come into my office and take whatever you like and whatever is left over we will do a contra.” Because that is just the sad way it is. But if you are into property and you want to buy things, now is the time to buy it, because you have hundreds of developments that have become dormant because they have gone broke. It is a sad affair, but that is where the bargain hunters go and get the best buys.

Host: Last year Malaysia announced the multimedia super corridor. What was that about?

Jonar Nader: Well, Malaysia was trying to say, “how can we differentiate ourselves in the region, what can we do to become known for as far as this new technology is concerned” and the multimedia corridor was how do we develop a knowledge society, how do we develop an infrastructure, that can allow large corporations to develop products and software, multimedia etc? Well the government said, “let’s develop tax barriers and tax breaks and let’s alter the law, let’s make a commitment that we will not have censorship on the internet there, otherwise we will drive multinationals away, let’s offer certain protection on copyright, and let’s offer new laws on intellectual property and let’s go into partnership with some companies where we pay 51% of the development costs, so long as they give us back some of the royalties from export, and there are zero tariffs on exports and so on.”

Host: Are there any signs of it actually working?

Jonar Nader: Well, last year was it’s first year, it was still in the selling phase, they were just selling the concept and about 100 companies bought in on the idea and they are developing and some very major companies are on the advisory panel, I think Nec, Fujitsu, Motorola, Acer and others. This year is now the first year where they want to see the action, and the infrastructure is mostly developed, and would you believe the place that the urban development is actually taking place is a place like the silicone valley which is called Cyber Jaya. Unbelievable isn’t it?

Host: I don’t see Malaysia as being a place to have this super corridor, do people gravitate to being in Malaysia. I guess being a multimedia, it doesn’t really matter where the corridor is?

Jonar Nader: Well, India is very well known for software development, and Microsoft has just signed a deal where India is the first ever development site outside North American, and a few other countries around the area have been attracting. Because, for example, in India, if you want a PhD in computer science you can obtain or hire one at a third of the price of what you would have to pay for that same intellectual capacity in North America so if PhD’s in America are asking for $100 000, you can get one for $30 000 a year in India. So therefore, labour is cheaper and there are more people. For Malaysia’s super corridor to work, they need 30 000 knowledge workers, and these knowledge workers have to be versed in multimedia and what is called programming and programming languages. So it ought to be really a long term thing. And the fact that they are putting pressure on this and are expecting year two to be developing results, is really tough, because in two years to develop a full infrastructure is very hard. Why would you pick Malaysia? Well, only again, it is not quite the centre but it is quite near to everywhere else the government is less rigid then most countries over there, the people speak mostly English over there.

Host: What is this smart school’s program? Has that got anything to do with it?

Jonar Nader: Well, they are saying if we want 30 000 knowledge workers where do we start? Well they are saying let’s start with the schools, and there is a tender out at the moment, where the government is saying let’s pilot 91 high schools and let’s see if the young people are connected firstly to the web, that they have computer and internet access and teachers know how to teach the subject. And they are going through what we are going through here in Australia, how and when do you start teaching this? But of course I am of the opinion that you don’t just go out and start teaching computing, you have to get computer people interested in it. I mean we teach mathematics every day of the year, and we don’t end up with mathematics professors running the loot it is not so simple, but at least they are trying and have a vision.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: The lawyers themselves have kept us on the run for a long time. And they have got a reputation over the years of charging us for what? At the end of the day it is just information. We have often discussed the topic of the impact of law on technology and on society and now in some ways, we as technologists are saying it is now about time we discuss the impact of technology on law because the show is on the other foot. How it affects their business for example we had a speaker here today, Professor Richard Suffcons who came via satellite from I think from the UK and he was scaring them to death, he said ” you people might very well be disintermediated because what value do you add when you do what you do?”

Host: People might be disinter-whatted?

Jonar Nader: Disintermediated is the intermediary or the middle person or agent who in this case is a lawyer. A travel agent is a middle person; they sell you a ticket from an airline. What does a lawyer do? They give you information that they decipher from the torts or the statutes and so he is saying, if all you sell is information, why can’t we go elsewhere for it? What makes you think I have to go to you? I could go to the internet, to other countries, to people who aren’t even lawyers just people who know how to decipher the law, and that was scaring them somewhat and Sir Ivan Richardson, who is the president of the Australian Court of Appeal was here this morning addressing everyone and he said that the costs and accessibility are far too high and is calling for a review on that. Certain prominent speakers are certainly shaking the attendees in their boots.

Host: Are the lawyers themselves open minded enough to take advice from technology people?

Jonar Nader: I think that in the past they haven’t been and now I think that everything is coming through fear, because remember fear has been a fantastic seller in our history, and so they have the fear put into them and are now listening and asking questions all be it they don’t like the tablet that they have to swallow for example there was the communications minister speaking about frogs being produced in labs without heads and how the papers have already put down to produce humans without heads and what ethical questions that will raise if you can have a factory with bodies, non deplumes who can donate their kidneys, etc. And when you talk about what technology can do, the speed transaction, the globalisation, the cross boarder trading, theft and crime then if you are not up on this, how can you practice law if you do not know what it going to happen and the minister of communication said “you may think that things may have been going quickly for us, you may think that technology has been travelling quickly, but I will show you the graph. In my opinion, it is going to shoot up just like a vertical and your children will be in a whole new world.”

Host: So a bit of a wake up call for the lawyers.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Host: Now there is a new report to suggest that mobile phones can cause headaches?

Jonar Nader: Yes, you know, notice the operative word, the ‘a former chief’ not the ‘current chief’ I think he got sacked the moment he said it, he was a medical officer for Telstra and a medical consultant, his field is electro-magnetic fields, and he is saying, that mobile handsets do emit very low levels of radiation, that at first were thought to be safe, but on some people there is a biological effect that it may break that thresh-hold and may cause people to have headaches which may later cause other problems in the brain. Now tho, what he is saying is he needs more research. So on one hand I believe him and on the other I am unhappy because I am sure he is going to go to the government and say give me some money so I can be employed and I can research. And I can tell you that I hate these researchers who just take money.

Host: So we don’t know over how longer period at the moment?

Jonar Nader: No, we will need to research it. But he is saying, from his experience, that the electro magnetic waves do interfere. I mean we see it that basically we will have static electricity when you comb your hair and you put a comb near your hair again you see your hair move. Well there is something happening in mid air and why isn’t it happening right through your skin, and right through your brain? And that is quite possible.

Host: And this is even with the aerial up?

Jonar Nader: You still have this thing about the aerial. What, do you think that somehow this 10cms is going to deflect like superwoman?

Host: I have no idea. That’s what I was told. And do you think that now the phone companies are going to have shares in headache tablet companies as well and everyone is sort of going to be in on it?

Jonar Nader: Well isn’t that a good idea. See you’re starting to think like me.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Host: Virtual reality. It is the world of almost. Is that how we could describe it?

Jonar Nader: Things being almost but not quite. Yet their effect could be very real. So that you may be practicing or training or learning how to drive a car. I think that would be a wonderful thing in the future. I was driving home just the other night and I saw the most horrific accident. A car was actually on top of another car in a ‘T’ formation. Physically on top of it. Now I thought that through virtual reality, if we could teach young drivers what it really means to skid on ice, or what a spot of rain could do to a road or how breaking at a certain speed effects stopping distance. You see when you go to learn, you learn about all the safe things, like how to park, how to accelerate, you know, how to be safe. But to really handle a car, you need to be aware of its tolerances. So through virtual reality, as pilots do when they perform flight simulation. By the way, some flight simulation pilots have fainted when they have crashed their plane. I mean, that is how real it is. And we spoke about their 280 nano second delay causing them to vomit on the spot as well. So it is a very real thing that I think would be wonderful. So the first company that can give you full virtual reality car tuition and lessons, all be it at $100 a minute or something could still do a pretty good job.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: What is the function of technology? For me the whole function of technology is to create an advantage. You actually must have something created. Now an advantage is now in business. We call it the competitive advantage. But often, business people stop thinking beyond that revelation. They say okay well now I have a computer at the ABC and therefore now I am competing with every other station. Well, no, because beyond creating the advantage there is a thing called law of annihilation, you hire and MBA, I’ll hire and MBA. You buy a gizmo computer, I’ll buy a gizmo computer. So the window of opportunity is what we have to focus on. So when you bring a technology into a company you only have a small window of opportunity if you expect it to be an advantage. Most businesses cannot create that advantage so therefore they use computers to reduce costs. So we ask, are we implementing a computer to reduce a cost?

Host: Is it actually reducing costs?

Jonar Nader: Well, if it is engineered properly the answer is yes, and many companies do. But most companies don’t, because they somehow forget the training factor. It is a bit like when parents buy a computer and don’t buy a modem or they buy a computer and don’t buy software. Remember the good old days when software didn’t necessarily come automatically. They would just buy the computer and then say to the kid, ‘go on then, get an ‘A’ mark’. Like as if that was it. Now I often say that the technology itself for it to create an advantage has to be absolutely exclusive, powerful and definite. And I ask you to pause for a moment and think, which technology in this world today is exclusive, powerful and definite? And I can’t think of one beyond the atomic bomb. So therefore everything else has a process of annihilation and it is up to managers to work within the window of opportunity which in this industry slams very quickly.

Host: Wow. You have said enough to sit back on my heels and start thinking. Now lets listen to some music and I want to come back to another aspect of this conversation. Now Vervaldi is your next choice, does this just fall into that style of music or is there a specific reason?

Jonar Nader: Well partly because we are playing obo concerto in C, adargio. I studied the obo when I was a kid and when I actually realised I was breaking the reed all too frequently, it was $10 a pop and I couldn’t afford that all too often. And I also realised that anyone who plays the obo apparently dies early because it has such a strain on the brain, so I gave that up and took up the violin.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: Other things are happening in the world of digits so that information is also in digits. Let’s look at three things, he content, context and the infrastructure. If you look at a major newspaper in the world, they have those three things. The infrastructure is huge printing presses, photographers, journalists and everybody out in the field making the thing work. That’s the foundation, the infrastructure of a newspaper. Then up the ladder, we have context, meaning the medium, how does it come to you? It comes on paper. Glossy or otherwise, it is the way it comes to you. And then the content, which is really what we are concerned about; a newspaper’s main objective is content. Well, now in the future, organisations will have to disintegrate and decide where they want to play, they can’t play in all three. So you will have experts in the field of infrastructure, where they don’t worry about the content, they just do the infrastructure, and we see that with the telecommunications companies. For example Telstra and Optus don’t care about what comes through the phone line so much, they actually only sell you the phone line. ABC and people like that only care about the content. They have freelance journalists out there.

Host: So all the technology is about this transfer of information? Hence, the phrase information technology. It is starting to make a little bit of sense at the moment. Is it a threat to jobs as we know it? That seems to be one of the key elements of information technology, that it is drastically changed the workplace, the work role and the work responsibility. Is that going to be a social problem that we are going to have to deal with?

Jonar Nader: It is interesting that you use the word change and I think it is change, not obliterate. Now, when calculators first came into being, they were huge clunky things. Accountants were worried that their jobs would be out, and there were strikes back then. And when typewriters came in, all sorts of people worried about their jobs too, and true, it does do away with some jobs. Before I go into the world of digits and what jobs that will get rid of, let’s first notice although we have lost a lot of jobs on the productions lines, in dangerous places and in office environments, other new jobs have been created. The police now have computer crime units, which never existed and no one would have thought that you would have a whole police force around the world including CERN the computer emergency response units around the world coping with computer crime, a whole new industry. Doctors and lawyers have a whole new branch called ergonomics and IT specialisation in law and health. So new jobs are being created. So what’s going to happen in the world of digits, is that first you have to have what is called disintermediation. Disintermediation takes place when somebody is not doing their job as quickly as somebody else can do it. Like, gas use to come in a bottle and the person who used to deliver the bottle has been disintermediated because the gas can come straight to your home.

Host: It is a big word.

Jonar Nader: Yes, disintermediation is, and your objective as a business person is to re-intermediate yourself and find out what ways you can create a new virtual value so that there is value in what you are offering. Take for example the people who cut your ticket to send you overseas, a travel agent. They can very well be disintermediated if you can buy your own ticket from the airline.

Host: Which is a possibility.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Host: The Japanese have unveiled the first ever electronic pet. I think they are sort of motorised dogs or something. I suppose the good thing about these is that when you go on holidays you can just unplug them or turn them off?

Jonar Nader: Well there is build in intelligence into those so that if you do that you will come back with a dead pet. You see, it is called the Tamagotchi. Now the Tamagotchi must be treated like a real think and you must put it to bed at a certain time and you must feed it by playing with it and if you over feed it, it will get fat. It’s a small toy but it is the beginning of ‘hey child, you can’t have a dog because a dog is too messy and Japan hasn’t got the real estate to have dogs in the back yard, so you are going to have a Tamagotchi.’ These things will be the start. And for example what happens after that? What happens if you had a Vant?

Host: What’s a Vant?

Jonar Nader: A virtual ant, you will get the hang of this, watch this. What’s a Vish?

Host: A virtual fish

Jonar Nader: And a Vog and a Vat and a Vird and a Vouse and a Veg. I tell you, a Vum could be a virtual mum and a Vad, a virtual dad.

Host: And hence, the vet will do well, won’t they?

Jonar Nader: Yes, let em leave you with this quote. Ada Augusta Byron, who was the daughter of English poet Lord Byron, she was born in 1816 and when she was 27 she worked with Charles Babbage, whom we now as the father of the modern computer. She herself was dubbed as the world’s first programmer. She said “Computers can’t originate anything. They can only do what we order then to perform. Since computers cant create, they cant think.” And that’s what Ada Augusta Byron had to say on the matter.

Host: Well I am starting to have my doubts. Thanks for coming in. Jonar Nader, who joins us every Sunday night for a look inside the world of information technology.

Below is a transcript of the audio file.

Jonar Nader: What’s happening now is that pagers are having a whole new use like, cop this, you were talking before about a cleaner coming to your house and cleaning your home for you. We can rig it now so that your pager will alarm if your office door at home is opened, or if the garage door is opened. So much so that you can have your pager buzz if someone goes into your bank account and makes a withdrawal or if someone accesses your phone card, or your security numbers. So that a pager can help you become your very own big brother, so you can monitor your own assets and movements and things like that, and that’s where now there is a new birth. And offcourse DNA used to mean something else in Biology and Science now it means Digital Network Alert, which is an alert system for you and further more that’s you receiving. Pagers can also give out signals so that if you are being attacked you can press a button and the local police can find out where you are and where you are being mugged or whatever.

Host: That’s very handy. I look forward to using that.