Big Brother is watching !

I’ve just watched two police officers clamp a strange object to the lamp post at the bottom of my street, which is a busy ‘T’ junction in a medium size town. This object then proceeded to climb the pole under their direction, then after it had reached a point not far from the top it turned its eye up our street and then down the cross street while the two officers observed from their riot protected van. Clearly it is a surveillance camera, but what the HELL is it doing on our street?

I’m not a criminal, my neighbours are not criminals, not so far as I know anyway, though that bloke at number 159 looks a bit shifty to me. Yet this THING will see me every time I leave my house, and observe everyone who comes to my house. I ask you is this really necessary? Who authorised this invasion of my privacy? And why were we, the residents of this area not informed or consulted?

Some years ago a young black poet asked us ‘Is Britain becoming a Fascist state,..’ and at the time I laughed. Then came Margaret Thatcher and the police beat the living shit out of the miners at her direction, and I wondered. Some time later we got Tony Blair and no one really hated him because he never really did much, then Tony Blair handed the country over to Gordon Brown the penny pincher without a fight. All the time the numbers of cameras on our roads have continued to grow, the numbers of police helicopters in our skies have continued to grow and Gordon Browns management of our economy has led to a worse recession and more unemployment than Margaret Thatcher was ever responsible for. What will it be next, remote operated camera drones peaking in our windows? Gestapo at the bus and rail stations checking our ID passes? Already there are moves to require that we all carry biometric ID cards.

And Gordon Brown sits there unopposed, as everyone knows the Tory wimp  doesn’t stand a chance and after Thatcher we don’t want him anyway. Nobody believes the Third Party has a chance either but Liberal Democracy may be our only way out of this mess if only we could see it. But no, our government swings from left to right to left and so called ‘New Labour’ has turned out to be more conservative than even Thatcher. All the time the numbers of surveillance cameras grow and no one , NO ONE complains!

Caveat Emptor – Let the buyer Beware!

So it’s nearly Christmas right? And money, as usual is tight. So tight that you are looking at any and all ‘special offers’ in order to get the best value for money you can find. Well watch out because many of these ‘Special Offers’ have a sting in the tail!

I was playing this game on Facebook called Mafia Wars, a cool game but it uses a system of ‘reward points’ which make the game easier if you buy stuff they advertise or sign up for ‘special offers’. So inevitably I find myself needing some reward points, well one of the ‘free’ offers was for ‘The Complete Road Dahl children’s Collection’ £4.95 and was worth 100 reward points. I have a niece and this I thought would be an ideal gift. So I clicked.

I was taken to a webpage and I duly entered my details, there was a terms and conditions PDF which I downloaded and a text box with a shipload of text crammed into it which I couldn’t be bothered reading. Gave ‘em my Card details and in short order I had my 100 reward points. A few days later the books arrived and they were as advertised, so I figured I had got a damn good deal,..

Then I started getting emails from ‘Books for Children’ saying I had agreed to take another 4 books and that their ‘editors choice’ would be sent automatically if I didn’t order anything else and on further investigation I discovered that in order to cancel I would have to pay £10 for each book I did not take. The ‘editors choice’ arrived a few weeks later and it was a piece of crap with an invoice for £16.95. I think you can now see where this is going, I phoned them to cancel and had to pay £46.95 in order to do so. To sum up those 100 reward points have cost me ( inc postage and packing ) approximately £60!

I’ve complained to Zynga the makers of Mafia Wars about this so called ‘free’ offer and the advert is no longer there, but when I complained to Trading Standards there was bugger all they could do. Why? Because I hadn’t read the terms and conditions, hadn’t read the crap in their little text box and the webpage I’d signed up on was no longer there! I’d been clobbered by your classic BookClub scam.

They hook you in with an offer that is too good to be true, and in the fine print claw back the real cost of the initial offer by forcing you to take over priced crap you don’t want, and there is bugger all Trading Standards can do about it because ‘The information needed to make an informed decision was all there’.

Well in my book this amounts to ‘Theft by Deception’ but I seriously doubt that a court would agree with me, so next time you are thinking about clicking on a ‘special offer’ remember this : CAVEAT EMPTOR , which is Latin for ‘Let the buyer beware’.

It’s Fucking Obscene !

Have you seen the images that now disgrace all cigarette packaging here in the UK ?

Under a British Government sponsored initiative the manufacturers of cigarettes and tobacco supplying the UK market are obliged to place some of the most horrendous images I have ever seen on all packaging. The images used include babies in incubators but mainly feature the most ghastly and grotesquely untreated tumours they could apparently find. No British doctor would ever permit such tumours to go untreated to this extent and therefore one must assume that these images where collected from abroad.

It’s Fucking Obscene ! If a private individual published such images in anything other than a medical text book they would be prosecuted and jailed, the offending material being immediately removed from sale and display. Yet the British Government believes that offending the sensibilities of every British and visiting smoker to the UK is justified because of the statistical correlation between smoking and such diseases. Now I am NOT about to argue the case here as to whether or not smoking causes cancer, anyone who smokes is well enough aware that what they are doing is bad for them.  What has pissed me off is that the British Government is gratuitously subjecting a very large segment of its population to these obscene images when there is no proof that causing serious offense to smokers will have ANY affect on their consumption of tobacco. The stuff is after all Addictive.

Considering that cigarettes and tobacco are in fact addictive, if the British Government did actually have the courage of its convictions surly the thing to do is to make them illegal? Rather than subject us to disgustingly obscene images every time we reach for one. It occurs to me that the true fact is most likely that, since the British Government is heavily dependant upon the insanely huge tax revenue from tobacco and prohibition would pump these billions of pounds into the hands of organised crime, these horrendous images they have caused to be placed on tobacco packaging are a sop to the anti smoking lobby in the hope that they will shut the fuck up, if only for a while. Meanwhile organised crime is already taking advantage of the huge taxation imposed on tobacco products and looks set to reap even greater profits in the future.

The British Governments’ hypocrisy not withstanding does any government have the right to legislate that obscene material must be published where it can be viewed by minors? Finally it is my considered opinion that causing and giving offense is no way to resolve the problem of smoking.

Ill Wind by Rachel Caine – Book Review

Sometimes you pickup a book at the book store on the off-chance, in the hopes that it will at least be entertaining enough that you feel you got your money’s worth. Sometime you are disappointed, sometimes you are reasonably happy and rarely, so rarely are you totally blown away.

So it was with Ill Wind by Rachel Caine . I bought the book on impulse, taking a chance on an author I’d never read before, something I rarely do these days, preferring, usually to stick with authors who have become like old friends. To say I was pleasantly surprised by this book is an understatement, ILL WIND literally blew me away. It sat on my coffee table for several days while I consumed ‘Paul of Dune’ by Herbert and Anderson, which left a bitter taste in my mouth because while that novel was sufficiently entertaining that I did NOT rush back to the book shop demanding a refund it still felt like a cynical milking of Herbert Senior’s reputation. ILL WIND washed the bitter taste away almost from the first page, gripped me in its vortex, and took me on the wildest ride imaginable. The book is about a ‘weather warden’ in fact its subtitled ‘Weather Warden book one’ which bodes well for more of the same or better, basically the heroine is a girl that can control the weather. A reasonably good idea for a novel, any half way decent writer could run with it. Rachel Caine didn’t just run with it though, she had a ball and though I know it sounds cliché I could not put the book down. Some books are suitable for winding your mind down sufficiently to get a good nights sleep, a few pages or maybe a chapter before you turn out the light, and some books you have to devour from cover to cover in one sitting, ILL WIND is the latter type.

USB sticks a growing source of infection

When we set-up our anti virus and anti spyware software these days we often forget about a potentially major source of infection, that is our USB data sticks. Automatic scans miss these devices because we don't take steps to include scanning them in our maintenance routines.

A friend of mine told me recently of a major incident in which a virus worm in fected 70 pc workstations in his college out of a possible 1000 before it was detected. This virus had entered the network from a USB stick and propagated internally accross the network infecting the server before it was detected.

While USB sticks and removable drives of all types are not automatically scanned by your anti-virus software they remain a threat to networks, it behoves us to become used to routinely scanning these items for our own safety. The fact that these devices are so portable and are often used casually in multiple machines makes them an ideal vector for virus and malware infection, be warned.

Offline Message Spam - Windows Live Messenger

There seems to be a problem with Windows Live Messenger being abused to send spam messages, sometimes called SPIM, what I have been noticing recently is that several of my contacts have apparently sent me 'offline' messages asking me to go to various websites, the usual format of these messages is:

yourContactsHandle says:
Tony and Julie told me today about this amazing new product called bugger berries, I tried them and they are great, you really should have a look at their website http://www.buggerberries.com/

These messages have appeared in various languages (usually the home language of the contact) and the website content has varied from a very genuine looking site for said berries to blatant activeX exploits designed to infect your system.

When you call your contact on this they will usually deny all knowledge of sending the message, or may admit that several of their contacts have complained about receiving similar messages from them. There is absolutely no point getting angry at your contact about this, you could loose a friend who is not necessarily at fault. There is also no point in panicking about your system having been infected, unless you did actually click on the link and your anti virus and anti spy ware systems are not up to date, in which case more fool you. If you didn't click the link you are unlikely to have been infected.

The precise cause of this SPIM seems to be a bit of a mystery, the likelihood is that it is your contacts system that has been compromised rather than your own. There are a couple of ways this could have happened to them; Their windows live messenger login could have been compromised , perhaps their login details were phished by a spoof message, a keylogger on their system has relayed the login details to its server or their password was so weak its simply been hacked, or they have been infected by a bot on their system that can access Windows Live messenger. Clearly the first thing you need to persuade THEM to do is to change their Windows Live ID password however this on its own may not proved to be effective, especially if the culprit is a keylogger or a bot infection. I have found only one product which purports to specifically target bots that abuse Windows Live Messenger, this is Clean Virus MSN which supposedly can detect and repair 3,800 MSN virus variants however I can not at this time validate its efficiency in the case of this 'Offline Message Spam' .

At present there seems to be nothing definitive available to tackle this problem, and the problem itself appears to be escalating if the numerous blog messages and screams for help on technical boards are anything to go by, so here is my current advice in regards to this problem:

1. Be very cautious about ANY offline message you receive from anyone, but especially from your trusted contacts if it contains a link to a website, before you click on any such link get your contact to confirm that they sent the message.

2. Let your contact know that you received such a message from them as it is more likely that their system has been compromised by a bot and they need urgently to run anti virus and anti spyware scans on their system as well as changing their Windows Live ID password.

3. Make sure your own anti virus and anti spy ware software is uptodate and is scanning regularly, if it doesn't scan automatically its time to do a manual scan.

4. If your contacts are telling you that you are the source of such offline spam messages don't panic!. Make sure your anti virus software is uptodate and running properly and do a spyware bot scan using the very latest definitions. Personally I use AVG FREE and Spybot search and destroy (also free) and have had no major infections, touch wood, for a long time. If your scans turn up anything at all but particularly remote access trojans or keyloggers you MUST change you passwords once you have cleaned the infection(s). Then its time to apologise or simply explain what has happened to your contacts.

I will be keeping an eye on this problem and if any information surfaces on the precise cause and remedy for this problem I will post the information as soon as I have verified it.

further update

In addition to the outlined work in the previous post I am currently investigating the feasibility of creating Combat X3d as opposed to combat 3 VRML97. Naturally I am looking at some software assistance in converting VRML to X3d and will report on the efficacy of what I find after I have done a few test conversions of the combat modules,..

Update 2009

Combat3 still inprogress

Anyone expecting the imminent role out of Combat3 as discussed in previous posts is unfortunately going to be disappointed by this post. Due to personal circumstances involving but not limited to having had to relocate, the work I had planned for Combat2, updating it to combat3 as cross platform MU development game, has been considerably delayed. Looking back to my original development notes for this project I have discovered that user/developer based instructional documentation is a significant lack in the distribution. There are also a number of features I discussed in PC Game weapons(paper) which I'd like to incorporate into Combat3 as standard. Other outstanding work includes a revamp of the game Hud, consolidating features built into different Hud versions into a single general purpose Hud. To say that there is still a lot of work to be done before Combat3 can roll out is therefor a considerable understatement.