Robin Wilton's esoterica

I flew in to Heathrow's much-maligned Terminal 5 on my way back from Tokyo at the weekend. In most respects T5 is... well, an airport terminal. At the architectural level, it's neither depressingly awful nor heart-swellingly amazing - though the multi-story car park ground-side of the main building is unusually hideous even of its type. Strangely, as the entire purpose of the terminal is to process a massive flow of people, the building's layout itself helps very little, and needs constant signage to tell you where you're supposed to be going (in its catastrophic opening week, this was one of the major obstacles for travellers and staff alike). It's good to see, at least, that in terms of flooring T5 has moved on from the frankly horrid carpets of its older siblings.

The most spectacular failing of the opening days was in baggage-handling, with a backlog of 19,000 bags, some thousands of which were trucked to Milan to use the (working) facilities at Malpensa. So it was with some dread that I surrendered my suitcase to the check-in staff at Narita and, 14 hours or so later, descended in the hope of recovering it, Lemminkainen-like, from the Tuonela of Terminal 5... [Apologies if my Finnish grammar is not up to scratch... that should probably be Tuonelasta or something... ;^)]

There are lots of information panels in the baggage retrieval area. This meant that none of the crowd of waiting passengers had trouble seeing that there was a backlog of 10 flights-worth of bags for which the collection carousel was not yet known. Not a cheering sight. Then it turned out that it wasn't the baggage-handling system that was down, but the information system... so our cases would emerge OK, we just wouldn't know where. Also, the PA system wasn't working, so a lone BA staff member was spending her Sunday trotting up and down the baggage hall shouting out the flight and carousel numbers whenever she could glean them from her intercom. "Tripoli, carousel 7", she would yell, "Athens, carousel 4"... and, like a well-worn refrain "cancelled flights: baggage on carousel number 9".

Poor sods.

As it happened, our baggage arrived with roughly normal promptness.
You may be wondering what on earth this has to do with Hazel Blears' PC... well, only this: you would have thought, given the incredibly high-profile failure of the T5 baggage system in its first weeks, that BAA and BA would have flung resources at it so that either nothing went wrong, or if there was a glitch, hordes of back-up bag-men would swarm in and sort it out manually. But no.

Likewise, you might wonder - given all the damage to the government's reputation as a reliable custodian of sensitive data - what on earth might prompt a Minister to store restricted data on a machine in her constituency office, despite data custody rules which forbid it. There may, of course, be a perfectly rational explanation... I couldn't possibly comment.

Interesting blog post by Uri Rivner on the Finextra Communities site. He notes a recent RSA report that "Software as a Service" (SaaS) principles are making their way into the underworld of online fraud, and predicts that within 18 months there will be sigificant use of 'hosted malware servers' as the basis for Trojan software attacks. And there I was thinking that, anecdotally at least, it was the porn industry which was usually the first to achieve large-scale subversion of any given new technology.