‘She grew on him like she was a colony of E.coli and he was room temperature prime beef…’

‘Phishing’ for the uninitiated out there is the fruadulent use of emails in an attempt to gain information from a user by pretending to be from an authoritative source. Most common of these being a bank. Here’s a typical layout of such a “Phishing” email (minus any URLS for your safety) -

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for banking with Citibank.
Sincerely,
©Citibank Customer Service
Code #843934022

I have chosen a bank email as a example because over 90% of phishing scams come from these. Reason I am posting this? Maybe it’s just me but I have seen a recent increase of these appearing in my inbox. Along with a newer flavour of scam which takes the form of an email ‘claiming’ to be from a reputable media company such as CNN with a most likley fictitious link to a story.

ALWAYS BE WARY OF ANY EMAILS ASKING FOR PERSONAL INFO

just wanted to make that abundantley clear, generally banks will NEVER email you for personal information or to ask you to update your personal information, even if the scam email threatens your account will be closed; it’s a lie!!!! If you are concerned simply contact your bank directly either on the phone or even in person and confirm whether or not they are canvasing customers via email (which I seriously doubt).

Same goes for the dubious CNN emails that have started appearing of late, unless you remember specifically going to CNN’s website and signing upto regular emails from them - HIT THE DELETE BUTTON AND WALK AWAY!

Ok….the walking away bit is optional….

Sermon over. I’m off laters!

I was taken on a walk around one of our vendors’ ‘R&D’ areas today; so they could show off all the flashy things they are looking at both today and for tomorrow; whilst some of it in my personal opinion is a little bit of a pipedream at this moment in time, certainly not against the realms of reality; all technically feasible stuff only things that hold this ’stuff’ back is the world of open source and ubiquity I guess? Anyhoo….they took us to that place where all the engineers work real hard, I know for a fact it was kocher; because of the low ceilings and lack of any windows or natural daylight! Interesting stuff anyways - whilst I wasn’t given a specific none disclosure form; I am savvy enough to realise that I can’t really talk in depth about the ’stuff’ I have been privy to today. All boring stuff anyway - I don’t wanna send you all to sleep …??? (nudge -ed) dang too late!

In other news? I’m about to embark on installing Open BSD on one of my home machines. Yes UNIX not Linux….ok!! It’s all good

Well…what can I say; seems like the brass band have dominated my life this year - and the culmination of all the hard work hopefully will pay dividends in a couple of weeks, when we head up to some place near Palmerston for the regional contest. Our 4th competition in 12 months of undefeated winning!!! People have high expectation since we are the current B-Grade Australasian Champions.

so….

no pressure?!

In other news - yup!! I did it - I went low maintenance on the hair style again….it’s all gone =p Jason sooooooo owes me a week of Chinese at work