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Every year at the Infosecurity Europe conference, the organisers try to get the pulse of the local population by seeing how easy it is to coax their secret password information from them. Previous years had 70% of the respondents giving up their information for chocolate, this year it was theatre tickets.

Of 200 people who were surveyed in London on their thoughts about theatre:

• 100% provided their names upon request
• 94% provided pet’s names (common passwords) and their mother’s maiden name (common second form of authentication) when told actors frequently use both to create stage names
• 98% gave their address in order to receive a winning voucher.
• 96% divulged the name of their first school.
• 92% provided their date of birth and the same number supplied their home phone number

What good is spending $thousands on security when people give it up this easily!

The lowlight of the week must be tonight’s American rewrite of The Office. Now I haven’t seen it but every British sitcom that’s been adapted to the US screen has been a complete disaster; Coupling and Men Behaving Badly to name just two.

The highlight has to be the new Dr Who episode this weekend. All over the UK people will be watching from behind their sofa just as we used to as kids.

Bummer of the week has to be that I’ll be here in the US unable to watch it. Hopefully someone will DVR it and push it out for us to download. Not that I condone such illegal activities of course!

Back from my trip home, had a very good stay with my family and especially my mother. Out of hospital only 4 days after surgery, she is almost as if she had never had any symptoms. And we almost had to tie her down to stop her from running around the house. It was great to see her back to her old self after the previous visit. Hopefully she will be able to keep the previous symptoms away for a long time; she’s a fighter.

Coming back into San Diego late last night I enjoyed the first uncomfortable landing (outside of my own!) in a long time. High winds, low cloud and heavy rain made it for a bumpy last 20 minutes. Much to my delight we flew over the airport (not that we could see it) and did a 180-turn to land to the east. I could feel the cross wind pushing us north and we made a great crosswind landing. Now, some time I want an east bound takeoff so that we takeoff over the city, I think that would be a trip.

Charles and Camilla are set to wed in April. If he ever becomes King (doubtful), she will have the title of ‘Princess Consort’ rather than Queen; that title is reserved for Prince Edward. I am sure there are lot of people in the Church of England who are unhappy that a divorcee is getting remarried (oh, the humanity!) and so they are having a civil ceremony in Windsor Castle. I haven’t received my invite yet, but you know how slow that trans-atlantic post pigeon is.

In sport news, there is talk of ressurecting the Home International Championship. As a kid I used to look forward to this tournament of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The games between England and Scotland were always classics and when they weren’t, you always had the fighting to watch instead. It would be good to see them played again, though I’d probably have to pay $20 a game to watch it on PPV.

And, finally, if you haven’t yet eaten check out this sorry story of a woman who has been jailed for ripping off a guy’s testicle and trying to swallow it. Don’t try this at home, kids.

We all tend to think of America and Great Britain as technology-aware countries but there are very definite areas where they disagree, or where one is far behind the other. I am always reminded of this at a petrol station. In the UK there is a huge awareness, and campaign about, the dangers of using a cell phone when pumping fuel. The feeling at home is pretty much that if you dial a number within 10 feet of a pump it will blow up. Over here though, that doesn’t seem to be an issue at all. There are no warnings about it on the pumps and most people I speak to haven’t even heard that it might be dangerous to use a cell phone at a petrol station. Given the American sense for over-protection it makes me think that the danger has been over-hyped in the UK though clearly it does exist (there are plenty of episodes of people being set on fire by igniting the fuel when their cell phone goes off), but why is it almost totally ignored over here?

Sigh, I am getting some comment spam again. Not much but enough to annoy me.