If you use prepaid for your phone or mobile broadband, it's handy to be able to grab vouchers without having to head to a retail store or use your credit card. After successfully trialling selling Telstra recharge vouchers via NetBank, the Commonwealth Bank is planning to expand that offering to include recharge vouchers for Optus and BigPond media services such as music and games.
One of the most basic rules of password security is to use a mixture of lower-case and capital letters. But that approach won't make any difference if you use the Commonwealth Bank's NetBank service, since it treats both as the same. In other words, as far as CommBank is concerned, Password1 is exactly the same as password1 and PASSword1. (Those are terrible passwords anyway, but the lack of case sensitivity makes them much, much worse.)
The Commonwealth Bank argues that local branches aren't dead, customers want online access when they visit their local bank and that HTML5 apps are the way of the future. I pretty much agree on the last point, but I'm not so sure about the other two.
When the Commonwealth Bank rolled out its Android app in February, it copped a lot of criticism from Lifehacker readers (amongst others) for being not much more than a bookmark to the NetBank site. According to CommBank executives, that was largely due to security concerns, but the future of its app strategy will be centred on HTML5 rather than platform-specific apps.
