Strangely Perfect

I’ve been busy. I posted the details of a wacky con on the Crawling Chaos website (shown above). In a nutshell, it appears to operate thus: User searches for music or other media User is presented with search results, some of which point to Black Box Access User clicks on link and is told that [...]

Introduction A few days ago I got hacked.  I quickly ripped out a heap of dodgy files left by the hackers but for some days now, Firefox, my browser, while viewing pages on this website, has been saying that it’s “downloading data from tructuyenso.vn… “. .htaccess This, of course, was not actually happening, as I’ve put [...]

Massive Spam Hit Willie R Over the weekend, I received over 600 spams from someone called Willie R (with a number appended to the name) to my gmail account which I now use for my spam-trapping on an old email address that I use for registrations and the like…  See the screenshot of one page [...]

Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami Following this morning’s (using GMT) earthquake just off Japan (now set at 8.8 on the Richter Scale, but it keeps rising as more information is analysed), I noticed that the Google search page has a Tsunami warning for all to see. I thought I’d capture it for posterity. Enormity This truly [...]

WordPress Comment Spam The plague of all blogs is spam, mainly comment spam, by sheer numerical superiority. Q.  Why Do They Do It? A. As a minimum, they do it to open a back-door into your blog that allows the perpetrator to place reverse linkages to another website to increase that website’s visibility in search [...]

Free Windows Defragmenter Search Take this for a scam and a half way of fixing the Google search results! Today I was looking for an old defrag program, but couldn’t remember the name – so I went to Google.  That’s the screenshot on the right. The second result looked promising.  After all, the text says, [...]

What is the Best Backup for Windows in a Small Home or Office? Which Windows Backup?  A History. Over the years I’ve tried many systems for backing up crucial Windows data.  Currently for small-scale backups I use the ubiquitous and almost bullet-proof flash drives, my current one tipping the scales at 8Gb.  But for major [...]

Introduction I got a new phone and when synchronised with Microsoft Outlook, the phone numbers don’t dial out properly because of spaces & STD bracketing.  It’s an LG – the previous Nokia was great, as was it’s synchronising software! Solution I used VBA in a workaround via Microsoft Excel!  (If you don’t have Excel, this [...]

Students die in India as bus plunges into river The above headline is awful enough for the people involved, but in reality, it’s subject, a road crash, is common enough in my own country, the UK. What is really bad is how the BBC is reporting this.  They should know better but essentially, they’ve reported [...]

For no reason …other than a try-out and also the current anti-spam plugins miss the odd bit of comment spam, I’ve now switched off TanTanNoodles’ Spam filter and am giving WP-SpamFree another try plus another plugin, AVH.  I’ve left Akismet running regardless. WP-SpamFree This now promises a lot, so it’s worth another shot.  Two years [...]

Introduction Yesterday’s News The use of intercept evidence in courts in England and Wales is not “legally viable”, …the Home Office has said.  This is reported on the BBC here, Using intercept evidence in court ‘not yet viable’ Security From the earliest days of the British (English) Secret Service, back in Elizabeth I’s time, all [...]

Remove Referrals Information from This Website because of Malware Like many blogs, this website has displayed the last few hits (referrals) that it’s received as a kind of ‘live’ activity recorder and a small service back to the referring website.  However, I’ve had to pull this from my front page because over the last few [...]

PreScript Advice If you think you’ve had your bank ‘cleaned out’ by any of a multitude of ‘life cleanse’ or ‘colon cleanse’ type internet scams, there is only one real remedy… Ask for a charge-back against the company through you credit card company. Your reason, when asked, is that the company has either: Not adhered [...]

There’s something weird about the recent ‘leak’ of BNP members’ names.  The list is available on the Wikileaks website here: http://wikileaks.org/wiki /British_National_Party_ membership_list_and_ other_information,_15_Apr_2009 There’s currently some trouble with downloading due to server overload.  Also, people are complaining that the file is a binary Excel workbook containing several worksheets.  It’s about 1.5Mb in size.  I’ve [...]