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Archive for the 'Odds & Sods' Category
I never underestimate the creativity of crooks. This ingenious scheme illustrates how crooks are always looking for a weakness to exploit. In this case, the criminals insured a marine vessel and then they made a claim against that policy each month. The claim was always lower than the premium, and the insurance company did not become aware of the fraud as they were making a profit.
The crooks had found a sure-fire way to launder money.
If you provide a location in your Twitter profile settings, then following @topix_local will get you tweets about the location. To stop getting alerts, simply stop following @topix_local. This needs a city name in your profile settings to be effective so that it picks-up the hashtag (#city).
UPDATE: You won’t get very many Tweets using @topix_local compared to using TweetDeck and creating a column for #City. But of course, in TweetDeck, you will get everything with the city hashtag, whether it’s news or not.
There is a saying that “you can’t know what you don’t know”. This might be tautological, but it is also true, as it might be impossible to identify gaps in our own knowledge. In other words, you can’t teach yourself what you don’t know. Without instruction and training, you’re very likely to think that you do in fact know “everything” you need to know, when in fact, you don’t have the ability to recognise your mistakes.
Typically, the unskilled rate their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities. Confidence is no substitute for skill and knowledge, while skill and knowledge must be used with confidence to ensure a positive outcome.
As an Investigator, my task is to determine Who Is Who, Who Knows Whom, and Who Did What to Whom, then I have to explain all this to the client, courts, lawyers, police, and prosecutors.
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion Scores on consumer credit reports:
- Poor: 301-600
- Good: 600-700
- Excellent: 700-849
You can find me on Twitter as @LocusCommunis. This will include the a lot of links to useful sites that I find as I wade through my daily workload.
The shooting of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford and the others is a deplorable event. However, we have heard the ensuing nonsense about political rhetoric before.
In 1995, a deranged knife-wielding man broke into 24 Sussex Dr. as then Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his wife, Aline, were sleeping. Afterward, former Prime Minister Joe Clark said, “I think this is an increasingly dangerous time. I think people are very frustrated and the extent of angry rhetoric in the country can lead people to extreme actions. On the other hand, that is part of the risk one runs in a democracy. You can’t cordon yourself off.”
The suspected shooter, Jared Lee Loughner’s YouTube channel makes him look like a lunatic who probably believed he was subject to mind control. At least The Catcher in the Rye didn’t appear in his list of favorite books.
Stand back or you will be run over by the stampeding conspiracy theorists and political pundits advocating everything from more gun control to the arrest of Sara Palin for inciting this, and a wide variety of fund raising on the back of this tragedy.
Nothing new happens in politics.
During the Second World War, the British Royal Navy constructed a series of sea forts for an advanced line of defense against inbound air raids and potential sea invasions from the Axis powers. The Maunsell Sea Forts still stand today, silent and abandoned a few meters above the North Sea. One, however, remains inhabited, now a nation of its own referred to as the Principality of Sealand.
This “country” was established by a pirate broadcaster in 1967. In 2007 the Principality was up for sale.
I recently encountered a very strange person who claimed to be a citizen of Sealand. He even had a passport and a noble title.
Here are a list of articles about password security that resulted from some recent research I was conducting.
- http://lifehacker.com/5516188/
- http://lifehacker.com/228887/bruce-schneier-on-how-to-choose-secure-passwords
- http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/01/choosing_secure.html
- http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords-184773.php
- http://lifehacker.com/software/security/pick-a-good-password-part-ii-032274.php
- http://lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords-184773.php
- http://lifehacker.com/software/passwords/keepass-password-manager-38223.php
- http://www.baekdal.com/tips/password-security-usability
- http://www.hungry-hackers.com/2009/12/how-to-hack-passwords-using-a-usb.html
Send an email reminder for those people who never respond or get things done on time.
A Self-Destructing recallable/erasable non-forwardable non-printable/savable email.
A List of Logical Fallacies — a must for the Investigator — Memorize this, or better yet, understand this.