Iain Ferguson reports on new merchant security standards being piloted in Australia.

Dan Farber reports on ten predictions made by Gartner analysts. Number 7 is particularly interesting:

7. Banks become primary provider of presence services by 2007 Presence services can manage your preferences, personal information and experience on the Internet. Gartner consider what it calls "one-click Internet" as essential to bringing convenience and mobility to the Internet. Microsoft (Passport), the Liberty Alliance, AOL, and Yahoo (among others) are vying for a piece of your presence--if not all of it. But Gartner's Claunch said that the future belongs to independent companies or financial service providers, such as the banks. Banks have had to deal with security, privacy and issues of trust for centuries, and that legacy is a particularly relevant in the digital age. Gartner gives the banks a 70 percent chance of succeeding in the presence business by 2007. I am not sure that we will have the standards and politics worked out by that time, but Gartner predicts that the banks will play a major role and adopt something like Liberty or Passport as the underlying framework for the trust broker business.