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Posted: November 14, 2017 |
Verizon’s report – which offers insights and recommendations on best practice in protecting health-related private data – is available here. The ship is a year from completion, so there is plenty of time yet to bin it for a more up-to-date and secure version of the venerable operating system.The Ministry of Defence is not returning our calls, but this could always be, as one reader says, “comedy wallpaper on a technician’s laptop...”You can check out the BBC News report about the Queen Elizabeth here. The XP wallpaper makes its appearance at 1m 25s.A 47-year-old who posed as a 13-year-old girl in order to extort more than £40,000 from paedophiles was sentenced to nine years in prison earlier this year.Lee Philip Rees, of Marlborough Road in Roath, Cardiff, was found guilty at Cardiff Crown Court of 31 counts of computer hacking, distributing indecent photographs of children and blackmail. He was sent down in June. Rees had been placed on probation for possession of indecent photographs of children back in 1989. He was arrested in 2011 after his wife, from whom he was separated, and her new partner passed his laptop – along with their suspicions that it contained indecent images – to the police.The scam, as Rees admitted, involved pretending to be a teenage girl in chat rooms to bait paedophiles. Rees tricked his victims into downloading a remote access tool along with a video. Through this, he planted obscene images on their machines and took screencaps of it before threatening to forward their personal details to local schools and the media. He also maintained a website where he published his victims' details.Although he was arrested in connection with the scam in 2014, Rees went on to blackmail a further victim while on bail, according to the South Wales Evening Post.Police reportedly found conversations in which Rees had boasted of his extortion and encouraged others to "paedo hunt" – despite, according to Wales Online, a psychiatric assessment having concluded that Rees himself was a paedophile. Rees described the extortion money as a "fine" but shunned the cybercrim currency of choice by opting for Amazon vouchers instead of Bitcoin. He would demand payments of between £25 and £100. Additionally, he described himself as being very close to a family in Thailand, to whom he would send roughly £500 a month.Sentencing Rees, Judge Eleri Rees – who is not related to the convict – said: "Having read all of the evidence and, in particular, the chat logs, I have reached the conclusion that you derived much enjoyment and satisfaction in controlling and manipulating these individuals, preying on their fears and extracting for yourself significant financial gain." Something for the Weekend, Sir? My underwear smells of bacon. The idea, I think, is to make carnivorous members of society salivate in the unlikely event that they should ever bring their faces into close proximity of my shreddies.Unable to test the effectiveness of this theory "in the field", as it were, I am forced to take it on trust. That said, I can confirm that the effect on vegetarians, membership of whom includes Half Life Wife, is significantly different, if hardly unexpected. I imagine that anyone would react the same way as HLW upon encountering bacon-scented underwear: to express their distaste using the classic Gonnabee-Hugh method.“What the hell? They smell like... oh my god I think I’m Gonnabee-Huuuuuuugh...[pant pant spit] Huuuuuugh... [etc]”Those of you who have a fetish for this kind of thing might wish to avail themselves of such porcine-perfumed pleasures by picking up their own stinky grundies for just $19.99 a pair.However, I should warn the less foresighted, not to mention olfactory challenged, among you that there might be a teensy design fault in the concept: once you pop the skid-catchers in the wash, the piggy pong will be dramatically reduced, if not blessedly removed altogether. Removing the smell from one’s smugglers is, after all, one of the principal project outcomes you come to expect from putting them in a warm cycle with a scoop of Daz.This is frustrating. Surely the manufacturers must know that even those of us in the IT trade put their clothes in a washing machine from time to time. It's as if they knew the product was destined for imminent ruination and yet it was all part of their evil plan. In order to maintain the consumerist cycle, they want you to break stuff.
Once the initial humorous "Wake up and smell the bacon" gag – and I emphasise “gag” – has worn off, your twenty-dollar chundies will end up the same as all the cheapo manties you bought from the supermarket, except with a large picture of a strip of bacon incongruously printed on the front. And with crushing inevitability, you will be forced to store them away in the bottom drawer along with other embarrassing undergarments you have acquired over the years, such as that basque you bought for the wife but never had the courage to show her and the novelty Y-fronts you ended up with after last year’s office Secret Santa – the one featuring a cartoon of a worm sitting on an angler’s hook alongside the motto “Girl Bait”.Is it really a design flaw, though, or just an acknowledgement that certain products are developed with the expectation that they won’t be used more than once?I only ask because it might help clear up an argument I’ve been having regarding Microsoft’s Surface Pro computers. Apparently, sales are doing extremely well. There is even talk that it is catching up with the Apple iPads in terms of market penetration and that Microsoft will be the fastest-growing tablet maker by 2019. Now, I happen to think they’re the best pro-class tablet you can buy while simultaneously being the worst. The problem is the usual one with all PC kit: I suspect it might not be built to last.Over the last 20 years or so, I have bashed my way through one desktop or laptop computer after another, hanging on to them right up to the point at which they explode or spontaneously collapse into a heap of loose components. And at the risk of upsetting the sensibility of many readers, I acknowledge that all the Apple Macs I ever owned have lasted at least three times longer than their equivalent Windows PCs.With the exception of the ghastly Computer Warehouse Mac-clone crap I bought out of curiosity in the 1990s, all the Macs that passed through Dabbs ownership are still working, many having since been donated and put to good use somewhere else. All my PCs, on the other hand, broke down at some point and ended up as landfill – except for their hard disk platters, which I use as coffee mug coasters at home. Two of those PCs I bought were dead on arrival, so strictly speaking they didn’t break down: they never even worked in the first place. One was so badly assembled that its heat sink had fallen off the processor, and during its journey by van to my office, it had swung wildly around inside the case, smashing the motherboard and PCI cards into multiple segments of razor-sharp green plastic.When the delivery man plonked the box on the floor, you could hear all the pieces jangling about like a bag of spanners. He was most miffed when I refused to sign. As he heaved the melodious box back on the van, he had to content himself with the thought that, one day in the future, he’d have the opportunity to purchase his own bacon-scented banana hammock.So while I have been sorely tempted to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro rather than, say, an Apple iPad Pro, experience has warned me that the former could be a short-term investment. One of my colleagues bought one and, although he thinks it’s brilliant, the bloody thing seems to spend more time in a workshop being fixed under warranty than it does in his own possession.
I want to be fair to Microsoft, so in the interests of balance let me say just this: either the Surface Pro or my colleague has not been assembled correctly.Building obsolescence into products is the bane of the modern age, but sometimes this has inadvertent benefits for the user. One example I noted last week was Belkin’s N150 router, whose built-in web server was said to suffer from a Telnet backdoor. Why worry, I thought, when you know that the router will stop working of its own accord after six months?No offence to Belkin but heck, what can I say? They might be lovely people but plasticky home network products sold at attractively low prices simply don’t last long. I'm embarrassed to say that I have bought my fair share of Belkin in the past and every single one ended up broken in under a year.As with my incorrectly assembled colleague, perhaps I am at fault. Perhaps I have just been unlucky, no doubt caused by not purchasing a twig of heather off that crone in Blackpool back in 1974. I had my chance and blew it. In my less enlightened days, I even owned a cheap pocket modem that used to drive me mad with connection problems right up to the day when it simply fell to pieces of its own accord as I plugged in a phone cable. It was if it had finally given up on existence altogether and decided to spontaneously decompose in my hands as a parting gesture of defiance.These days, I refuse to buy any network box of any type, even for home use, unless it comes in a metal case held together with screws.Besides, that 2019 date for Microsoft units to overtake those of iOS and Android tablets is suspiciously familiar. Isn’t that when Bladerunner is set? You know, the film about dangerous products that had a built-in four-year lifespan before self-destructing?Something for the Weekend, Sir? My underwear smells of bacon. The idea, I think, is to make carnivorous members of society salivate in the unlikely event that they should ever bring their faces into close proximity of my shreddies.Unable to test the effectiveness of this theory "in the field", as it were, I am forced to take it on trust. That said, I can confirm that the effect on vegetarians, membership of whom includes Half Life Wife, is significantly different, if hardly unexpected.
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