What Do Saudi Arabia, Russia and the Vatican City Have In Common?
According to tonight’s Evening Standard, they’ve all had diplomats arrested for drink driving in the last three years in London by the Met. Saudi Arabia had four, so I suppose it’s now alright for expats to drink in that country! In that time, 59 diplomats or their family members were alleged to have committed various offences, including fraud, robbery, rape and other sexual offences. One from Oman, even made a bomb threat.
But of course none were punished, as they all claimed diplomatic immunity.
Isn’t it about time, this arcane law was scrapped.
A Cable Thief Finally Wins a Darwin Award
After several attempts recently, like this one and these on the Central line in London, someone has finally won a Darwin Award in Leeds.
I know it’s sad when someone dies, but it does appear that in this case the electricity company involved has done a lot to make the site safe.
Visual Basic 6 Programmer For Hire
A couple of times recently, I’ve met people, who have said that my skills in Visual Basic 6 may still be needed, because in the City of London, there are still a lot of important systems written in the language. Hence this post, which is almost an advert to say that I’m looking for work.
At my age and with my hopefully sensible finances, I don’t need a permanent job, but old programmers never give up coding, even if they just do it in their mind. Living alone, I have plenty of time on my hands to spend with my therapist, but sometimes I feel I need to do something constructive. Even if it’s just to prove I still can!
So if anybody is in trouble and needs a good Visual Basic 6 programmer who still has most of his marbles, I’m here just north of the City of London, a short bus ride away.
On the legal side, I have complete sets of discs and manuals, so I would not be working outside of any licences.
The Unbelievable Case of the Hacking of Milly Dowler’s Phone!
I wrote a few months ago about how easy it is to hack many mobile phones. Basically, if your pin is still set to the factory default, the averagely competent ten year old can read your messages and do other things with it.
You could make out a case for some phones to be hacked, especially if a compromising or criminal scandal that has ramifications for us all is ongoing.
but no-one, and especially the editor of a newspaper or the child’d parents could sanction the hacking of the phone of an young girl, as appears to have happened in the Milly Dowler case.
Obviously, to hack a phone you need its number and the problem here is that I suspect that the average child has given their mobile number to dozens of friends and some have even posted it on-line.
But at least, it should be possible to find out the numbers of those, who called Milly’s number and when they did it. It should also be possible to find the number of the perpetrator of this horrendous act. But I suspect that the hacker would have used an untraceable number, from perhaps a pay-as-you-go phone that they bought for cash in a no-questions-asked shop.
There is only one sentence for newspapers that do this sort of thing, if it is fact proved that they did. And that is that they have to suspend publication for an appropriate time.
If you read the headlines of today’s papers, the tabloids mention nothing about the Milly Dowler case. In my view, this indicates that they all know a lot more about phone hacking than they care to disclose.
The Anonymous Widower 