News just in from the we-just-can’t-make-it-up department. It seems that even in cultures that shun modern technology you still find that high-tech crime (or hi-tec crime as it’s referred to in my chav-infested neighbourhood) goes on. James Bontrager, a 17 year old lad from Markesan, Wisconsin USA pleaded guilty to telecoms fraud after wiretapping his neighbour’s line and calling up relatives in Indiana.
He was fined US$367 and ordered to pay US$36.09 in long distance charges for his trouble. When confonted by a Deputy Sheriff he led him to a shed where he’d spliced into his neighbour’s phone line and brought it inside. The boy claimed that he didn’t know his neighbour would be charged for the calls, I didn’t know the Amish shunned 2600 magazine these days.
Like many of you, I had no idea that the Amish had beige-boxing tone-busting phantom phreaks amongst their numbers, especially after watching Kingpin. Still, if only he’d dialled up to the Internet, he could’ve learnt about the joys of WiFi and VoIP and saved himself a lot of trouble.
Posted in Funny, News, Security.
By steve
– May 8, 2006
As I posted earlier (welcome if you’ve come here from boingboing by the way, please be sure to look around), Shell have stopped taking Chip & Pin payments at 600 petrol stations in the UK. It got me thinking about how these things work, and to tell you the truth it all looks a bit scary. Privacy Commission has some interesting notes on how these things work. Continued…
Posted in Business, Links, News, Security.
By steve
– May 7, 2006
Petrol giant Shell has suspended chip-and-pin payments at 600 petrol stations across the UK after over £1m was siphoned from customer accounts (sorry about the pun there). Although Apacs (the Association of Payment Clearing Services) said it was related to just one petrol chain, BP is also looking into card fraud at petrol stations in Worcestershire. We don’t know at this stage if the alleged fraud at BP is chip and pin related, but after the February 14th Changeover to chip and pin only the chances of it being so are quite high. Continued…
Posted in Business, News, Security.
By steve
– May 7, 2006
Over at the Huffington Post there’s a great article on the FBI Porn Squad. Now this isn’t a group of guys dedicated to cracking down on child porn, forced prostitution or anything like that. It’s an FBI squad, set up to tackle… porn. Admittedly at what I would consider the less tasteful end of the market (well, disgusting but nothing that doesn’t happen in the mid-west of USA, the westcountry in the UK or dogu anadolu) but nonetheless you have to think if there’s a war against terror going on there must surely be better things to do? Continued…
Posted in Funny, Links, News.
By steve
– May 7, 2006
If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll probably know that sometimes daily posts appear here, and sometimes weeks can pass without a new post. The reason for this is that work (i.e. stuff that pays the mortgage) are more important than non-work related activities such as blogging.
In order to help redress this imbalance, I set up some ads using Google Adsense some time ago. Sometimes they made enough money to cover the hosting costs (particularly with some of the more popular posts) but nothing much. I stumbled across a few articles about how I can optimise adsense, again nothing special.
Recently I updated the filters to filter out Ads I didn’t really want to run. Then one day Google cancelled my Adsense account. I still don’t know why. Now I could be like the zillions of other people out there who whinge about lost revenue and so on, but to be honest my lost revenue probably equates to little more than a few pints of beer in the pub and a nice meal. So instead I decided to have a look around at what’s available, what’s good and what’s not.
Continued…
Posted in Links, News.
By steve
– May 6, 2006
