2012 Olympics Security to be Chosen by Sponsorship

denebian devil writes "In an Editorial/Blog at ITPRO, Davey Winder writes of a keynote speech at Infosecurity Europe by Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt. In this speech, which was about the IT security demands of running the 2012 London Olympics, Derek Wyatt MP dropped the bombshell that IT Security at the Olympics will hinge not on which companies show themselves to be the best in their field or to have the technology that best meets the needs of the Olympics, but rather on whether or not the companies were a 'major sponsor' of the Olympics. So who has bought their way into being the security experts of choice, and with whom our security and that of the visiting millions will rest? Visa."

Comments

This should be good

[Hoi Polloi]

I look forward to seeing guards dressed as Ronald McDonald and Mayor McCheese handing out the medals.

This should not be a surprise

[rbanzai]

Business goes to those who spend the most money. It is not based on ability. Why? Because there is no accountability on either end of the process. Unless a company is threatened with the possibility of personal punishment for corporate stupidity then there are only rewards for this kind of system. If a business suffers or fails due to this kind of dumbness those responsible will just get a job somewhere else and leave the mess to someone else.

Re:This should not be a surprise

[Lumpy]

In the news tonight the Microsoft security teams missed a bomber at the Olympics village that killed 32 olympians.

Microsoft said they will be issuing a patch next tuesday to fix the problem.

Duh, it's the olympics.

[EveryNickIsTaken]

This should surprise nobody, as the olympics themselves are typically given to the city that spends the most $$ and bribes the most IOC officials.

Re:Duh, it's the olympics.

[MightyMartian]

Why anyone bothers with this nationalistic jingoistic drug-fest is quite beyond me. There bringing the whole show to Vancouver in 2010, and we the local taxpayers are on the hook for all the cost overruns. Most of us won't be attending anyways, so the whole thing is a real joke on the unlucky souls who get to foot the bill.

If they are going to have this stupid over-blown sportsfest, then why don't they just build a permanent facility, say, in Greece (that funny place where it actually began) and then fire every one of those corrupt, worthless bastards in the IOC.

Re:Duh, it's the olympics.

[eln]

That's a little unfair. Hosting the Olympics can totally transform a city's economy. After all, look at what's happened to Sarajevo since it hosted the Olympics in 1984!

why is this on slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

This impacts none of you nerds. Everyone here has asthma.

Zonk, please stop misrepresenting via headline

[rbanzai]

Zonk, your persistent use of misleading headlines to stir up the posters is unprofessional. This is only the latest in a long string.

Your headline says "2012 Olympics Security to be Chosen by Sponsorship" and with security such an issue of course the reader will at first believe that it is PHYSICAL security in question.

You know damn well this is not the case. I am just one of the many who want you to start showing a little class and write headlines that accurately reflect the story, not the inflammatory fiction that you would prefer.

This is a technology site and this is a technology story. To fancy that it is anything else is an extravagance on your part, unprofessional and in the end, juvenile.

Re:Zonk, please stop misrepresenting via headline

[rbanzai]

It does not free him from the responsibility of writing an accurate headline instead of one he has written to deliberately misrepresent the content, his frequent approach. For a recent example check out this whopper: "HP Stops Selling Printers, Starts Selling Prints." (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/19/16920 8)

Of course HP is not going to stop selling printers. But why let that stop him from writing a headline to make the story seem far more significant than it really is? Instead of letting the story stand on its own merit he needs to cook it.

And no, I'm not going to filter out his stories because I reserve the right to challenge him every time he does it, watering down one of my favorite websites with his bungled content.

Re:Zonk, please stop misrepresenting via headline

[radtea]

Eh, c'mon, this is Slashdot, what do you expect? First-class journalism? Pfft.

I expect headlines that aren't outright falsehoods, which a large number have been recently. Sometimes they just repeat falsehoods in the linked stories ("hot ice burns!") but they are often the pure fabrication of /. editors, who apparently believe that "news for nerds" means, "headlines that lie".

One of the things that distinguishes nerds from normal people is that nerds have a low tolerance for falsehood. This is why we don't have any friends. The technology we work with every day has no sense of humour. The system of 19 coupled differential equations I am banging my head against right now doesn't care how I feel or what I think: the only thing that matters is that my code--and my math--is exactly right.

This is the way nerds approach the world, and we have nothing but pity for people who are so stupid as to put anything ahead of truth, because we know that the truth is what moves the world. Everything else--however deadly or destructive it sometimes can be--is just the transient flailing of sad little people who want to put their fantasies in place of reality.

Re:Ah, Smell that?

[k1e0x]

No its not, its Corruption.

Corporations are an affront to the free market. Governments have allowed rich people to create legal fiction to protect themselves if there business were to do something questionable. Laws allowing people to incorporate and receive such special protection are wrong and not part of pure Capitalism.

What if something does happen.. So you think the "security company" will be head accountable for providing poor security? Unlikely.. maybe the CEO will retire with a large payout.. err.. I mean "step down" .. In a pure capitalism society that man would be liable not the fictions corporation.

MOD PARENT UP

[rockout]

I, for one, get Slashdot stories via an RSS live bookmark on Firefox, and I don't know that the headline refers to a story at it.slashdot.org - I have to agree that Zonk's headline is extremely misleading, as when I see "Olympics" and "security" I immediately assume the headline refers to physical security.

Re:Millions of infections

[plover]

I still maintain that Visa is responsible for killing advances in credit security, rather than their current wrong-headed PCI approach to "enhance" them.

A decade ago, Mastercard came up with the Secure Electronic Transaction (SET) protocol. This protocol cryptographically ensured the security of credit card data, and was designed to be implemented in hardware at the retailers. Each one of those PIN pads is capable of participating in the SET protocol.

Visa killed it, because it rendered them irrelevant.

Visa itself isn't a credit lender. Visa is a commercialized industry group, very similar to the RIAA, providing a common badge to paste on the front of thousands of banks, and a common mode of operation for those banks. When you get a Visa card, it looks and acts like any credit card from any of the member banks. That's important because you (and the merchants you shop at) trust that if your card has a Visa logo that it will be honored. Back in the late 70s, that was vitally important because most credit commerce was conducted off-line. But now that we have ubiquitous electronic networks and everyone authorizes credit cards before accepting them, that logo means almost nothing. Now, it's a question of "does the merchant trust that they'll get paid?" The Visa logo lets the cashier know that his store does (or does not) trust the bank on the other end of the transaction. It assures the merchant that yes, this Visa member bank will pay them. But with a fully online transaction, the payment could happen automatically and securely. The merchant wouldn't care where the card came from, since the authorization went directly to the customer's bank, and their bank transferred their money instantly before the customer even walked out the door. There would be no need for intermediaries to skim their transaction fees for operating a special bank-only network, as the secured transactions themselves could take place over any public network.

This would have killed Visa. Instead, they swept SET under the rug and we've been dealing with phony cards and ID theft ever since. Now, they have a program called PCI-CISP, and it's used by Visa to deflect the blame to the merchants for leaking stolen data.