The UK has said that it intends to refuse to register new diesel and petrol cars and vans from 2040. Lorries will not, at that time, be affected. It's apparently in a bid to reduce air pollution. Does the move from petrol / diesel inevitably mean a move to fully electric and if so what will happen to the toxic batteries when they die? And where does all the raw material required for all those batteries come from? Are we walking replacing current ecological disasters and and geo-political tensions with new ones? [Free content for seven days]
As if the crisis in retail isn't a sign that the global financial crisis, and the UK's part in it, isn't over, the news from manufacturing and other sectors of large-scale redundancies, non-renewal of contracts for term-staff and closures or restructuring of businesses in non-high street retail isn't enough, mailboxes are being spammed with one of the earliest signs of a financial crisis, threatening to ensure that recovery is a long way off. At the forefront is a spam promoting SAGA, the company that is supposedly the elderly's best friend.
The Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai often throws up things that seem like anomalies but after 14 years of doing it, the strange is becoming the norm. And it's that unpredictability that makes this the race where, so often, the season comes alive. This year was no exception: while loyalty would have had some fans predicting the winner, no amount of analysis of form of driver or team would have identified the winner nor the final result down to tenth place. It was a race of derring-do, bravery and magical overtaking by experts and dismal failures when others tried identical moves. Literally edge of the seat stuff with multiple battles...
This weekend has been an interesting weekend for spam, not the least of which is because such a large amount got through our first line filters: far more than usual. But they were all stopped at the second line of defence and as we trawled through the blocked messages, we came across several that were worthy of comment. One is that old chestnut, the United Nations scam; another is the latest example from a spam-house that now allows us to identify their server farm and it is particularly interesting because it appears to promote a scheme that fell under the bus when the British tax authorities began action in relation to that scheme...
We can't even be bothered to write about this amazing spam-scam. Just read it and weep - tears of laughter. Alexandra, supposedly at supportf@finditeasy.info, you are hereby nominated for a prize at the annual spam-scam awards.
In a notice issued by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority at or about 17:30 today, Hong Kong time, Carmen Chu, Executive Director (Enforcement and Anti Money Laundering) says "The adequacy of sanctions screening systems and controls is a supervisory priority for the HKMA, especially in the light of recent geopolitical developments." The notice is serious reminder to stored value facilities licensees that even though, mostly, the amounts involved are small, the regulatory requirements are not significantly diminished in some important areas.
It's the American dream: little lonely kid with only a handful of people who appear to like him talks with one or two of them and they come up with a geeky idea : let's put our college yearbook (a curiously American thing) into a database and let everyone in it tell everyone in it what they are doing, and let them read what everyone else is doing. Then, as the others, one by one, find out that the reason he's the little lonely kid is that he's a sociopathic egotistical self-absorbed autocrat, he ends up alone and somehow sitting on something that generates thousands of millions of dollars in share value. Then someone spills the...
We are now a further 24 hours into the chaos that was brought to our notice at about 13:00 hours GMT on 10th April when our Group websites began to do down as Names.co.uk started a process of migration of our websites. It is several weeks since Names.co.uk bought our previous provider and their actions have been incredibly disruptive leading to total failure of service to unreliability.
Following the business-crippling actions by Namesco Limited which attempted to migrate our Group's websites to their servers yesterday, after 12 hours we continue to have several sites down or cannot be reached and more with problems of one kind or another. We have been and continue to press Names.co.uk to resolve the problems they have caused but have no faith in their ability or willingness to do so. We regret the inconvenience to our customers and clients as a result of these failures which are entirely outside our control. The list below includes both our own sites and sites we manage. It is not exhaustive: we are still working...
It's amazing: the old 419 scam still works enough for people to persist in using it. From mail in envelopes via, in some cases, telex and then fax and onto e-mail, they just keep on coming. This one purports to come from someone working at Barclays Bank.
The term "asset recovery order" means one of two things: either
- where, in civil litigation, a party obtains orders to protect and ultimately return to their true owner assets which have been wrongfully denied them; or
- in criminal cases, the state obtains orders to protect and confiscate assets which have been obtained by criminal means. In this case they are rarely "recovered" in the true sense of the word.
We've had enough of spam from a group of servers that is being a serious nuisance. And they all have one thing in common: they are investment related, in one form or another.
Working on the assumption that, if all victims adopt this policy spammers can be at least a little frustrated, this is what we have written to the company hosting the servers because, by reducing the business the ISP can do, there may be some pressure to be brought to bear on them to prevent their servers being used for spam.
The single over-riding principle that makes cryptocurrency accounts attractive to criminals is not the supposed anonymity (that argument is a done deal except for those who don't know what they are talking about) but the fact that, by design, there is, literally, no single body or person with regulatory authority.
What that means is that, while governments and courts (at the behest of victims) can make Asset Recovery Orders, or, as the US government is trying to do with its listing on OFAC of crypto-currency accounts that it claims it has reasonably identified as connected to listed persons, these are after the fact restrictions and to try to enforce them is, by reason of the essence of the distributed ledger, only ad hoc....
This morning, I received, in one of my corporate mailboxes, a spam which is disturbing on several levels, none of which are relevant to the core arguments in this piece so I've added the text in a footnote for readers' information.
What is relevant, and not disturbing, is that it demands payment to a specific bitcoin account.
This is it: 1JXuMq6sbL95XnrcDEsrZTCvvRjB52RCAD.
Governments and others are focussed on the person behind the account. There is another way, says Nigel Morris-Cotterill
The return of the high-volume spammer and spammers who use proxy servers while using many different domain names means that the more common "block sender" spam control is less effective against them than against the relatively ad hoc spammer. But there is something you can do.
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