I’m doing a live online chat today (Thu) with the CBC’s Book Club at 8AM Pacific/11AM Eastern/4PM UK. Hope to catch you there!

My latest Guardian column, “Promoting statistical literacy: a modest proposal” discusses the way that state-sponsored lotteries and sloppy financial regulation promote a dangerous kind of statistical illiteracy; dangerous because it subverts our ability to assess and mitigate risk.

For example, my own bank, the Co-op, recently updated its business banking site (the old one was “best viewed with Windows 2000!”), “modernising” it with a new two-factor authentication scheme in the form of a little numeric keypad gadget you carry around with you. When you want to see your balance, you key a Pin into the gadget, and it returns a 10-digit number, which you then have to key into a browser-field that helpfully masks your keystrokes as you enter this gigantic one-time password.

Don’t get me wrong: two-factor authentication makes perfect sense, and there’s nothing wrong with using it to keep users’ passwords out of the hands of keyloggers and other surveillance creeps. But a system that locks users out after three bad tries does not need to generate a 10-digit one-time password: the likelihood of guessing a modest four- or five-digit password in three tries is small enough that no appreciable benefit comes out of the other digits (but the hassle to the Co-op’s many customers of these extra numbers, multiplied by every login attempt for years and years to come, is indeed appreciable).

As if to underscore the Co-op’s security illiteracy, we have this business of masking the one-time Pin as you type it. The whole point of a one-time password is that it doesn’t matter if it leaks, since it only works once. That’s why we call it a “one-time Pin.” Asking customers to key in a meaningless 10-digit code perfectly, every time, without visual feedback, isn’t security. It’s sadism.

Promoting statistical literacy: a modest proposal

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be interviewing William Gibson, live and on stage for London’s Intelligence^2 event on Oct 4. Bill and I always have great conversations, and this one should be a lot of fun, since I’ve been bugging his old friends for interesting conversational veins that go beyond the usual. Plus there’s the fact that his latest novel, Zero History, kicked eleven kinds of ass (I hope that we will be able to enumerate all eleven of them, but I’ll settle for one or two). Hope to see you there!

William Gibson on ‘Zero History’

Thomas Gramstad sez, “I’ve started a web page with an overview of Norwegian translations of your texts. Norwegian titles in bold, English original titles in parenthesis. The list also includes some interviews with you and reviews or summaries of your work (when substantial).”

In a very short time, I will be launching my self-published short-story collection, WITH A LITTLE HELP. This is a complicated beast: there’s a free ebook in several formats; the paperback is a print-on-demand that comes in four different covers; the hardcover is a super-premium item in a limited edition. There’s a free, downloadable audiobook, licensed for easy inclusion in your podcast feed; you can also buy the disc. You can donate cash to me, you can also donate copies to worthy institutions that are seeking same. If you report a typo, I’ll give you a footnote on that page, and I’m also releasing a monthly status update giving all my income and outgo. There’s also a gallery of hundreds of scans of paper ephemera donated by writer friends for inclusion in the limited-edition hardcover.

Since 2003, I’ve used the same template, with minor tweaks, for each of my book-sites; it was designed by the amazing Mena Trott for my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and great as it is, it’s not quite up to par for this.

Which is where you come in: I’m looking for a quick-and-handsome template that is identifiably of a piece with the rest of my sites, but accomodates four covers, the downloads, the audiobook, the limited hardcover, the special reports, the gallery of scanned ephemera, the two donation methods…

Got any ideas? Sketches? Send them along and if I use your design, I’ll trade you one of the first twenty limited-edition hardcovers to come off the press.

Here’s the video of my Melbourne Writers’ Festival talk from last week, “Copyright vs Creativity”: