Elliott Rodgers

Added two more galleries; a Snowscapes Photo Gallery and a Sunsets Photo Gallery.

If you are planning on leaving comments on my website, there are a few simple rules. Follow them and it’ll all be fine. Don’t get me wrong I like recieving comments, when they are worthwhile and appropriate.

• Comments should actually be meaningful, worthwhile and appropriate for the page/blog entries.
• If you put a web address with the comment, it should not be a link to site which contains inappropriate content such as porn or a site that hasn’t been updated for months.
• Don’t fill your comment with nothing but links.
• Comments have to be in English.

If you’re thinking of spamming me, bear the following in mind:

• I use Akismet so any spam will be caught.
• All comments are moderated, that means only I will see it and I’m not interested in your spam.
• Your IP address and ISP are automatically collected. This makes it very easy for me to track you down when you spam me even if you supply a false email address. I can also track you through proxy servers as well so don’t bother trying. I’ll send a copy of your spam comment to your ISP.

See quite simple, fair and easy… These rules can also be found on the page Site Comments

It feels like the internet has been around forever, but it was March 1989 that Tim Berners-Lee published a paper titled Information Management: A Proposal, his ideas and proposals became many of components of today’s internet. However there were plenty of people involved before Tim Berners Lee as far back in time as 1958.

Where possible I’ve cross referenced and checked sources as much as much as I could.

1958
The US Department of Defense started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which developed into the basics of the Internet in the 1960’s and was the world’s first operational packet switching network. ARPA came about due to threats that were believed to exist relating to the Cold War. This project would change into ARPANET in a few years.

1960s
Leonard Kleinrock at MIT published the very first paper on packet switching theory in the summer of 1961. Douglas Englebart developed NLS – an online hyperlinking system and also invented the mouse; a vital tool that wouldn’t become popular for almost twenty years. Ted Nelson comes up with the term “hypertext”.
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I’ve added some galleries to the photography menu today – Artistic Gallery, London Zoo Gallery, Random Photos Gallery and a Wild Birds Photo Gallery.

Hope you enjoy them.

Photography is one of my creative outlets, I’ve been secretly experimenting with various options and then decided on just using the WordPress Gallery shortcode to keep it simple. So over the next few days, pretty much all of the photos that were previously on my site will be making a comeback! Hope you enjoy them.

You can find the galleries on the Photography Menu. If you’re looking for the Sheppie Gallery it’s on the Sheppie page.

anyone in the area of Lowndes Avenue, Beechcroft Road in Chesham please check sheds, garages etc,. for my neighbours missing cat, small black and white, with limp on front left paw answers to “spot”… He “belongs” (as much as a cat belongs to anyone) to Colin, a neighbour of mine.

If you have any information please leave a message for me on the contact form.

If you are based in Chesham area please pass this information on via blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve set up the following short url – http://bit.ly/cheshamlostcat to this post.

The cat returned home, late last night!

Sadly there are dishonest people in every part of life and that includes online. Some scammers run scams to make money, gather your private details to sell on or they want more of your details to better target you in email scams. Some wait for you to click on a link in an email to confirm that your email address is valid before sending a deluge of spam, sadly some of these links are dressed up as unsubscribe links. Some scammers seem to do it just for the pleasure of causing distress and heartache, this is especially prevalent amongst “health scare” emails.

It’s easy to fake the from field in an email

Believe it or not, in less than 3-5 lines of web code (+ a line per email address) a script can send out an email with anyone’s email address in the from field. These scripts can send thousands of emails out an hour. Shocking I know, thankfully most of these scammers are to dumb to realise this and when you look at the from field you see something like this:

facebookadmin@facebookmail.dfrghjk.cn

This doesn’t mean that it’s from Facebook at ALL. The bit before the @ is simply the name of the email account, in this case facebookadmin the bit straight after the @ and before the . is known as a sub domain. Lots of web hosting companies allow sub domains and you can call them what you want. The bit after the dot dfrghjk.cn is the actual domain name where the scammers want to send you.

Hover before you click

Sometimes scammers put a legitimate web address in the email but point it at a different domain. If you hover over a link and look at the status bar in your email program or browser, it should show you the same address. For example the link below claims to be for you to win a big lottery prize but in reality it takes you to the page about Sheppie, my border collie (you have to watch these border collies they can be sneaky).

You’ve Won US$100,000,000 in the Nigerian Lottery

Domain names can also have sub-domains. These are seperate little areas within a website, many scammers will use this to try and make the links looks legitimate.

So:

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/antiphishing/PPPhishingReport-outside

Is a genuine PayPal link (it goes to the page about reporting Phishing attempts). The bit in bold tells us what domain it is on.

Whereas this email address:

http://www.paypal.com.536koo74yx8te1m7cf.gfrd7gtbhnumu7ng3x33.com/cgi-bin/webscr/?943-120-325RNC943-120-325?login&login_email=someone@somedomain.co.uk&ref=

Isn’t anything to do with PayPal at all, in fact it’s really part of the site www.gfrd7gtbhnumu7ng3x33.com. Worse the web address includes a suspicious number and email address. It’s almost certain that if you click on this address you will get a massive increase in spam and phishing emails since the scammers now know that someone is using the email account (rather than an abandoned email account).

Be aware that scammers will sprinkle links around a scam email in hope to dupe stupid people so check ALL links before you click on them. They even put in warnings about scams linking to the genuine pages for the bank, credit card company etc who they are impersonating.

Are you expecting the message?

It may sound obvious but if you’re not with National Smiley Bank and they send you an email asking for your details then don’t supply them. If you do bank with National Smiley Bank and they never email you and you don’t use internet banking and an email turns up be suspicious! If you do use internet banking, look at the email, does it look the same as an email that you know was from National Smiley Bank? If you suspect it is a fake, go to your browser, type the usual URL in the browser and sign on as normal. If it’s important they’ll be something when you sign in.

Wrong email account?

Here’s an easy way to spot suspect emails and keep yourself safe. Have a secure email, a friends email and a random accounts email is always a good idea. If you use Thunderbird or similar decent email client you can move emails into different folders once they arrive (I definitely don’t suggest using an email client called something similar to LookOut as it’s not very secure at all).

1. A special account just for banking, credit card services and high security sites (do not use this account for Facebook, give it out to friends etc).
2. An account for work, friends, legitimate websites etc.
3. A third account just for use at random websites, signing on for offers and such like.

These should all have different passwords. You should avoid using generic, obvious names for the accounts “banking”, “NationalSmileyBank” etc.

If you get an email in your third “random” or “friends” email account claiming to be from your bank, you immediately know that the scammers have found your account details somewhere and included you in the list of scammers. If you look at the email and it says undisclosed recipients or similar wording and isn’t sent direct to you to the correct account then that’s a definite flag for it being suspicious.

Report Phishing and suspect emails

The faster that phishing and suspect emails get sent to the bank the faster they get taken down. This means the scammers have to work harder to get their scams out there. Less victims => less money. You reporting the scammers saves someone else falling victim, tomorrow someone reporting them may save you. I’m maintaining a page of email addresses that can be used to Report phishing emails.

Part of the reason for moving my personal site over to WordPress was since I’m moving various sites onto a Virtual Private Server (VPS) from names.co and the fact I really fancied a change in design. It seemed a good time to bite the bullet and go for it. Within a couple minutes of installing doing a manual install of WordPress version 3 (which I really like a lot) at 5am on a Saturday morning (couldn’t sleep) I kept getting weird errors.

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3136 bytes) in ****/httpdocs/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 958 (have obscured part of the server address for security reasons). Initially I suspected something had gone wrong with the WP3 installation but this didn’t seem to be true. Google is always handy in these situations so off I went to do some research. You should avoid the temptation to allocate a site too much memory since this may impact on other sites you have on the same server setup. (Some webhosts don’t allow you access to the php.ini file or to change memory allocations in which case you are going to have to use their tech support).

Altering your .htaccess file:
php_value memory_limit 32M

Alter your wp-config.php file:
define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’32M’);

Alter your php.ini file: (if you have access to your PHP.ini file)
memory_limit = 32M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume (32MB)

Contact your webhost tech support team
sometimes all else fails and you need some advice, at names.co they are absolutely brilliant.

As it puts it on the TV licensing website: You need to be covered by a valid TV Licence if you watch or record TV as it’s being broadcast. This includes the use of devices such as a computer, laptop, mobile phone or DVD/video recorder. So if you watch a live TV channel from Germany at 1am in the morning on your iPhone over the internet, legally you need a TV Licence (at your residence) even if you aren’t at home. If you do you are committing a criminal offence which could make you liable to imprisonment and leave you with a criminal record. Few commercial companies have such vast powers.

(Seriously you want me to have a licence to watch TV over the internet that isn’t even from the UK on a tiny mobile screen phone when I am at home, madness?!?! Seriously?!?)

Of course if like me you only use BT Vision+ (or a similar system) to watch programmes that are on BBC replay or iPlayer (ITV Player, 4 on Demand, Five on Demand etc) then this is not live television and so doesn’t require a TV Licence. BBC do however state in their T&Cs for iPlayer on their website that you have to be a UK TV licence holder to use iPlayer and then further down in the small print it says you only need a TV Licence if you use the Watch Live simulcast option or you watch any part of a programme while part of it is still being broadcast live on television. Confused? If you are that’s their intention. They imply that watching any TV programme while part of it is being broadcast is considered ‘live’.)

The BBC uses a lot of pseudo legalise jargon to try and add to the “deterrent” effect and imply that their “enforcement officers” have far more powers than they actually do. TV Licensing is a trading name for a company called Capita Business Services Ltd (registered company number: NF004206; no nature of business given and registered address in Northern Ireland) acting as an agent for the BBC. If a TV Licence “investigator” turns up on your doorstep they will use bullying tactics and intimidation to convince someone they HAVE to let them into your property and to sign a “statement” or “paperwork”. Legally you don’t have to do either. They have no legal right to enter your home without a warrant. They are extremely unlikely to get a warrant since in order to do this they would have to reveal how they got the evidence, to date it would seem that they have never actually got a warrant to enter someone’s house if anyone knows of a case please feel free to correct me.

Only around a quarter of people visited by TV License Investigators/Enforcement Officers et al are found to require a licence. This means that by the BBC’s own figures on average they unlawful harass more than half a million people a year! In 2005, a TV Licensing officer was found guilty of false accounting and perverting the course of justice after he deliberately forged the confessions of four people to obtain commission payments (I’ll bet there’s been a lot more of those). Yes you read the correctly – TV licensing officers get paid a commission ~ some officers are self-employed and are paid £20 if the resident signs up to a direct debit, or £18 if they pay in full there and then. Others are paid a mix of salary and commission, including that paid if a prosecution occurs. Explains why some residents are bullied into paying. They can’t force you to sign any piece of paper either, not even the police can force you to sign a piece of paper!
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I’ll openly admit I’m not a fan of Flash used for entire websites, it locks out various internet users unless they use an add on in their browser. Some phones can’t use flash and so on. With the latest exciting stuff coming through with HTML5 and CSS3 there’s a lot that can now be done without flash.

Flash is however brilliant for producing some amazing games like Raft Wars and Stunt Dirt Bike.

If you have no connection to the internet and you still can’t resist playing your particular flash game. Here’s how you can download the flash game to your own computer. You can open flash files on your hard drive just the same as you open web pages. You can often open the game almost full screen Raft Wars does this, they are just as cute when they are bigger; using a digital projector you could even make them six feet high on the wall (b-u-t I’d never do that *looks innocent*).

Using Firefox (by far one of the easiest ways to be honest!)

1. Open the page with the flash/game file.

2. Select Tools Menu
3. Select Page Info
4. Select Media Tab
5. This reveals a complete list of Images, CSS Files and Shockwave Flash files that Firefox downloaded while opening the page of the website.
6. Scroll through the list and locate the .swf file.
7. Click the “Save As” button.
8. Save it somewhere on your hard drive and save the file.

Using Internet Explorer (more complicated and lets be honest who really wants to use Internet Explorer! )

1. Open the web page with the flash file/game.
2. Click Tools, then Internet Options
3. Choose the General Tab, click on the Settings button in the Temporary Internet Files group.
4. Click View Files to open the Temporary Internet Files folder.
5. Click View > Details.
6. Click View > Arrange Icons By > Internet Address.
7. There could one or more Flash files (Shockwave Flash Object) under an Internet Address.
8. When you have the right file, right-click and copy.
9. paste the .swf file in another folder.

Happy Days!