Many other UK banking apps are limited to viewing your account statements and provide no additional features for managing your account and making payments.

Obviously it goes without saying that you need to have a First Direct bank account of some sort to use the service and be registered for First Direct internet banking.

The First Direct app has been designed very well, uses your same Internet Banking credentials and is very fast and sleek. All in all a great looking app!

[First Direct iTunes App Link]

Facebook has been down for most people for well over 12 hours. Facebook denied all knowledge around 10am GMT but finally admitted they were having problems around 2pm GMT. Still at 7pm GMT Facebook is still down.

Is this yet another in a line of DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service), or some other network failure or overload?

The podcast is usually about an hour long hosted by Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson (the security guru) and the guy behind Spinrite at GRC.com.

Steve talks about internet security every week, whether it’s about ARP spoofing (which can be pretty technical) to other things like what are the latest security alerts, security fixes from Microsoft, Adobe and other companies or just how browser exploits occur.

You can listen online at twit.tv/sn or subscribe to the podcast using iTunes and sync to your iPhone or iPod Touch.

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Security firm Intego however, is criticizing the inconsistency as actually being worse that if the feature hadn’t been included at all. A number of people have tested the anti phishing feature, some people were getting warnings for sites that others load just fine with no warning.

All that seems to be clear is that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. This is clearly more dangerous than no protection at all, because if users are under the impression they are protected they will be less careful about which links they click.

The anti-phishing database is updated on a user’s iPhone via the charging/syncing process in order to preserve battery performance and prevent hidden data usage on cellular networks. Apple spokesman, Bill Evans, told The Loop. “After updating to iPhone OS 3.1 the user should launch Safari, connect to a Wi-Fi network and charge their iPhone with the screen off. For most users this process should happen automatically when they charge their phone.”

The report notes that the entire anti-phishing update must be downloaded in order a user to be protected, which likely explains much of the inconsistent behavior seen in early tests of the feature.

The upside is your car is pretty secure and although you’re told not to leave valuables inside cars, they’re still safe. The downsides are the high price they charge you. Most of the council run and NCP car parks charge around £25 for over 12 hours car parking. Bearing in mind that most people that might try to drive into London will get there early and leave late (like I do), the price they get is a good solid £25 per day.

The original bug demo is still available on You Tube for anyone wanting to take a look. It’s good to see Apple doing some good work here as I can confirm that the bug has been resolved in iPhone OS 3.1. Good news for those of you worried about the security implications of this bug!