US company to vouch for Australian identities in new e-Passports?

Later this year, US company Cybertrust will be vouching for your Australian identity when you present an e-passport at international airports.
And the International Civial Aviation Organisation will be verifying that your passport was issued by the Australian government.
That appears to be the upshot of this weeks news that Australia's new e-passports will use Cybertrust's public key infrastructure (PKI) to secure the micro-chip that will be embedded in the document.
The new e-passports, developed to meet the increased security requirements of the US post September 11th, will have a digital image of the passport owner embedded in the micro-chip.
And a public key will also be programmed into the chip, so that the e-passport reader machines at international airports will be able to verify both that the image data has not been altered, and that the picture is of an Australian citizen.
In practice, this will mean that the e-passport reader machines will look-up a Cybertrust database to verify the passport data.
Australia is fast becoming the 53rd state of the US it seems.

Dead sites/pages die too slowly

Dead web-pages and out of date information are a curse on the web.
For my upcoming annual review of payments gateways down-under I've stumbled on quite a few surprising dead sites and out of date pages.
For example following the link www.eway.com.au to stgeorgebank include at least two sites/businesses on
their list of preferred partners who are, if not dead, then certainly no longer alive under those names.
To start with www.Vaultx.com.au and www.starpay.com.au are no more. It has been absorbed back into www.eway.com.au
I'm sure that I've got some out of date info on my site as well, but I somehow expected better of the St George Bank and its subsidiary Bank SA.

Melbourne IT is a popular domain name registrar for spam crooks at myprivateregistration.com

Last week my email inbox had yet another unsolicited financial scam, this time pretending to come from the brother of a Japanese diplomat killed in Iraq earlier this year.
A little quick checking showed that there is no web-site associated with the domain used for the email address (bkysconsortium.com).
Moreover the domain name itself was only registered on the 12th of August, with whois records suggesting that the person supposedly registering that domain has an email address at myprivateregistration.com
But once again there is no web-site at www.myprivateregistration.com and the domain is also very new.
The give away however is the claim that the person who registered this name at domain name registrar, Melbourne IT, is said to be none other than Merlbourne IT Ltd.
Yeah, sure, and my mother has three legs!!!
Indeed it seems that myprivateregistration.com is a very active financial scammer, with the same email contact associated with scams at www.invest3life.com and www.papyal-com-cgi-bin.org
What is the betting that a quick check will reveal Melbourne IT is once again the registrar for these oufits.
It would seem that Melbourne IT's checks on the identity of people registering domain names is non-existent.
You can claim to be anyone from anywhere and they just don't care, as long as you pay the associated fee.

Australians to get chip-based ePassports

Todays announcement that Australian passports are soon to include a micro-chip that will store an image of the passport-owner is not unexpected.
But it will be interesting to see how it works in practice.
The image stored in the chip is intended to be of a suitable quality to be usable in facial recogntion systems.
But what does that mean, and how do you tell, just by looking at a photograph, whether it is suitable for sue in facial recognition systems.
Australia has, of course, been experimenting with facial recognition systems at one of its airport with reputedly very mixed results.
Not only do the growth of mustaches and facial hair upset the systems, but so too do five o clock and other shadows.
In any event, as authentication for both off-line and online identity becomes ever more important to ecommerce and egovernment, these practical questions are going to be ever more important.
Thats why I've already registered to attend the seminar on ePassport security and identity being held at the Note Printing Australia works in Craigieburn on the 22nd of September.
Full details of the free seminar are up at www.noteprinting.com
See you there

Phishing attack hits National Australia Bank

NAB sources tell me yesterday's phishing attack has failed to have any impact at all.
Only five customers are known to have keyed in their details, with some 300 customers
phoning in to alert the bank, and 50 odd sending in emails.
As one NAB exec put it, "most of our customers are aware of these things now."
She said that the email didn't contain a trojan, and that it had originated from
Servia, via a domain registered in London.
"Most of our phishing attacks come from Eastern Europe" she said.

Victorian public transport smart card update

Victoria's $494 million public transport smart-card ticketing system will apparently use the same technology as does London's public transport system.
Sources who should know tell me that the contactless smart-card system will display the account balance of your card as you pass through the turn-stiles.
These sorts of details are unusually scarce at the moment because of the controversy over the tender.
As readers may or may not be aware, the Sun-Herald published details of the penultimate bids lodged by the various contenders. And the winning company, US based Keane consulting, did not have the lowest bid.
The whole business has now been referred to the Victorian Auditor-General, because clearly the tendering process was not carried out with proper confidentiality.
And in the wake of that the winning tenderer, Keane, has clamped down very tight on speaking to the press.
They'll only do it via a PR company, with questions required to be submitted in writing in advance.
So details of the system that Victorians are going to get have thus far been very scarce.
However I've learnt today that what we are going to get is essentially the same as what Cubic Transportation Systems have installed in London.