STAYING SAFE

I've just received an interesting email from someone called Loris Ayoub. Loris is publicising a book, snappily entitled "How to protect Yourself from Identity Theft, Internet Scams & Phone Scams" written by Brett & Deborah Christensen who publish the "Hoax Slayer" web site.

She has identified this blog (don't ask me how) as listing the site as one of my favourites and is asking me to promote the book which I am very happy to do. I have used Hoax Slayer many times to debunk social media stories which to any normal person couldn't possibly be true but manage to fool people anyway.

The book covers the following subjects and offers advice on how to recognise and deal with each.

• Do you know the six essential strategies for safe computing?


• Do you know how poor smartphone security can lead to identity theft?


• Do you know how scammers target people looking for love or work online?


• Do you know how to protect your information while shopping or banking on the Internet?


• Do you know how to help your elderly parents stay safe from scammers?


• Do you know how to recognise and deal with phone fraudsters?

To learn more about it, click on this link to the review.

To download the book, click on this link not the one in the review as it takes you to the Australian site.

Brett & Deborah Christensen

While we are on the subject of online hoaxes, I thought I would repeat some of what I have written about before which is the nonsense story that appears on social media such as Facebook.

Anyone receiving a story of doubtful provenance can simply type a description of the story followed by the word "hoax" into a Google search and something is sure to come up. You might think that as it's so easy to do, most people would before sharing a fake story. Sadly, that is rarely the case and my inbox, along with many others will find themselves bombarded with tales of religious festivities, social events, presentations and the like being banned because they offend Muslims/refugees/immigrants etc., etc., etc.

While this sort of stuff is regularly the preserve of neo-Nazi tabloid rags like the Express and the Mail, it's the publishing of this inflammatory rhetoric on social media that can be the most damaging because of the way it can spread so rapidly.

One of the most successful exponents of the art (if you can call it that) of spreading malicious rumours is a fellow called Joshua Bonehill-Paine. Regular readers of this blog will have heard me mention him on a regular basis. He publishes his own blog, or actually several, but all of the same ilk which is to make up completely fake stories, mostly with a racist, misogynistic or otherwise discriminatory content. It is quite easy to see that all these stories are fake, but people are taken in by them all the time.

One of his stories was about a pub in Leicester that, he claimed, had banned armed forces personnel in case it offended immigrants. This resulted in thousands of people threatening to attack the pub and staff working there. The Judge at his subsequent trial on a charge of malicious communication described him as "Moronic". 

Joshua Bonehill-Paine is many things but moronic isn't one of them. The Judge had nothing to say about the real morons, that is, the ones taken in by the hoax and starting a hate fuelled campaign of terror against a completely innocent victim.

This book doesn't deal with the obvious social media scams designed solely to be malicious and instead gives advice on those designed to steal you money, your identity or both and covers all types of scam including the now popular phone scam which are used by criminals to create false identities or to convince you to part with your money.

You can obtain the whole book for free if you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited or for a modest price if you don't. I thoroughly recommend it. 

IT'S A MYSTERY

I do enjoy looking at where referrals to my blog are coming from, both referring URLs and referring sites. I know I've covered this before but it's fascinating.

This weeks offerings include http://ashleydavidsonmarvellousevents.blogspot.co.uk/. This is a single issue page, written by a fellow called Barrie Trower, who is unhappy about a company called Ashley Davidson's Marvellous Events. This company, according to Barrie, booked him and his band for an even for which they have never been paid. Sorry to hear that Barrie, and for anyone wanting to read more, click on the link to the site.

I have no idea how someone went from that page to mine as there is no mention of it anywhere, but I get my hits where I can.

The next one is http://brainmaps.org/. BrainMaps.org is "an interactive, multiresolution next-generation brain atlas". I don't know how I've managed without one for so long. As with the last site, I have no idea how anyone would get from there to here.

http://jptrans.naver.net/ is just a blank page so again, I can't see how anyone could have been referred here from it.

Ditto this one http://com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox/

I'm also getting hits from various URLs which bounce me to a sex contact site. Very frustrating.

PEREGRINES OVER CROSSNESS

This is a picture I took a few days ago of one of a pair of Peregrine Falcons flying over Crossness Nature Reserve. You see them quite a lot.

blogger layout mysteries

I have been slowly getting to grips with the idiosyncrasies of the way Blogger organises it's page layouts. When you set up your page, you have a number of different options to suit your own taste. They are quite limited though and for those of us who have had some experience of using desktop publishing programs like Pagemaker, setting up you page in Blogger can be a frustrating exercise.

Then, if you decide later that you want to change the layout, it has a knock on effect on everything you have ever published. If you have set text to line up with photographs for instance, it can throw the whole layout out of alignment.

Fortunately, help is at hand as a quick search on Google with a brief description of what you want will generally produce a solution. It has to do with the fact that you are able to fine tune your page using the web page language HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).

Unfortunately, I don't do HTML so when I find a solution to my problem, I am given a set of instructions that I don't understand. To get round this problem, I simply copy the HTML code used in the suggestion offered on the web and paste in into my page. This doesn't always give me the result I want. 

What I am trying to say is, don't be surprised if my blog starts to look a bit strange over the next few weeks as I experiment with my page. The good part however, is that with using HTML, I can modify everything past where I insert the code so it doesn't bugger up all my previous entries.

connections

I was trawling through the internet looking for a cartoon to decorate another piece I was writing for this blog when I happened upon some work by Gerard Hoffnung.

His is an interesting story. Beginning with his escape from Nazi Germany to the UK as a small child, he later gained fame as a cartoonist, musician (he played the Tuba) and later as a broadcaster and public speaker. He died aged only 34 from a cerebral haeomorrhage.

This chance discovery led me on to a recording of a famous speech he gave to the Oxford Union in 1958. Entitled "The Bricklayers' Lament", it's an absolutely hilarious account of the story of an unfortunate bricklayer. The tale itself has uncertain origins, probably dating back to the Music Hall traditions of the 1920s but his was considered to be the definitive version.

It would be a good idea at this point to listen to the recording. You may well have heard some version of it either spoken or set to music but this one is the real thing. You can carry on reading when you stop laughing.

Sadly, you don't get to hear much about Hoffnung today which is a shame.

In any case, the tale was turned into a song called "The Sick Note" by Irish singer/songwriter Pat Cooksey. 

This song was then taken up and in some cases, recorded by other artists and resulted in a number of copyright issues eventually resolved by the Performing Rights Society London.

One of the musicians to record this song under the title "Murphy and the Bricks" was another Irish singer/songwriter called Noel Murphy. According to his Wikipedia entry, this record actually made it into the UK singles chart although  I haven't been able to find any other reference to this.

By co-incidence, I was having another trawl this week, this time through an enormous folder of old scanned negatives and while doing so, happened to come across some pictures I had taken at the 5th Cambridge Folk Festival back in 1969.

Folk music goes in and out of fashion and when out of fashion, as it rather is now, it's quite easy to forget how influential it actually is. In the 60s it was hugely popular and a number of famous people in the music business started out there. One of the artists at the 1st Cambridge Folk Festival was a young Paul Simon playing his song "Homeward Bound", written on Widnes Railway Station.

In 1969, I was serving as a Photographic Technician at RAF Wyton (home to most of the Royal Air Force UK photographic reconnaissance capability), situated between Huntingdon and St Ives in Cambridgeshire. The base had a very popular folk club with all the famous acts of the day performing there. One of those acts included Noel Murphy who brought with him a Scottish banjo player he introduced as "Shaggis". Noel Murphy had appeared at the RAF Wyton Folk Club before and said he always liked coming back because he could never remember leaving. We had a cheap bar.

Noel Murphy and Shaggis in 1969

Anyway, Noel Murphy and his sidekick "Shaggis" also appeared at the 5th Cambridge Folk Festival which is where I managed to get some pictures of them performing. Some of the sharper eyed of you will recognise "Shaggis" as being Davey Johnstone the guitarist who went on to find fame with Magna Carta and the Elton John Band who he still plays with today.

If you click on the link below, you can listen to a live recording of the Noel Murphy (without Shaggis) version of the The Bricklayer's Lament which he called "Murphy and the Bricks".

lack of connections

I tend to go on a lot about the idiots who share the obviously fake stories about Romanian immigrants kidnapping children from ASDA supermarkets (link here) or local authorities/schools banning Christmas in case it offends Muslims, etc., etc. (link here)

A similar problem exists with the equally daft, gullible idiots who send you those Facebook pages offering to show "shocking" images of fairground accidents/people being eaten by sharks, etc., etc. 

What actually happens is that if you do click the link, you are taken to another site where you have to register using your personal details. You will then be asked to fill in a questionnaire with the offer of a prize if you do. There is no prize of course, just another questionnaire. The result is you and anyone unfortunate enough to be your friend then gets bombarded with spam. Unless you are a champion idiot, then you will have given them your bank details as well so they can pay your "prize" into your account.

A good example of the stupidity of people was the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on games platforms over the Christmas period by an organisation calling itself the Lizard Squad. In order to carry out this type of attack you have to have control of a large number of computers. So how do they get control of large numbers of computers? 

Easy, all you need is lots and lots of idiots; you know the ones, they are the people who sent you the post about how a Wiltshire Church was being turned into a Mosque and all the bodies were going to be dug up out of the graveyard. Yes, those ones.

They are the sort of idiot who will go on line without having proper anti-virus software on their computer or device. They are the sort of idiot who will download pirated games and records from websites run by criminal gangs and then seem all surprised when they discover that they have been hacked. They are the sort of idiot who will open an attachment running a script which gives the details of how to claim your 8.5 million dollar prize from the Microsoft/Google/Facebook Lottery you never entered.

If you think that there aren't than many idiots, think again. To run a DDoS attack, you need to have control of tens or even hundreds of thousands of computers. The Amy Hamilton kidnap hoax was shared by over 250,000 people.

Here are a few simple rules to help keep you safe and also prevent the web being cluttered up with rubbish.

1. If it looks too good to be true, it is.

2. Never share a Facebook post which asks you to share it before Googling it first to see if it is genuine; there are a number of websites which regularly publish details of hoaxes and it's very easy to sign up to them. They will give you regular updates of recent scams and advice on how to avoid them. Most of the examples I have given in this piece come from Hoax Slayer. If you join their Facebook page, they will send you regular updates of the most popular scams to watch out for. Snopes is also worth visiting.

3. Install anti-virus software. If you are a real cheapskate, there are even some free ones about. They won't offer the kind of protection a paid version will but they are a whole lot better than nothing.

Free AV utilities include AVG and Comodo.

If you do think that your security is worth paying for, the only one to consider is ESET. I don't get paid for saying this. You can buy multi licences if you are running a number of devices and works on all platforms except Apple (there's a surprise). There is even a version for Linux if you are a serious belt and braces type person.

Flower power

A butterfly flew past me on Friday as I was tidying up the garden. It went past too quickly for me to identify it but it is a symptom of the exceptionally mild weather we have been having of late. Our Lavender is still in flower as is a Hebe hedge and we still have pots of flowering Lilies.

The BBC is reporting the results of a survey of plants still in flower on New Year's Day, in it they claim that instead of the usual 20 or 30, there are a record 368.

The latest weather forecast suggests that it may all be coming to an end soon so make the most of it while you can.

the jobcentre is looking for dossers

No, really. The BBC has reported that the huge and impossibly complex CMS computer payment and management system used by the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) is going to have a makeover. 

Unfortunately, the whole system still runs on MS DOS and it seems that nobody knows how it works anymore. They have decided to try and recruit someone who is still familiar with this old system. 

There are probably few people working in IT today who will ever have used it, or if they did, remember how it worked. I used to be able to do some limited programming in DOS once upon a time but would struggle to cope with it now and I could never take on a project this size. 

I know from personal experience while working for Jobcenter Plus that the bit of the system we used to process Jobseeker's Allowance claims (the Jobseeker's Allowance Payment System, or JSAPS for short) was amazingly complicated to use and that was just a small part of it.

Whoever takes this on is going to be very busy and the consequences of it going completely wrong 

are too terrifying to consider.

The Bonehead Saga

The next episode

If you are one of my regular readers you will be aware of the antics of one Joshua Bonehill-Paine (now calling himself Joshua Bonehill). 

He's back

This loathsome Nazi troll set up a website called The Daily Bale which posts fictional stories about how the country is being overrun by Communists, Jews, Romanian immigrants, etc., etc. Think of the Daily Mash run by Himmler and you get the idea. I published an article about one of his stories (seen here). This featured a painting of a South African child, stolen from the artists Flickr account and used to promote a story about an English child supposedly kidnapped by an Asian grooming gang from a shopping centre in Croydon. 

Another story about how a pub in Wiltshire had banned members of the armed forces in case it offended Muslims got him a community order after thousands of other morons who believed the story threatened the pub and it's staff.

If you want to see a prime example of his journalistic style, then this should tell you all you need to know. I do recommend reading it. I know I could be accused of providing him with publicity but lots of people listened to Lord Haw Haw and we still won the war.

It seems he is now back, with his new, slimmed down name and running another website calling itself 'National British Resistance'. His tactics remain the same however and one of his most recent stunts was to take a picture of a Church in Carlisle, move it to Wiltshire and then invent a story about how it had been turned into a Mosque and that all the people buried in the Churchyard were going to be dug up and moved. Despite the ludicrous nature of the story, it didn't stop thousands of idiots sharing it on Facebook though.

You can read more about this story here on my favourite hoax busting site. I suggest everyone should bookmark the site and refer to it any time they are thinking of sharing some idiotic story that appears on their Facebook page.

Water, Water Everywhere

Speaking of Facebook pages, I was recently referred to an article in the Daily Mail about the amount of salt in bottled water. 

This got me onto one of my principal grumps, which is about people who are fooled by advertising gimmicks and claims about products which are exaggerated or downright lies.

The bottled water industry is one of the most polluting in the world. Behind all the claims about purity, health and vitality and the pretty images of mountain springs, lakes and other scenes of a pastoral nature is a cynical, self serving business which manufactures a need for a product by using public ignorance about health matters and it's obsession with 'alternative' lifestyles.

Before any of you goes out and buys another bottle of water, please take a look at these links

http://www.businessinsider.com/facts-bottled-water-industry-2011-10?op=1

http://storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-bottled-water/

You will need to download the film from the webpage but it is well worth it. If it doesn't play properly in Windows viewer you may need to use DivX or Quick Time. VLC will work if you are running Linux.

London, where's that?

Episode 4

Recent stories about London posted on the BBC text news page.

5 men are travelling (it doesn't say how) from Brighton to Berwick to raise money for cancer research. They are not going via London as far as I am aware.

Welsh children have seen a drop of 11% in the value of their pocket money.

Man dies trying to recover a ball from a lake in Bletchley, Bucks.

New leisure centre being built in Flitwick, Bucks.

A £5.6 million improvement plan for a road between Slough and Maidenhead.

Recycling

Bexley Council Style

27 July 2014
last emptied 22 May