Almost 60 per cent of Britons rely on the Internet to do their banking, according to new research commissioned by the Alliance and Leicester bank.
Surveying around 2,400 people, the study found that just under one-third (29 per cent) use Internet banking between once and twice per week, with just over one in 10 (12 per cent) logging on to their bank everyday
The YouGov survey revealed that there’s been a 63 per cent rise in people managing their bank accounts online since 2003, with balance checks proving the most popular activity (96 per cent) followed by money transfers for payments (76 per cent).
It seems that people still prefer to sort out complex problems by visiting the bank, and of those folks who choose to avoid online banking, over a fifth (21 per cent) said they preferred to deal with people face to face, with 13 per cent expressing concerns about security.
With this in mind, the Alliance & Leicester has announced that it will become the first UK high street bank to give all its customers two-factor authentication technology.
Designed to cut down on identity theft and online fraud, the two-factor authentication compels users to provides two means of identification.
This usually involves something that has been memorised by the user (like a password or special code) along with a physical device that generates random numbers or code.
With this security double whammy, hackers who have managed to capture the first pass code should be unlikely to proceed because the customer then needs to generate a new code to authorise online transactions.
The authentication technology will also be used to prove the authenticity of a bank’s Web site, and this should help clamp down on phishing sites.
The bank hasn’t revealed any further details yet, although it has said that the initiative would be a “simple and robust way” for customers to be confident that “their data online is safe from criminals.”
Other banks are also jumping on the security bandwagon, with Barclays running a new chip card reader trial involving 5,000 customers and staff, while Lloyds TSB is close to completing an exhaustive six-month test of a keyring type device.
The trial involved 30,000 UK online customers, with Lloyds TSB declaring itself well chuffed with the initial findings, which produced a healthy 78 per cent adoption rate amongst users.
Around 95 per cent of people using the device said they found it easy to use with the bank claiming a 100 per cent success rate in reduction of fraud among users.
Despite its success, Lloyds said that the current trial was more about testing consumer response to the technology, and it’s more interested in working to meet banking industry group Apacs’ universal security standard that will eventually be used by all banks.
As more banking activity goes online, the face of High Streets looks set to change forever, with the Economic and Social Research Council recently concluding that the rise of Internet and phone banking has led to more branches being closed.
The story we’ve 
The problem is that BT staffers are unhappy at being bundled in with the sale and have worries that long term they could see a reduction in the conditions they enjoy. One of their unions, the CWU, has now after balloting, threatened strike action, hoping to change BT’s management’s attitude to those described as ‘in scope’ by the potential deal.
Now to us here at Digital Lifestyles, this threatened action seems to have a bit of a King Canute/70’s vibe about it. The truth of the matter, is that the competitive landscape has changed in telecommunications and broadcasting. BT is answerable to their city shareholders, and a move to tackle some of the entrenched attitudes within the company’s workforce might be looked on favourably by the number crunchers around the London stock exchange.
Before you start reading this review, let’s get a few things straight.
And if you like your cameras to look mean’n’lean with big shiny lenses, all-swivellin’, flip-out LCD screens with hi-tech add-ons like optical image stabilisation and bleeping bells’n’whistles, walk on by.
Although this approach may not appeal to the point’n’shoot brigade, for enthusiasts fed up with the endless button pushing and dial spinning that comes with most compact digicams, this camera is a revelation.
Sadly, there’s no built in optical viewfinder, although the big 2.5″ LCD 210k pixel screen performed well in bright light and can also display a live histogram display.
The camera is one of the smallest digital cameras with ultra-wide angle lens, and fits easily in a pocket, measuring 107 x 25 x 58 mm (WxDxH).
Shooting in RAW and spending a little time in post-processing produced some stunning results, but shooting at low ISO/high quality JPEG should prove fine for most users.
Because of its niche appeal, the Ricoh’s a tough camera to unreservedly recommend, but for keen street/landscape photographers looking for a rugged, flexible, high quality camera capable of the very highest results, we’d put the GR Digital right at the very top of the list.
Big glasses-toting Buggles sang about ‘Video Killing The Radio Star’ back in 1979, but new figures from Ofcom suggest that the while Internet may not exactly be killing TV, it’s certainly giving it a bit of a duffing behind the bike sheds.
Industry pundits are collaring the Internet as the reason for this decline, along with DVDs and gaming.
Consumer broadband continues its exponential growth, exploding from zero to 10 million connections in just over seven years, with some 70,000 new connections being added per week.
You’re thinking of doing your own podcast, I can tell. You were getting all excited about the new generation of digital microphones.
Digital array microphones, however, are as good as the data stream they’re poured into. Imagine my delight to find that the default setting for OneNote audio recording is eight kilobits per second, mono. I found this out AFTER recording an Important Person at a press conference. I have no idea what he said; all I have is a recording of people coughing and creaking their chairs. I’m sure fellow-recorders have found the same.
The English version of Wikipedia has now notched up more than one million articles, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the fellas who run the free online encyclopedia.
Wikipedia’s reach is truly global, with versions of the encyclopaedia currently available in 125 languages, containing a total of 3.3 million articles.
With the million-article mark passed and the Wikimedia Foundation estimating that new articles are coming in at a rate of 1,700 new articles every day, our back-of-a-beer-mat calculation reckons they’ll be hitting 2 million sometime 2009.
Vodafone’s new high end 904SH (Sharp 904) 3G handset may look like any other twisty clamshell phone, but it has a cunning twist or two lurking inside its attractive, squared off lines.
If it likes what it sees, it will ask for the answer to secret question (already inputted), and if that’s correct the phone will be ready for use. Vodafone say the whole validation process should take less than a second.
Back to the phone itself, the design uses a smart flip and swivel screen with the large screen packing in a massive VGA display – that’s 480×640 pixels, the same resolution as old 14″ monitors! 
With all that gadgetry inside it’s not surprising to find that the 904 is a bit of a pocket bulging beast, measuring 104 x 50 x 28mm and weighing 151 grams.
The Big Six handset suppliers increased their rottweiler-like grip on the global mobile phone market, accounting for 84 per cent of all sales in Q4 2005.
There was a veritable tango of phone flogging going down Latin America way, with sales reaching nearly 102 million units in 2005, a maraca-shaking 40 percent increase from 2004.
Fifth Media have announced the forthcoming unveiling of their AXIA A308 PDA Phone, proudly proclaimed as the (deep breath), “world’s smallest PDA Phone on Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 featuring Wi-Fi connectivity.”
The all-important battery life is claimed at 4 hours talktime with the removable/rechargeable 1500mAh Li-Polymer offering 120 hours of standby time.
Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)