I seen an advert for Raja fashions ( http://www.raja-fashions.com/ ) in the economist the other week. I could remember someone mentioning that there is a group of tailors from Hong Kong who sometimes com over here to ply their trade so I decided that I would go and have a look to see what sort of outfit they operated.
Alarm bell 1.
They had hired a small room in the Hilton and there was absolutely nothing on display except cuts of material.
Alarm bell 2.
The advertised prices in the Economist advert are complete rubbish and a lot lower than what they offered me.
Alarm bell 3.
Ladies tailoring for a suit adds £100 to the price.
Alarm bell 4.
There was another guy being seen to by the man himself and he seemed to be making some noise about the whole setup ie none of the information he was now being told was on the website etc.
Anyway at this point I decided I would rather not have anything to do with them so promptly left.
Alarm bell 5.
When I left the guy came out and asked me if I wanted a cheap suit. I explained that the way he was pressuring the guy in there put me off and no I was not particularly interested in a cheap suit which is why I was leaving. I sincerely doubt I would be getting anything but a cheap suit from him regardless of price paid hence my quick departure.
I would still love a tailor made suit and a full length trench coat but it looks as if I am going to have to head to Saville row rather than fly by night traveling salesmen.
Tombstone
I was browsing around the web and I came across some quotes from Tombstone the movie. If you haven’t seen it then I suggest you go and watch it post haste. Great story and the dialogue is brilliant.
My favourite character was the Doc (Val Kilmer). While watching his character being played out its a good thing to keep in the back of your mind that he knows he’s dying. Some of the lines the Doc gets to say are nothing short of brilliant.
Distributed nightmare
This is an interesting read.
Reflections on Brilliant Digital Single Points of Internet 0wnership
Why blog
When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest the climber George Mallory answered,
Because its there
This was a fantastic answer and I wish I had an original one liner to answer the original question. My paltry answer is:
I blog because I blog.
Google Premium Adsense
I currently use Google Adsense and was wondering just how many hits a second I would need to be receiving in order to apply for their Premium service
You need to be getting 10 million content views per month. This is not the same as hits because images, spider hits etc don’t count.
Last month I got approximately 1020358 hits which sounds impressive but it isn’t that great because this only got me 102,636 content views on google adsense as per their own stats. So approximately every ten hits I get 1 content view.
Using some advanced mathematics based on our very accurate assumptions 😉 This means I need approximately 100 million hits a month to achieve 10 million content views. This is of course pie in the sky.
This is about 40 hits per second. I doubt very much if my little sever would be able to withstand that kind of usage 😉 I suppose if I was getting that many hits per month then I would be able to afford a whole rack full of equipment.
Emotive entries
Is it just me or do more emotional entries on blogs get more hits. The reason I ask this is due to an entry I made just recently.
I’ve had more comments on that one topic than any other. In fact, its been the most popular topic on my blog for a couple of months. Admitedly this is not a huge achievment but I have found the more controversial or emotional the entry the more comments it seems to collect.
FT Search Engine Spam
Just noticed the following on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. This is a pretty shit way to make money.
Basically moneysupermarket.com have paid the Financial Times (FT) to add some hidden links to their website. Of course when Google finds the link it will assign a hefty amount of PageRank to the page that’s linked to (FT has a PageRank of 8). I wonder how much the ask for this type of service.
Google’s Quality Guidelines specifically states:
Quality Guidelines – Specific recommendations:
* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
I wonder what the penalty is (if any) for this sort of search engine spam. I don’t do it for fear of loosing what little Ranking I have with Google. I suppose I could report them but I doubt anything would be done to the FT.
Original Story
Spell Counterfeiting
Having read Bruce’s article on Belgium’s latest way of trying to reduce counterfeiting I got the impression he’s not particularly impressed and I don’t blame him.
Professionals will spot the speling mistakes, particularly now that they know they should be looking for them. They might be thinking that several foreign languages might fool the bilingual counterfeiter but its hardly rocket science for the more accomplished crook to refer to bablefish or a foreign dictionary or some other external reference…….. oh…oh perhaps a real card!
It would appear that Belgium may be assuming their counterfeit operations are run by a bunch of half wits who only speak “da wocal wanguage”, have no access to the internet and are not particularly well educated.
I suppose if every card had a semi-random spelling on it then it might introduce a bit more labour on the part of the counterfeiter but that only works until they figure out how to scan it and of course you’re then back to the gimpy race
I would love to see some stats on the success rate of this new idea.
fortune 500 feeds
I was bored yesterday……………………………. so whats new?
the difference this time was that I decided to do something about it and build yet another website (moan).
The idea!
I like to read certain types of news and for the most part the news I am interested in seems to gravitate towards big companies ie, the A list, more commonly known as the Fortune 500. I am not sure why this is the case because there is plenty of really interesting stuff taking place in small companies but for the most part Google seems to steer me up rather than down. Perhaps I am a headonist (please forgive my humour) and don’t know it.
Anyway.
I don’t have a blog roll because I don’t regularly read any blogs on a regular basis. I think this is because people tend to be either eclectic 1 or eclectic 2:
Eclectic: (from webster)
1 : selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles
2 : composed of elements drawn from various sources; also : HETEROGENEOUS
neither of which lends towards regular reading. Unfortunately E1 is particularly rife amongst the blogging commnuity so some strong filtering is required. Thankfully E2 is much more readable than E1 if done correctly which for the most part is true but if I am to read something regularly then I would prefer something along the lines of E2 but with a general topic in mind.
So with all the above crap in mind I decided that we all need another website (not) that will take the collective wisdom of the fortune 500 and produce dynamic feeds from it.
Ransom-Ware
Just read a very interesting article on Bruce Schneier’s blog.
The most alarming part for me was the following:
Internet attacks have changed over the last couple of years. They’re no longer about hackers. They’re about criminals. And we should expect to see more of this sort of thing in the future.
Unfortunately the above is only too true and we are going to see a marked increase in cybercrime. When you think about it you can almost take any of our old style crimes and with enough imagination and know how make it work over the wire.
Take blackmail.
Using a similar method you could break into someones PC and look for something the owner would really not want shown in public. The criminal then downloads the files and blackmails the owner. If you don’t find anything you might be able to hold his files for ransom anyway.
You could also use it to destroy someones reputation. Lets say John is the CEO of a large corporation with some less than honest competition who would love to see the company damaged in any way possible.
One of the competition hires a cracker to gain access to Johns machine. This would most likely be the home machine since if they managed to break into the work machine then I am sure there are other things that they could do that would cause much more damage.
The cracker then downloads lots of child pornography to Johns machine and makes the logs etc look as if John is a regular child pornographer. Of course the times would need to coincide with John being at home but this sort of information is easily obtained from the machine itself.
The cracker then deletes all trace of him being in and even updates the Virus checker and secures the machine for John so that, when the investigation takes place the police cannot see how the machine could have been cracked.
A phone call to the police on an anonymous line from a child professing that John sexually assaulted them and he would then be under investigation for sexually assaulting a minor. This would lead to confiscation of his machine and of course they are going to find plenty of stuff on it to keep them busy for a while.
Regardless of whether they determine he was set up or not Johns good name is being dragged through the gutter and a certain amount of damage is done.
I am sure that the criminals out there would be able to come up with more imaginative ways than the above to do these sorts of things but as Bruce said we are going to see more of this sort of thing in the future. What frightens me is that we are going to see much more damaging crimes than ransom-ware or identity theft.
As our dependence on computers grow so does our vulnerability and there are criminals with no conscience about what they do or how they do it and I am not including terrorists in this bunch.