But define what you mean by “Security”…

I have many sisters (long story), but haven’t had any contact with the one who lives nearest to me for almost three years now.  Not a problem.

You, dear reader, need no more information than that to understand that I was somewhat surprised to receive an email from her a couple of weeks ago !

However, on closer inspection it became obvious that this email was, in fact, spam. I duly clicked on the appropriate button to inform my email host of the fact and thought no more of it.

Last week I received another, even more obvious, spam-mail which was using her email address and it received the same treatment.

But today I received a different email, again from her address, in what I consider to be a very business-like font, and I present the text below verbatim (with the exception of her email address) for you to read.

Subject: email account hijack

This email account has been subject to hijack, generating spam advertisement emails for iphones and electronic equipment.

To protect your email address from further abuse, the personal contacts list will be deleted shortly.

Personal email account holders: DO NOT OPEN ANY FURTHER EMAILS RECEIVED FROM THIS ACCOUNT. The account ‘xxxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com’ will no longer be used for personal communications to individuals. It will remain open for non-personal business communications only.

Please contact the user by telephone to obtain new email account details.

Sincere apologies for any breach of security which this unfortunate incident may have caused.

The first thing to note about this email is that (where I have put xxxxxxxxxx) her email address was actually mis-spelled by the omission of one letter.

The second thing to note is this…. the remainder of the header to the email…

From: My Sister (xxxxxxxxxxx@hotmail.com)

To: ………

… at which point, all NINETY email addresses from her contacts list were there for everyone to see and share !

Quote… “Sincere apologies for any breach of security which this unfortunate incident may have caused.“… Unquote !

DEFINE WHAT YOU MEAN BY “SECURITY” !

I assume that this problem is being sorted out by someone at Hotmail…. someone who has never heard of BCC … BLIND COPY !

What hope in hell does anyone have of beating spam when even Hotmail are plastering people’s email addresses around for all to see ?

Tip: For all of you who like to forward all those “funny” emails you get to lots of your friends, do what I do.

1. Set up a new contact in your contacts list (address book, or whatever it is called on your system), name it something like “Me Here” (literally !), and put your own email address in it.
2. When you want to forward something on to more than one person, send it To “Me Here” and BLIND COPY (not just COPY) it to everyone you actually want to send it to. (On some systems, such as Yahoo, you may have to click somewhere hear the header to open up the Blind Copy [BCC] option).

You will get an extra copy of the email yourself, but that is easily deleted and you are doing your bit to cut down on the number of email addresses contained in the email.

If you’re a real trooper and spam-hater you could also do what I do and, rather than just forward the email willly-nilly you could Copy the actual relevant part of it, without everybody’s email addresses and all the footers which are already in it, paste that into a “New” email, and then do what I explained earlier.

It only takes a moment or two.

Or is that asking too much ?

Who said “Honesty is the best policy” ?

A police officer pulls over a speeding car.

The officer says, ‘ I clocked you at 80 miles per hour, sir.’

The driver says, ‘Gee, officer I had it on cruise control at 60; perhaps your radar gun needs calibrating.’

Not looking up from her knitting the wife says, ‘Now don’t be silly dear, you know this car doesn’t have cruise control!

As the officer writes out the ticket, the driver looks over at his wife and growls , ‘Can’t you please keep your mouth shut for once??!!’

The wife smiles demurely and says, ‘You should be thankful your radar detector went off when it did.’

As the officer makes out the second ticket for the illegal radar detector unit, the man glowers at his wife and says through clenched teeth, ‘DAMN it, woman, can’t you keep your mouth shut?!!!!!!’

The officer frowns and says, ‘And I notice that you’re not wearing your seat belt, sir. That’s an automatic $75 fine.’

The driver says, ‘Yeah, well, you see officer, I had it on, but took it off when you pulled me over so that I could get my license out of my back pocket.’

The wife says, ‘Now, dear, you know very well that you didn’t have your seat belt on. You never wear your seat belt when you’re driving.’

And as the police officer is writing out the third ticket the driver turns to his wife and barks, ‘WILL YOU PLEASE SHUT THE HELL UP?!!!!!’

The officer looks over at the woman and asks, ‘Does your husband always talk to you this way, Ma’am?’

‘Only when he’s been drinking’.

Bank wants to charge £20 and admits it will do nothing for it

I have been waiting for some money to arrive for some weeks now, fully expecting it to be paid directly into my account.  But no.  Yesterday it arrived as a cheque in the post.

Dammit!… I need that money, like “last week”.

So off I toddle to my local branch of Lloyds TSB, cheque in hand, and I ask the woman at the desk how much they charge these days for “special clearance” on a cheque. 

“£20″, she says, “but it won’t make any difference, the money won’t be available to you any sooner.”

What !!??

Eco-tourism? The world’s greatest misnomer !

I had the very good fortune to happen upon a BBC2 program tonight about the Galapagos Islands.

For years I had thought that eco-tourism was a good thing… “ecological tourism”.

The Galapagos were very much in my top three ”places to visit before I die“.

No more… !  Oh no… that would be the biggest mistake I could ever make…