Tectonic Pate

…I’ve actually been putting together a very rough (but better than it was) Wordpress site for my ju-jitsu instructor, whose class I’ll be leaving when we move next week.

A work in progress - most of the text has been copied from the old site.

Astonishing pre-Photoshop eyes.

There’s an story over on  National Geographic about the life of an Afghan woman made the cover of the magazine (and several books) back in the days of the Soviet occupation. The photographer is the alternative Kevin Carter – he hunted her down in the Tora Bora mountains (where Bin Laden is purported to hang out) to find out what’s happened to her since.

Not only is it an engrossing story, it’s one of the first pieces of journalism I’ve read about Afghanistan for a long time that actually helps me understand a bit about what life is like there. Well worth a read.

You try to do someone a good turn, and look what happens...

I don’t know why this offends me any more than regular spam, but there’s something particularly low about registering with altruistic giving-stuff-away site Freecycle just to spam everyone who tries to use it.

This mail, or variants thereof, has popped up in my inbox several times today. We’re relocating to Shoreham-by-Sea next week, so are in the middle of clearing out all the stuff we haven’t used in the two years since we moved to Melksham. As you’re no doubt aware, Freecycle is a lovely way to do this.

Every thing I’ve posted gets a quick reply from this lady, ostensibly from someone Esther Simmons. Now it happens I may know an Esther Simmons – at least a Mrs Simmons whose first name I’m not sure of – so it took me a couple of reads to figure out what it is.

It’s a crude, but no doubt highly successful, piece of social engineering spam. Written colloquially to lull you into a false sense of security, full of mea culpa to get you to click on a link for a Freecycle-like community (’If only I’d known about this other site, I’d never have thrown good stuff away”).

The cunning part is that it tries to allay your fears that the link is going to ask you for personal details. The quote from the email is: “(I seem to recall they are advertiser supported so you may have to stick in an email or zip code or something to see what they have available)” Too people out there won’t even mentally flag this as a potential phishing attack, even though the writer isn’t sure which country she’s in. I mean, zip code? Really? You couldn’t even write a piece of spamming code that was geographically aware when posting to specific local groups? Go back to spam school, you lazy spammers.

–Update

I may have underestimated the spammer slightly. The return address (@wellnessresearch.info) is a nice touch compared to the usual random letter assortments. Makes it seem safe and respectable doesn’t it?

Mr Chuffy looking happy

I really should learn to look in the local paper more often. This morning I took Tabby to the local Christmas Fayre, having seen the sign for it in a car park last night. It consisted of a hot dog stand and this chap, who was advertising train rides for children’s parties or something. Needless to say, Tabby was slightly disappointed, and terrified of the train (because of the dog. She is wise and knows the truth about wolves in the living room).

Had I read the paper before hand, I’d have realised the majority of the Fayre was actually indoors, in the town hall, and that if we’d gone in the afternoon, she could have met Santa.

I’d also have noticed this story about a handsome young journalist from the area who got through to the finals of the Guardian International Development Competition (who, by the way, didn’t win, but did get published, which makes him happy). Wonder why they didn’t call me for a quote?

Invisible Children, a US charity that started out helping child soldiers in Uganda and pretty much defines how to raise money Web 2.0 style, has another brilliant video up on its site. It’s a preview of a new Fairtrade-style clothing and apparel range called Mend. An impressive venture in its own right – for some reason ethically sourced clothes are still hard to find these days – it’s worth checking out just for the video.

He's very good at getting his old connections back.

There’s one important detail that people are missing in this whole argument about ISPs to policing traffic and suspending the accounts of filesharers. One small factor which should render the whole debate null and void. Same goes for the idea that everyone who goes over a certain bandwidth cap should pay extra in order to renumerate struggling musicians who may have had their songs pirated. Not a great plan, Muse-man.

Small businesses.

It’s quite important, if you’re a business of any size or shape, to have an internet connection these days. Apart from the obvious roles of email, e-tail, instant messaging and file swapping collaboration in getting absolutely anything done, the biggest growth market in telecoms right now is Voice over IP. Telcos are falling over themselves to give away high quality, wide bandwidth, voice-ready internet connections at cut down prices to small businesses for two reasons. 1) They can, because they’ve all just (or are in the process of) upgraded their networks to ‘next generation’ fat pipes. 2) If they don’t someone else will.

Seriously, if you’re a small business, you can get an unlimited, guaranteed and traffic-prioritised broadband connection for a tenner a month. For £22 (+VAT), you can get an all you can eat package that includes WiFi hotspots and an IP phone bundle that charges just 5p an hour for calls. If you’re running a small business and haven’t looked into this yet, you probably should. You can get consumer accounts cheaper, but not much.

Now, here’s the question. Are ISPs supposed to be monitoring all business traffic for excessive and illegal usage as well? And will they be applying the same sort of tough love when it comes to disconnecting them. Or, as is more likely in my opinion, will they leave their most lucrative and sensitive market the hell alone?

Even if you could stop just anyone signing up for a business account – and that would be yet an another regulatory nightmare on top of simply spying on consumers – the government is really pushing the concept of homeworking at the moment. It’s far more efficient and healthy for a company to pony up for one of these cheap but rock solid business packages for an employee who wants to cut down on their carbon footprint and get back a bit of quality of life, they say.

So what happens when sales reps are banned from the net for a couple of years because their kids ripped a couple of Lily Allen’s singles? Think the CBI might start getting involved?

The thing anyone involved in the proposals to cut off pirates should remember is that ubiquitous, cheap broadband is here to stay and any plans to enforce copyright restrictions simply can’t get around that. I’m no economist, but the costs of policing such a system must surely come close to anything the music industry is realistically losing, and still be unworkable, because the internet doesn’t differentiate between a consumer and a business.

Debate the ethics of filesharing and the damage/benefits it brings to bands to your heart’s content. But any public money spent on drawing up plans to withdraw internet access is just a waste.

There’s a few stories about the hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in the Midlands, not far from where I grew up by the sounds of it, doing the rounds today. My brother in law metal detects just down the road. He’s very jealous. But he did forward on the link to really incredible images of the hoard.