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Bank of England Fraudulant Accounts scandal

So, the Government/Bank of England lent £61,000,000,000 to prop up the Scottish banks last year and didn’t think we should know about it. It didn’t appear with any clarity in the accounts, and I’ve just been listening to “Lord” Myners, Gordon Brown’s “Treasury Minister” defending this on Today, saying that “…no retail bank customers lost out.” So that’s alright then?

As usual, he was let off lightly. The Bank of England is publishing cooked books, and the justification is that it’s for the greater good. What I’d like to know is: what’s the point of publishing accounts if they’re deliberately misleading? Or more accurately, dishonest.

The government seems to think it’s okay to lie to us whenever it feels that we’re better off not knowing something. And you can hardly call £61,000,000,000 a trivial issue that’s easily overlooked by mistake, can you? Well perhaps it is to Gordon Brown and his banking mates. No wonder they fail to see any problems with their expense claims.

According to Myners, the board of Lloyds was made aware of the loan at the time they were merging with HBOS in those murky circumstances. So what? Lloyd’s isn’t owned by the board – the Lloyds shareholders had every right to know, but they decided to keep quiet about it. They were tricked into voting for a merger with a bank that was only propped up by a massive secret loan.

Paul Myners is, of course, a New Labour Lord, given a peerage by Gordon Brown after donating £12,700 towards his leadership campaign in 2008. He hasn’t been elected by anyone other than the Labour Leadership.

The fundamental issue here is that if any company published cooked books, concealing a £61,000,000,000 transaction, they’d have the serious fraud office all over them – and rightly so. This government, on the other hand, thinks it knows best and will only tell us what it thinks we should know. Sounds familiar?

Of course, plenty of people must have known about it and kept quiet. So why has the news come out now? Presumably someone was about to spill the beans and they’ve published as the least-worst option.

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Digital Economy Bill

As we all know, the Queen’s Speech yesterday was written by Gordon Brown and contained a fantastic list of things he’d do should the British public ever elect him as Prime Minister. While everyone was falling about laughing at the idea of new laws to make both budget deficits child poverty illegal, you might have missed some gems from Digital Economy Bill, which was announced today and will be published tomorrow (Friday).

In verbiage reminiscent of Wilson’s “White heat of technology” twaddle, the Queen was obliged to say:


“My government will introduce a bill to ensure the communications infrastructure is fit for the digital age, supports future economic growth, delivers competitive communications and enhances public service broadcasting.”

The actual bill appears to include such ideas as the £6/year tax on all land telephone lines (why not mobiles?) to ensure that everyone in Britain can get 2Mbps broadband by 2012. Do these politicians understand what the term ‘broadband’ means? Why should we be subsidising the infrastructure for ISPs who’ll be charging us whatever the like for the use of the new network we’ll be paying for in this extra tax.

Perhaps the biggest ‘idea’ is a clampdown on Internet based piracy. New Labour’s sleazy spin-doctor Peter Mandelson was on about this recently, and it’s going to be in the bill. Apparently persistent offenders will get a series of stiff letters and the ISP will eventually pull the plug on them. Get real! Anyone with the slightest idea how the Internet works knows that you can’t tell whether material transiting a network is subject to copyright. You can’t even tell what it is! No amount of legislation will change that.

On the same tack, children are going to be protected by making it illegal for video game retailers to sell games intended for over 12’s to under 12’s. That’s really going to work. The government can’t keep hard drugs out of a prison, so how are they going to stop anyone getting hold of dubious video games.

Another nice little earner for the treasury is switching over to digital radio by 2015. If you thought updating to digital TV was bad, they now want you to scrap all your radios too. Including those in cars? DAB radios use 20 times the power of simple FM receivers – not exactly a green idea either.

I do hope that whoever wins the election next year will ditch these stupid ideas, but do the conservatives have any better idea about what the Internet really is?

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New Botnet?

Over the last 24-hours I’ve intercepted several emails containing malicious attachments in .zip files. There’s nothing odd about that, expect these are coming from ‘clean’ IP addresess.

Is this a new Botnet, spreading fast?

Yesterday the subject was “your mailbox has been deactivated” and they pretended to come from the IT support team at your domain name. If you don’t have an IT support team it’s a bit of a giveaway. The message continued:

We are contacting you in regards an unusual activity that was identified in your mailbox. As a result, your mailbox has been deactivated. To restore your mailbox, you are required to extract and run the attached mailbox utility.

Best regards, technical support.

Today they’ve got the subject “Payment request from , where the company varies.

The full text is:

We recorded a payment request from "" to enable the charge of $ on your account.

The payment is pending for the moment.

If you made this transaction or if you just authorize this payment, please ignore or remove this email message. The transaction will be shown on your monthly statement as "".

If you didn't make this payment and would like to decline it, please download and install the transaction inspector module (attached to this letter).

The interesting thing is that none of these have come from IP addresses that are currently listed as part of a botnet, known spam sources or anything. They’re completely clean. I’ve no proof that the two attacks are related, but I’m suspicious.

If anyone has more parts to the jigsaw, please share them with a comment.

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Cleaning an LCD Monitor or TV

I needed to clean a large LCD screen today. My usual recommendation for such things is to us a soft dry cloth (preferably microfibre), and to do it gently so as not to crack the glass. But this screen had a stubborn smear – possibly caused by a hand being wiped across. It had the appearance of a water mark of some sort – mineral deposits left by a cloth or tissue dampened with tap water perhaps?

The soft cloth wasn’t going to shift it, so a liquid was called for. But what?

You certainly don’t want to use use alcohol based cleaners on the delicate plastic of an LCD. It might be okay on some, but if it’s not you’ll trash it permanently. So a quick trawl of the web found me the favoured recipe, and everyone’s consistent about it distilled water plus vinegar, mixed 1:1. Any everyone’s wrong!

Vinegar is a great cleaner, and I use it for lots of things. But the idea of a 50% solution is a big warning – how strong is the vinegar to begin with? It’s too precise a recipe using imprecise ingredients. I tried it nonetheless, and ended up with a smear covering most of the screen rather than the original area I was trying to clean.

Time for some home cooking, and the solution is simple. Distilled water, a bit of vinegar and a small drop (no more) of washing up liquid (detergent). This lifted the deposits into suspension or solution on contact. The other trick you need to use is a double cloth – wipe off immediately after wiping on, before it has had a chance to dry.

I used soft kitchen paper towels for the process, but I thought the monitor was made of fairly hard plastic. A micro-fibre cloth would be safest if you’re not sure.

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Spammer without a Motive

Anyone who knows what I’m about will have guessed that I’d take an interest in the spamming attempts on this blog site. And indeed I have. However, a couple of weeks ago I had a slew of comments for which I can’t deduce a motive.

They took the form of meaningful comments to half a dozen posts – the sort of thing you’d normally let through even they they didn’t add any useful knowledge. They were also well written, by someone who clearly spoke English. But they didn’t add up.

The author purported to be an American cleric, and the comments were written from that viewpoint. However, they didn’t smell quite right – there were a few slips that suggested they weren’t written by a west-coast American priest. Investigation revealed they were, in fact, sent from a computer in Manchester or thereabouts.

So what’s the game? Well there were no links or other nasties in any of the posts. The web site of the poster (which may well have been blocked anyway) was a religious blog in the USA, but it hadn’t seen any activity since mid-2006.

Could this person have been creating an identify for a sock-puppet? Well having waited a couple of weeks, the name hasn’t appeared anywhere else. It could be that the poster failed to convince anyone, but the Internet is a big place and most blogs aren’t posted by computer security experts.

The only explanation I can think of is someone trying to create an identity with enough rights that subsequent posts could get through unmoderated. This would have taken a great deal of further work, especially as the email address provided was an anonymised temporary one.

So, I’m still stumped!

Some of the comments were quite funny, so I might let them through anyway and see what happens.

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Scam.co.uk

Scan Computers has been around for some time, and they’ve always been tricky when it comes to faulty goods (I have a pile of DOA hard disks on my shelf to prove it). Now they’ve gone a step worse. Their latest wheeze is to add ‘installation insurance’ to your order without you knowing about it. There is a check-box, but it doesn’t always seem to stick and to make it trickier they don’t add it as an invoice line, they add it to the tax and shipping.

Watch out.

They’re still using a premium rate telephone number (without the required Ofcom warning) as their sole contact method if you have query about this extra charge. Incidentally, if you want the standard rate number for them it’s 01204 474747.

Nonetheless, I’ve sent them an email asking for an immediate recharge, or I’ll put a dispute on it with the credit card company. Let’s see what happens.

It’s a shame when this happens, because the people at Scan are basically very decent and helpful when you do manage to contact them, and they’re the place to go for high-end graphics systems. Like many companies, it seems they have someone in the money-making department dreaming up such schemes in the short term, and hack-off the punters long-term. Although this was less than 0.5% of the order value (it was only applied to some cooling fans – the big stuff wasn’t covered anyway), little things like this do get noticed and create a bad feeling – and everyone has a choice. Continue reading “Scam.co.uk”

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Saga of Sunon fan in Acer PC

As regular readers might remember, when IBM’s PC division became Lenovo I got worried, and bought a few Acer machines to see if they were any good. Their backup was dreadful, so I stuck with Lenovo. As is the way of things, one of the samples ended up as my main PC and has been purring along ever since. Until this morning.

It showed all the symptoms one would expect of a dead PSU. That is to say, the mains lead was live but the PC wasn’t.

Luckily the PSU is pretty standard and I had a spare on the shelf, but while I had the case open I gave the fans a twirl. I didn’t expect to find a problem as the machine ran silently, but to my amazement the CPU fan was ceased. Completely solid. I couldn’t shift it.

I removed the heat sink to get the fan off, and saw to my disgust that it was a special with a built-in thermistor and a fourth wire on the cable.

Computer case fans generally have two or three wires. If it’s just two it’s simple, a +ve and GND. The third wire is a spin sensor: usually yellow wires give a pulse as the fan completes a revolution and this the motherboard (or fan controller) can sense the actual fan speed. A white third wire generally indicates either spinning or ceased up completely. The type you need depends on the complexity of your control system.

The fourth wire, if there is one, tends to be for controlling the fan speed. There are basically two ways to vary the speed of the fan – vary the voltage or modulate it. Varying the voltage can be a bit tricky: dropping a voltage generally means converting it to heat somewhere along the line, and this is best avoided. Pulse Width Modulation, on the other hand, is great. You keep the voltage the same but you turn it on and off. If it’s off for 50% of the time and on for 50% of the time you’re only getting half the power to the fan, so it’ll turn half as fast (gross simplification, but you get the idea). The pulses, of course, have to be fast. Switched mode power supplies work using the same principle.

Naturally I had a box of fans, but none of them supported pulse-width modulation. I pretty much knew that before I looked. Never mind, I though – I’ll run a standard fan at a fixed speed and be done with it. Foiled again! This fan is 20mm thick whereas every other 80mm fan is 25mm thick. And the extra 5mm matters, because it won’t fit on the heat sink otherwise.

The fan in question is a Sunon FMD1208PKV1-A. Decoding this shows that it’s a FMD series, 12V, 8cm, 20mm thick and so on but doesn’t say whether it’s a ‘special’ – that could be what the –A is all about as Sunon do make special versions for OEMs.

It’s actually quite a fancy fan – maglev bearing and other leading-edge refinements. According to its data sheet it can shift more air with thinner blades than most of the competition. Hmm. It’s not like the case is so cramped that 5mm had to be shaved off the thickness of the fan!

A quick trawl revealed that RS Components (Radio Spares to my generation) stocked the beast, for about €30. Sorry, RS, but I don’t do Euros and certainly don’t have 30 of them to spend on a fan.

Com-Com, who recon they carry spares for most servers, advertised the part but you have to call them for a price. So I did. They don’t actually have any, but could get a box of 100 if I really wanted them that badly. Well they are nice fans and 100 would keep me going a long time so I enquired as to the price – £1500. They’re nice fans, but not that nice. The bloke there suggested I call Acer to see if they can sell me a spare. Calling Acer “Customer Services” is bad for my blood pressure, and has never resulted in anything good – basically some fool reading from a script that appears to have inadvertently been designed put you off buying anything for Acer ever again.

Next I tried running the box without a fan, as it clearly hadn’t had one for a while. The CPU temperature was hovering around 70C, which is a bit hot. In-spec, possibly, but not the best way to ensure it has a long and healthy life.

So I had a closer look. The fan can’t fit far enough down the heat-sink due to its thickness – it fouls the fixing posts. However, it’s held on to the heat-sink with a pair of off-set brackets, and these are reversible. If you swap them over the fan will just about clear the fixing posts once they’re screwed down. That’s the key…

Remove the heat-sink, fan and brackets. You then have to replace the heat-sink and screw it down – the screws will be inaccessible with the fan in place. Then re-fit the brackets the wrong way around (swap them over). It’s a fiddle, but you can screw the fan onto the brackets with the heat-sink in position – well the outer two anyway. The inner two could probably be managed if you were keener than I was.

A standard three-pin fan plug will fit the 4-pin connector on the motherboard; just push it over the appropriate three pins and avoid the one the blue wire would have been connected to.

Although the fan is now offset by nearly an inch, the CPU is really cool – about 25C. The down side is that it’s always running full-blast and it’s a tad noisy. Does anyone know where I can get a FMD1208PKV1-A with a PWM wire cheap?

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New Trojan scam

Earlier this evening I intercepted a single instance of a new Trojan malware ploy, which may be of interest.

Unlike most of these scams, this one was written in good English and sounded very plausible. It was sent directly to a mail host and was pretending to come from the administrator of that host, stating that the mail server was going to be upgraded on a specific date in the near future and the SSI(sic) certificate was going to change. It instructed the recipient to download an update for the (supposed) Windows PC you were using, and this would install he new certificate. It used a mangled URL that looked like it came from the mail hosting provider.

These people are using ‘clean’ IP addresses to send from so they won’t appear in lists of known spammers. The URL for the download (1ssl-cert.net) was freshly registered, and this was the only thing about it that an automated spam detector would have noticed.

A lot of people may be fooled by this. Watch this space.

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Micro Men – Acorn vs Sinclair

The BBC has, for once, come up with a one-off programme I actually enjoyed – Micro Men. It’s screening now (several times) on BBC4, and if you were around at the start of the micro computer era you really should watch it. It looks like it was made for us nerds.

It deals with the rivalry between Sinclair and Acorn in the UK home computer market. Okay, it takes a lot of liberties with events and totally ignores the rest of the industry – the best you can say is that it’s fiction based on history. But if you look beyond that, the background detail was completely amazing. And I’m not just talking about having the correct covers on the issues of PCW, although this was nice to see.

For a start, look at the posters on the walls – they’re spot on. Then look at the electronics they’re playing with in the lab. That’s either the guts of a real Acorn Atom or it’s a very good reproduction, even though the chips, which would have been more interesting, are hidden on the reverse. The software on the shelves at WH Smith looks like the real thing, in the real packaging.

In the closing scenes, where Chris Curry and Herman Hauser are discussing where it all went wrong, the whiteboard behind them contains the instantly recognisable design goals of the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM). Even the briefcases the men from the ministry carried – I bought one just like that in 1978 and I’ve still got it!

Someone was obviously paying a great deal of attention to such detail, and I didn’t see anyone mentioned in the credits who could have supplied it. But could it have been Roger Wilson, the genius I’ve always believed to be behind Acorn/BBC BASIC? He featured prominently in the depiction of the Acorn team, whereas Andy Hopper was nowhere to be seen; although this is perfectly reasonable from a dramatic sense

Roger Wilson has subsequently changed to Sophie Wilson, and I got a call from an old friend claiming that she appeared (unaccredited) in a cameo role as the barmaid. I never remember meeting Roger Wilson in person, so can’t tell, but it’s plausible when looking at it again.

The final scene, where Clive Sinclair drives a C5 down a runway only to be overtaken by two lorries, one from Microsoft and one from HP is obviously symbolic of the thrust of the whole film. Romantic, but wrong, of course. We’d all been using microcomputers with Microsoft software for a couple of years before either Sinclair or Acorn came on the scene with their ultra low-cost offerings. Like most people I knew, we avoided the newcomers because they were too cut-down an unsuitable for general nerd activities – particularly interfacing to things. And their manufactured PCBs used hairline copper tracks that were covered in solder-resist – difficult to rework.

Acorn and Sinclair started too late, and ended up building the machines we all wanted in 1980. By 1984 the bulk of computers were being sold not to enthusiasts, but users wanting pre-packaged software running CP/M or MS-DOS – and the Apple Macintosh was on the scene showing the way forward. The Mac booted into user-mode whereas previous machines started with the BASIC programming prompt.

What they didn’t realise was that we were never going to become a nation of computer programmers, we were going to become computer users. And the rest is history.

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Outlook Send and Receive Dialog

If you’re having problems with Outlook insisting on showing you a send/receive dialog even when you have checked the box to hide it in future the solution seems to be simple. Go to the View menu and make sure “Status Bar” is ticked at the bottom.

It appears that if there is no Status Bar to display progress, Outlook will display the Send/Receive dialog regardless of the preferences you’ve set.

If this doesn’t work for you, please leave a comment below.