I have just received an official email communication from MBNA which contains the following text:

For your additional peace of mind, every customer e-mail sent by MBNA Europe Bank Limited, including those on behalf of its Credit Card Partners, will include your postcode:

AB123CD

(Obviously I have removed my real postcode there)

In what universe is a postcode considered a secure piece of information? This does nothing for my peace of mind since my postcode is not hard to obtain by anyone who feels like doing so. You do not need to be MBNA to have my postcode. There will be some people out there though who don’t think it through and now when they receive an email saying it is from MBNA (or a Credit Card Partner! And let me tell you I am on the edge of my seat over the kinds of Partners I could soon be receiving email from!) quoting their postcode they will feel just that little bit more convinced that it’s real.

If a service provider wants to alert me to something or pass on some information that they consider it worth proving their identity over, then either they need to use proper digitally-signed email (yeah right) or at least just tell me to log in to my account in the usual way (no need for a link!) and view the message there. Which is what my bank, smile does, and what Egg Money does, and what Paypal does. But not MBNA; they must be new to the credit industry!

And while I am all worked up over this, what is with the email coming from mbnaapply.co.uk!? Were the domains mbna.co.uk and mbna.com not enough? Oh and a third one to do the actual online banking through? Get a clue. You need precisely one domain name; you can use http and https versions of this, and by this means build up a consistent brand and identity which really does go some way to promoting peace of mind. All these stupid extra domains represent the people with good sense at your company being forced to bend over and take it from the muppets known as “The Marketing Dept.”

This kind of stupidity is a great way to encourage me to use your plastic as a balance transfer tool and nothing more.

(via Ed Falk)

This is deeply uncool. I’m hoping that Kevin just hasn’t realised the problem here (what if everyone did this to promote their products, as spammers promote their penis pills).

Unfortunately given my recent stance on Rob Levin’s abusive behaviour, in order to be consistent I now need to boycott Clerks II, which is a real shame because I was rather looking forward to seeing it.

D-Link: Don’t understand how not to abuse a public service, and then would rather use a metric fucktonne of lawyers as opposed to a nanoteaspoon of clue.

Ian, without dishing out any personal insults or anything, what it boils down to is that every (supplier|vendor) can make mistakes and have problems and therefore it is every (user|client|customer)’s duty to think about how that will affect their business.

So yes I would say it is incredibly unwise to store critical data in any one place that is so far removed from your own control. The beta webmail service of a large search engine company would be just one example of a bad place to keep the one copy of your vital data.

What is so very different about this example and say, buying all your Internet transit from one NSP? If people being able to reach your network is essential to your business and you buy all your connectivity from one NSP whose network then dies, you can sit on a blog bitching until you are blue in the face about how the NSP should have forseen this and built a redundant enough network to survive it, etc. etc., but in the real world any network engineer will tell you that you should have had multiple upstreams for redundancy purposes.

Equally someone who put a lot of business critical data in one remote place hosted by some other company (especially given it is likely that their data and their custom means very little to that company) made a foolish choice.

Unless redundancy and local control is inherently built into the service then it will never be suitable for (power users|big business), and this is one major reason why I will never use gmail.

resiak, don’t get me started!