Talk:Loss of United Kingdom child benefit data (2007)

Not News

There is no reason for this on the front page and it is not important to the world. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Rukaribe (talk • contribs) 13:04, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

There is a reason for it as it affects millions of people in Britain and people around the world might want to look at what's going. p.s there are other stuff that appear on the front page that is of little concern to anyone else somewhere in the world. User:Pathfinder2006 —Preceding comment was added at 13:30, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Image

Can someone supply an image of the HMRC building at Washington, as that was the location of the original foul up, not Nottingham? Yorkshiresky (talk) 23:25, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Without going into original research, what could this potentially mean?

Even if there are not references for this at the moment - what is the potential scale of this? What could the effects be? I'd like to get an idea of the magnitude of this from someone who knows more about this kind of thing than I do, whilst equally observing WP:NOT#FORUM, so that it could be added to the article later if proven true.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 06:01, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

same shit happened in the U.S. not too long ago. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.161.204.86 (talk) 07:52, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure that its worth having the opposition quoted so extensively when compared to the size of the article. Could we not just have links to comments that have been made regarding what the implications are. MLA (talk) 09:37, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

That would be just linking to news articles in the external links, which isn't the best MoS. Because the event was so recent it is difficult to select what is important and what is not. General practice seems to be to include a lot, and when time passes and that which is significant presents itself in the real world, then we can be selective in what we include in the article. Better too much than too little at this stage, I feel. SGGH ^speak! 10:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

I would caution against putting MoS concerns above neutrality though - I happen to disagree with a lot of MoS as much of the decision making there is for the editor rather than the reader but I do understand the value of direct quotes so long as a particular political spin is not the main thrust of the article. MLA (talk) 10:12, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

All that data on 2 CDs?

Hang on a sec. One CD-ROM holds 700MB. So that's 1400MB for both disks. Divided by 25 million. That's 56 bytes per entry. How can you get full names, addresses and bank details into 56 bytes? AJKGORDON«» 11:08, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

The reference (#1) used to support the CDs claim does not say explicitly that CDs were used. So I've changed it to 'computer discs' which is the word that's been used in official communications. Pre1mjr (talk) 11:44, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

They are disks, probably DVDs:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/The-Missing-Disks_W0QQitemZ150185957181QQihZ005QQcategoryZ16164QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

And it could even be hard drives. The information currently released gives so little to go on. At the moment you just have to take the word of Darling blown up by media spin. Not the sort of thing WP can report as hard facts... Dsergeant (talk) 11:55, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Data compression perhaps? personally, I'm wondering what "password protected" really means. If the data was say AES encrypted and a passphrase is required, then the data is likely to be safe no matter what. If the data was in a say an older version WinZip file with a password, it's fifteen minutes work to crack. Toby Douglass (talk) 12:03, 21 November 2007 (UTC)