Your Wife Photos Attached
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been getting several e-mails every day with a title of “Your Wife Photos Attached” and just a zip file enclosed. My ISP marks them as spam and as I’m careful, I have never opened the zip, so they have been no threat to my computer until now.
As a widower though, who sorely misses his wife, I don’t like theses messages.
So finally curiosity got the better of me and I this morning I decided to find out what the zip files contain.
I don’t recommend doing this, but if you are careful it is a perfectly safe procedure. I copied the zip file on to an SD card and then transferred this to an old laptop, which is unconnected to the network and the Internet The laptop also has nothing of value on its hard drive, except gigabytes of nothing.
So what did the zip file contain?
Just an image containing a Russian web address, that if you typed it into your browser would give you access to cheap Viagra-type drugs. They would probably be cheap, but useless fakes.
So from a computing point of view they would appear to be safe at present!
But never take the chance of clicking on one of these zip files. Someone will start distributing ones, that are dangerous rather than just annoying!
Java Problems
I’m having a few problems on web sites that run a lot of Java. Nothing serious, but my computer tends to lock and I find that I have to reboot once a day or so. What worries me though, is that friends have also reported problems. There also seems to be threads in web site forums saying that some flavours of Windows, add-ons and Java have interaction problems.
I think that it is livable with, but I have stopped updating to the latest version of Java.
WiFi on East Coast
It seems to be working fine and was a very easy connection.
Follow Me On Twitter
For the next few days, I shall not be posting too much, as I’m travelling without a laptop. You can follow me on Twitter. My ID is VagueShot.
A New Test for Autism
This report on the BBC shows the way that modern medicine is going. I know that I don’t suffer from autism, although I’m a bit weird, but then programmers are a lot of the time. These sort of scans though, will help doctors sort out stroke sufferers like me.
Let’s hope the medics and the programmers, who work with them keep going!
They have had one of the researchers involved, Christine Ecker, on BBC Breakfast this morning. She reckons that soon they will be able to use the test with children. They have even developed a quiet non-claustrophobic scanner, so children won’t be frightened.
I am very enthusiastic about this test and feel it will have other beneficial effects. Obviously, as the research techniques get better and we know more about the brain, they will benefit people like me, who have had strokes to those with more serious brain problems or injuries.
I also think that C, my late wife, would have welcomed this test. She was a barrister and most of her work was with families, divorce and children. She said to me many times, that childen with things a like autism and ADHD, put a tremendous strain on the marriage and often caused the break-up. Sometimes, that strain was caused by the difficulty of getting a diagnosis.
Hopefully, this test will reduce those problems and might even help couples to stay together!
Benefit Fraud and Daisy
My software, Daisy, has been used several times to combat mass fraud.
It was used to check winter fuel payments by the DSS. They drew a chart based on Surname and Post Code. In some cases they found severalclaimants at the same place. Some were genuine as they were old peoples’ homes, but others were fraud.
The software was also used to check student loan applications. I’m not saying how, but there was a large amount of multiple applications from people, who were never seen again.
It is possible to set up a system, where a large database of claimants for benefits or grants is analysed and then split down into groups, say based on town, post code or street. These can then be e-mailed as individual Excel spreadsheets to the fraud investigators responsible for that area.
I have just set up my mobile phone, so that it can post to Twitter. If you want to follow me on this, my user name is VagueShot.
Viruses on Smart Phones
It is being reported that smart phones are now being targeted using apps that contain trojans and viruses.
This is just another reason, why I stick to my Nokia 6310i.
It is now ten years old and may be a bit battered like me, but it sends texts and hey, it makes phone calls too!
I can drop it, which because of my stroke, I frequently do and if I go away for a few days, I know it will stay charged long enough, so I don’t have to take the charger.
A Clean Internet Cafe
I’ve used Internet cafes all over the world from Morocco to Istanbul and from Naples to the Gambia.
There are certain characteristics that they all share; cigarette and other smoke, filth, surly operators and crap machines. Except possibly the one in Marrakech, which was kept spotless by a headscarfed and hennaed young lady of impeccable manners, who found it uncanny that my web site had pictures of me on it.
But this one, the Keystone Cafe, just up from King’s Cross Station has none of those nasty characteristics. The machine is a bog-standard Dell and even my typing isn’t that bad. Saying that I just hit the dreaded Windows key and got into a mess.
The Shambles of the Regional Fire Control Centres
NuLabor wanted to bring in a set of nine reginal control centres for the fire services across the country to replace 46 control rooms. That was the theory, but read this article in The Daily Telegraph, which details the shambles. The buildings are ready, but the software is not, so they are just standing idle and costing about £1.5 million a month.
I was alerted to this by an article on the BBC local news about the unused centre at Waterbeach. The new government is now saying that councils can opt out of the new centres. In a way, that is compounding the problem.
Surely, one of the main reasons for having a network of identical centres, is that this woulds mean that if say an operator had to move say to another part of the country, they could then be reemployed if necessary at another centre without retraining. I once met a doctor, whose wife was an ambulance controller. When he had moved to Cambridge, she had taken a year to be retrained because all the systems were different. That is rediculous, as we need standard systems for fire, police and ambulance all over the UK. I have heard reliable reports of Chief Constables, who want the best system money can buy, as long as no other force has it.
It should be one size that fits all! As an aside here, when we designed Artemis, there was essentially one system, that could manage projects ofd all sizes. You just specified it with bigger discs and more terminals for larger projects. But then we knew how to design systems properly so they worked. When I see the words government and computer system, because of my bad eyesight, I always read it as a gravy train to disaster.
So these fire control centres should be got up and running as soon as possible and if they are late then the contractors should be liable for the losses. I suspect though, that that is impossible, as the idiot who specified the system and wrote the contract forgot to put in a penalty clause. He or she should be fired! But they won’t be!
