Category: Web & Technology

In April, a young man called Amir decided to sell a broken laptop on eBay. This kind of thing unfortunately happens regularly, and the scammers never get what they deserve. Or almost never.

Clever scammers can get away with it, but unfortunately for our friend Amir, he wasn’t clever. Yes, the laptop he sold was broken, but the hard drive remained intact. And the buyer? Now, him, he was clever. He created a website for Amir.

On the laptop’s hard drive, Amir left the following:

• Lots of porn,
• Some foot fetishism,
• Plenty of webcam photos of himself shirtless,
• A disturbing number of photos of ladies’ legs taken with his camera phone on the tube,
• And some more porn…

But more seriously, Amir left things such as:

• A scan of his passport (he was born in Milton Keynes),
• His bank details,
• His mum’s bank details,
• Multiple copies of his CV (all with different GCSE grades),
• Full access to MSN and Hotmail (automatically signed in).

So Amir’s shot himself in the foot and the backfire could have been a lot worse if the owner of the new laptop had wanted to make it so.

Putting that situation aside, we, as normal non-scamming people, need to learn to protect our personal data. There are as many reasons to protect your personal information as there are types of information to protect. So much of our information is now available in digital format, which means it can be duplicated and shared easily.

However, there is a fine line between being careful and being paranoid. For example, if your home wireless network is secure, well protected and all computers on the network are in a “healthy” state, there is no need to turn off the wireless router every time you’re done surfing the web. That’s just impractical and silly. (Also, the tin foil hat, take that off now please. Ah, that’s better, you were starting to get on my nerves with that!) But it’s worth shredding/ripping letters with your name and address on it[1], holding your hand or your wallet over your other hand while entering your PIN when shopping and checking that your bank’s outdoor cash point hasn’t been modified.

Tips to keep your personal information safe:

• Shred letters and paperwork with your name on it before throwing it out or recycling it
• Put your hand or your wallet over your other hand to hide your PIN as you enter it (if at an outdoor cash, have a look over your shoulder to be sure no dodgy person is looking over your shoulder)
• If a cash machine looks like it’s been tampered with, don’t risk it and go to a safer cash point
• Don’t enter your bank details on websites you don’t completely trust, and ensure the security certificate matches the site address
• Keep passports and important personal papers locked up in a safe and keep a tally of the cards in your wallet (so you can easily and quickly cancel and replace them if your wallet gets stolen)
• If you use USB keys to carry business data, encrypt your files when possible and keep the damn key close to yourself. The boss wouldn’t be pleased to know you’ve lost a copy of your top secret files while at a conference filled with your competitors, would he? (more from the BBC on this topic)
• Use common sense – Before you sign up, agree to or hand over your details for any service or transaction, take a step back and question whether it’s a good idea or not.

As for Amir, last time I checked, the site had seen just over a million visitors in three weeks (of which +600,000 were from the past 3 days) close to three million viewers – most of which are from the past week[2], which in Internet terms is nothing, but I’m sure laptopguy got more revenge satisfaction out of that than by whinging to his mates at the pub.

Moral of the story, keep your personal data safe. And don’t leave half-nude photos of yourself on your hard drive if you want to scam someone on eBay – it’ll bite back!

—
[1] Having watched Dispatches: Britain’s Rubbish, I’m more careful than ever when disposing of personal paperwork. You expect your recycling goods to go straight into pulping machines, but they’re in fact intercepted by so many disgruntled low-pay employees who could very well use your paperwork for their own gain that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
[2] This took me over a week to post so the numbers changed drastically every day!

We’re in the peak of the Web 2.0 wave, with betas for all sorts of web apps coming out of our rears ears (that was a genuine typo!). Some are good, some are absolutely brilliant, but some are just dire.

Joining the Hall of Shame is fo.rtuito.us, where you can meet random new friends. We know of del.icio.us now, we can almost spell it without having to pause too long. But fo.rtuito.us takes it that one step too far with the hip, Web 2.0 URL.

As a TechCrunch reader writes, “This is not Beta… more like Alpha. This could not have taken more than a couple of days to put together. The matching is completely randon, not based on any user data what so ever… Very innovative, not!”

I think it’s a pretty pointless site, and that, while it’s a novel idea, it should be no more than a feature within an existing site, rather than a site in itself. The users are randomly matched rather than based on any interests, location, age, etc… yet the “What would happen if we no longer used things like looks, age, sex and nationality to decide if we would try and become friends with a person?” homepage statement is negated by the fact that you MUST upload a picture when you create a profile.

Somebody needs to sit down and rethink the unique selling points and features of their little Web 2.0 dream…

So you’ve seen blogs where you need to enter a few characters to verify you’re a real person and not a super-duper-spam bots. Ever struggled to read the characters? I know a few times I smirked and thought it wasn’t that easy, but it never stopped me from getting it right.

Until today.

Yahoo! mail requires users to enter a code before they can hit send on an email now. And it’s not any code, it’s mythical super-duper-alien alphabet!

(Click here to see the whole email page – Then leave me your best guess in the comments! Andrew’s guess on the screenshot was wrong!)

Can you seriously read this? I know I have no idea what that second character is. Andrew and I got the guess wrong, and it took until our third try to find a clearly readable one! Granted, I can cope with getting it wrong once to get one that’s slightly easier to guess, but anyone with the vaguest visual disability or who isn’t fully technology-savvy will be stumped by it.

If I can quote my friend vegcat again, Yahoo! mail can bite me. For needing this verification image before hitting send on an email, and for making me use an exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence. Bite my Six Mile Bottom!