Posts by Spacebots

Something a bit phishy in your inbox? You can now email suspected frauds straight to Blighty's web takedown cops

Not working!

The automated reporting system appears to be broken. I got a phishing email this morning to one of my email addresses purporting to be from Virgin Media saying my account was about to be disabled due to non payment and asking for me to verify my payment method. So I forwarded the email and it bounced due to containing spam. I tried sending the email as an attachment instead and it still got bounced. Finally I sent an email asking how exactly we are supposed to report phishing emails, which went through but then got an automated email thanking me for my report.

So how is this different from The National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, [e-mail] which I've been forwarding all phishing emails to for several years now? They appear to be doing exactly the same thing.

It’s baaack – Microsoft starts pushing out the Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Working OK here

I used the manual Windows update last week for both my desktop and my wife's tablet after reading somewhere that Microsoft were recommending people do that because of some new bug or other. It did take longer than average but I didn't realise it was that October update again or I might have declined. Last autumn my desktop was totally bricked after installing that. It was fortunate I had a full image backup on an external drive or I'd have been screwed.

Fortunately, my desktop is OK this time other than one of my apps stopped working and I had to spend a few seconds reinstalling it. My wife's Win 10 tablet is also OK other than that every time she switches it on now, the wifi connection has been disconnected and she has to manually reconnect. I haven't looked to see if I can correct that yet but it's not a big deal She only has to right click on the wifi icon at the bottom right of the screen and left click on the "connect" button.

Edit: forgot to mention it is Version 1809 Build 17763.253

HMS Queen Elizabeth has sprung a leak and everyone's all a-tizzy

Fake news of the week

As a boat but admittedly, not ship owner myself, this sounds like the fake news story of the week. The thing is...................drum roll..................... stern glands always leak. Not only that, they're supposed to as the water leaking in both cools and lubricates the stern gland. If they leak too much, it's usually just a case of tightening the gland cover. When there is no more adjustment left, the gland has to be added to or repacked. It's routine maintenance and certainly not worthy of the panic stricken news stories in the media today.

Surveillance Capitalism thinks it won, but there's still time to unplug it

Nothing ever truly new

People don't realise how the surveillance society has been around for decades. It was going on even before the age of the Internet.

I recall seeing a documentary on TV at least twenty years ago, maybe thirty, about how Great Universal Stores had a database with details of every single citizen of the UK, including children. It showed how they could target advertising to people based on any aspect of their life, such as toys to families with children, music and fashion to teenagers, home furnishings and DIY to people who were potentially getting married and setting up their first homes, then looking forward to retirement as they got older.

Of course, GUS didn't just keep this information for themselves, it was available to other companies for a fee. A database like that was/is worth a fortune. It's a standing joke amongst myself and my friends who are all a similar age, how we all got a pile of posts from Saga, the moment we passed our fiftieth birthdays. That's because we'd all been tracked on a database for decades previously. There are children born last week, who will probably be getting similar communications in fifty years time. their lives will be continuously tracked from day one.

Scouse marketing scamps scalped £70k for 100,000+ nuisance calls

Re: Unicorn hunt

Interestingly, there are numerous legitimate uses for automated calling. I myself am signed up to the Environment Agency's automated flood warning service for the local river. Also, burglar alarm systems use it and automated fault warning systems for 24 hour on call maintenance engineers comes to mind too.

eBay threatens to block Australians from using offshore sellers

Re: Seems Resonable.

I think the limit is twenty pounds in the UK. My wife imports cheap jewellery from China bought via Ebay and sells it at car boot sales. We have packages arriving from China most days but it's very cheap stuff and we've never had to pay any duty. I did buy a CCTV system on Ebay last year, which also had a Chinese seller and was amazed to find it arrived next day tax free. That did indeed have a sending address at Heathrow. So yeah. It seems the money goes to China but the stock is held in the UK for fast delivery. On the other hand I was well upset when I bought a CD from the States a few years ago that was just over twenty pounds. The duty wasn't too bad at the usual 20% VAT if I recall correctly but the Post Office ripped me off for another eight pounds handling fee, which I think is borderline racketeering.

Virgin rolls out fibre to 1m

I've had the same broadband connection since 2000. Originally NTL World but rebranded Virgin Media, I've always gone for the fastest available connection and have never suffered any slowdowns. I've downloaded around 50 GB this month so far. Amongst other things. I use it to watch 4K streaming downloads from my Amazon Prime account and it works perfectly.

Virgin don't have any caps for most users. I think they DO throttle the upload speeds at certain times of day for people on the cheapest packages, which seems fair enough to me. It doesn't effect people on the higher levels of service and everyone can download as much as they want without any throttling.

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Itty-bitty pyttipanna

The dish in the last photo with the raw egg in the centre is surely "Salmonella Surprise" ?

Virgin Media's SPAM-AGEDDON 'fix' silences mailboxes

I've got two ntlworld email addresses, which are my main ones, plus six virginmedia ones I keep separate for various game logins. I've not had any problems with any of them. My wife on the other hand has just one ntlworld account for everything and was getting swamped with masses of spam emails every day for a few days last week.

I'm pleased to read this story here as we were both wondering if she'd accidentally given her address to some dodgy site. It seems not and I don't think she was still getting the same problem over the weekend, so maybe it's fixed. I hope so.

Sony PC owners to get Windows 10 upgrade as early Christmas present

Since I was in the Insider program and had no problems on my test machine, I had access to the ISO file on the first day and upgraded my four year old i5 powered Vaio laptop without a second thought. The upgrade went flawlessly. I think Sony are just covering their backsides. If you do upgrade and have a problem, you are free to restore the previous version of Windows for a month anyway.

I certainly won't be doing that. I have it on two desktops and two laptops and all of them work great.