Has there been an SMC Direct customer details leakage?

Today I received a fairly credible phishing attempt for Alliance & Leicester bank sent to me on an address I have only ever given to SMC Direct. When I reported it to SMC Direct they said there have been no other reports from anyone else and that I probably have a virus on my machine. This seems highly unlikely.

Has anyone else received spam or phishing emails on addresses they only gave to SMC Direct?

Freecycle as a dating service?

After discussing the following Freecycle ad on IRC:

Hi all. me and my chilren are moving to an unfurnished home and we need pretty much everything like sofas 2 two seaters colour unimportant. microwave, tv unit, small tv for my daughters bedroom and everything would be well appreicated so please contact me if you have any of these on your list to clear out. many thanks and kind regards
emma

I want to know, has anyone dated anyone they met from Freecycle? Feel free to tell me in confidence if you don’t want to be identified!

Update: Just to clarify, I am not suggesting that this ad in any way presents itself as looking for dates. The conversation that followed me mentioning it on IRC did, however, contain a suggestion that someone who was interested in meeting single mothers might find Freecycle a good place to do it. And I am interested to know if anyone has ever had a relationship with someone they first met from Freecycle.

Really?

Mair, do you really have no utility bill? What about gas, telephone? Do you have no savings account nor pension? Nothing from a letting agency?

I’d say your best bet is still a utility bill.

I’m a Smile customer. I’m pretty happy with them, so I’d say it’s worth the hassle.

Vertical tab bar on Firefox 2.x

Having just upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Edgy one of the things that took me longest to get working how I used to have (or at least how I like) has been the vertical tab bar in Firefox, since Edgy comes with Firefox 2 and the old hack for 1.x no longer works.

For years now I have used a vertical tab bar on Firefox. With the tabs going vertically down the left hand side of the browser window I can fit some 30 to 40 different tabs on one screen and have them all visible at once. Any site that I think I will use more than once I just leave lying around in a tab. It greatly reduces the amount of navigation I need to do.

So I wasn’t at all happy to find out that the hack I used to use no longer works. It took me about an hour of googling to find something that does work, by Johnathon Weare. Now I’ve got it set up I’m pleased to find it actually works a lot nicer than the old hack.

Nice work Johnathon, though your “2.0” name does not sit well with me!

Is “Chinese whispers” racist?

Here’s something I’ve been pondering recently.

Is the phrase “chinese whispers” racist?

You may not know, because I didn’t know until I looked it up very recently, that the term is a very colonial one (late 19th, early 20th century British empire) and refers to a game which most of the rest of the world knows as “Telephone“.

As far as I have been able to determine, Chinese whispers is derived from another phrase, Chinese fire drill. Chinese firedrill is named after a fire drill done on a ship with Chinese crew who didn’t understand what was going on, the end result being it all got screwed up. It basically got blamed on the Chinese for being stupid.

So when something goes completely wrong due to incompetence or stupidity leading to mass confusion, it got called a Chinese firedrill, the implication being that Chinese are stupid, and they can’t communicate clearly.

I have been using the term “Chinese whispers” all my life (though not often, as I kind of grew out of this game fairly early on) without any thought to its origin. I have never heard the game of Chinese whispers referred to as telephone before so I suspect that most people in UK would be unfamiliar with it also (similar to how we know the song as “okey cokey” but the rest of the world knows it as “hokey pokey”).

lug.org.uk progress

I’m very pleased to finally be able to report some progress has been made recently on improving lug.org.uk‘s services.

For a very long time, all of lug.org.uk was running from a machine kindly hosted in Leeds by Energis Squared. We (well, Alasdair) had made an attempt to install Xen on it but there was something clearly not right in the networking functionality of the kernel because connections were randomly stalling for minutes or hours at a time. Most noticeably for our userbase, emails were sometimes taking 12 hours to go through the server and out to the lists, and the web sites were often unusable.

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