This tip brought to you by a textile friend whose son works in cyber security.
I’d not heard it before, so am passing it on…
Fun as it may be to lead on all those nuisance callers: real or machine, do not say anything (at all) to them.
Just hang up.
With an increasing number of organisations using voice recogntion technology (including HMRC and banks), fraudsters are now targeting spam calls to known people at known addresses on known telephone numbers to get a speech sample.
I’m told that very little speech is actually needed to allow the fraudsters to digitally replicate your unique voice patterns, and then use these to hack into anything that now requires voice recogntion security.
Scary stuff: and there goes one of my favourite pastimes…
Month: November 2019
“Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds.”
– Clive James
Many years ago (probably around 20 now) when life was good in the business world, profits boomed, and big bonuses were frequent sightings, we purchased a Tempur adjustable bed with one such windfall. A 6 foot bed, made up of two separate 3 foot beds with memory foam mattresses, joined together at the top and bottom of the bases, with rising head and feet, storage underneath, and adjustable firmness.
It has turned out to be one of our best ever purchases.
And yes, I’ll happily accept that while it may appear that we were old before our time, it is amazingly comfortable, and has prevented my many aches and pains being much worse than they are.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a clunk and a sudden drooping as I got out of bed with the head raised at 70 degrees. “What am I going to do now?” I wailed. “I can’t cope with getting in and out of bed without bits being up and down!” “Let me look, I’m sure it can be fixed,” reassured Mr BW. Fortunately for me and the many ‘accidents’ that somehow randomly occur to me, Mr BW can fix most things.
He pulled up the mattress and looked. He sucked his teeth in what is usually a ‘workman about to impart large estimate’ mode (well, from what other people say, I assume that’s what happens as we don’t often need the services of workmen, given Mr BW’s skill set). “Hmmm. It’s the metal strut, it’s sheered right off. Could be tricky… I’ll investigate and think further in the morning.” I was waiting for him to say, “But never mind, you can have my side of the bed for the time being!” but sadly he didn’t, so I had to make do with using several cushions to prop myself up, just like most people do.
I was worried. “If you can’t fix it, we can buy a new one, can’t we… this one is about 20 after all…?”
The following morning I turned on my little netbook, which had been by the side of the bed when it broke. I clicked onto a recipe page. Up popped an advert for… yes, you’ve guessed, adjustable beds.
Now, given that:
– I have never Googled ‘adjustable beds’,
– I have never before been served an advert for adjustable beds,
– adjustable beds have nothing at all to do with recipes,
– I hadn’t had the netbook open since before the bed broke,
How did that advert pop up?
A similar thing happened just a few days later. I’d misplaced my Fiskars orange-handled embroidery scissors. My sharpest pair. I turned the Studio upside down looking for them, but failed to locate them. The netbook was in the same room. When next I turned it on, I was immediately served a pop-up for the identical scissors.
How did that happen?
I always cover over any webcam on any computer with paper and then with thick black tape.
Is there a microphone in the netbook that is constantly listening? It is nearly 4 years old, and has no VRS and no whizzy software. We won’t have Alexa or Echo or any similar gadgets in the house, due to privacy and security concerns.
If there is such a microphone, how can it be permanently turned off? I don’t use it for anything else.
George Orwell’s ideas about Big Brother are as nothing compared to the apparent powers of the internet these days.
“The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to unerstand the meaning of life.”
– Rabindranath Tagore
And not an Alan Sugar or delusional picked-for-TV-entertainment wannabee oddball in their early 20s in sight.
It occurred to me this afternoon, as I was listening to a Money Box programme on R4 about retiring early, and what you have to do to achieve it, that there are at least 7 other people listed in my (hugely out of date but unalterable due to ‘old code’ impossible to update issues) sidebar who have also retired early. Most of them (sadly) left blogland long ago.
It was an interesting programme, although I admit to having shouted at the radio several times during it.
It’s not that difficult, really.
Although… two years ago we were raking in around £300 a month in interest on (17 different) current accounts and 7 regular savings accounts, which is down to less than £100 a month now. Thank you banks. With CPI currently runing at 1.7%, and such offers dying on a near-daily basis, I am dubious about the future possibilities, unless you are in a hugely well paid job (which we weren’t), and are comfortable taking huge risks with stock markets (which we’re not).
I don’t actually like the ‘FIRE’ acronym, or what its extreme proponents push (plenty of them available on a Google search, but, none I could actually recomment as I don’t read them, or indeed believe in – most of – what they preach).
I’m actually uncomfortable being part of that ‘movement’ actually: I am sure that there are a lot of people who are retiring early who will run out of money before they run out of life, and will then need the rest of us to prop them up, and I don’t think that is right.
I already know of several people who are stilll working, but taking money out of their pensions at 55 and ‘blowing it’, because they believe that The State Will Always Provide for those who haven’t been prudent. Not sure what the answer is, but I am sure that it will become an increasing problem.
This, together with the huge complexities of the pension market that I alluded to last week, leave me hugely uncomfortable that those who aren’t financially savvy, and can’t do their own calculations, or live within their means, are very vulnerable to schemes and scheming individuals. My advice, as ever, remains: if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is.