Industry is fighting fire with firewalls, reports Paul Rodgers

Judith Palmer investigates poets' toenails and other mysteries

Blunder over Barclaycard application highlights doubts about accuracy of credit-vetting agencies

Secret messages on the Internet

Sir: I am surprised to see your leading article "Spies show their intelligence" (2 October) comparing the US government's encryption proposals to Cold War intelligence gathering. No foreign power or international terrorist is going to deposit decryption keys with a third party, or use software that insists on this. The only people who will do so, and hence the only people who can be spied upon, will be law-abiding citizens and corporations in friendly nations.

Mobile pager companies are to hold an urgent meeting to discuss security measures next week after the revelation that hackers monitored messages sent to aides of the Labour Leader, Tony Blair.

Encryption sounds complicated, but is merely a dressed-up version of the secret codes that cloak-and-dagger types have used since Roman times. Plaintext, or ordinary language, is put into ciphertext, which is any kind of combination of letters and numbers.

Yesterday was a bad day for (2859,433-1). Listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest-known prime number, it has been knocked into numerical obscurity by (21,257,787-1), a monster of 378,632 digits which has been proven prime by a computer at Cray Research, Wisconsin. It would take about 12 pages of this newspaper to print out the number in full. The old record-holder would have run out after about nine pages.

So many hackers are using the Internet to try to break into sensitive American military and civil systems that the United States government is about to create an expert team to counter "cyber-terrorism".

OPINION: Internet traders are being held back by scare stories about credit card risks, protests Nick Rosen

A child's earliest years are crucial in determining how it relates to other people for the rest of its life. From birth to the age of 10, the blueprint of our emotional responses is laid down. In this guide, we look at the effects of unmet early needs in later life. It does not take neglect to cause emotional wounds, just the knocks and blows of life. But experience shows that a defence against a childhood vulnerability can be played out again and again in adult relationships. Our instinctive reactions take the form of either an emotional `fight' or `flight' response - neither of which will succeed in getting us the love we crave. The good news is that we can change. By acknowledging our fear, and bringing our rational minds to bear on unconscious stirrings, we can choose to behave differently and thus create a `conscious marriage'

CHARLES ARTHUR

JOHN WILLCOCK

Hundreds of people have complained to the Data Protection Registrar that Child Support Agency staff have been wrongly handling and disclosing confidential and sensitive material.