Fresh from my inbox: " Dear Sir/Madam We regret to inform that your Visa/Mastercard secure has been set off because to many attendings, and we beleive that others were ussing your details. Please download the attach   to reactivate the account." Yeah, right. To many attendings, eh?  Others ussing my details?  Unbeleivable! I'm still haunted by the memory of a printed sign I saw in the lobby of a hotel in Sierra Leone, along the lines of "419ers are not permitted here".  Actually I wish I had photographed it for posterity.  Ho hum.

From Wired :  "Four Romanian nationals have been charged with hacking card-processing systems at more than 150 Subway restaurants and 50 other unnamed retailers, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday ... The hackers allegedly scanned the internet to identify vulnerable POS systems with certain remote desktop software applications installed on them, and then used the applications to log into the targeted POS system, either by guessing the passwords or using password-cracking software programs." Which begs the obvious question: why would anyone put their P oint O f S ale systems on the Internet, with remote desktop software to boot?  The answer presumably involves the millions of retail outlets that don't have an in-house IT function but rely on external 'point of sale IT specialists' to install, manage and maintain their card readers and often the electronic tills, accounting and stock management systems. I wonder if the mom-n-pop retailers are sufficiently ...

Wow!  Lucky me!  I've won a prize from the MSN Foundation! I guess Microsoft must have fallen on hard times. ($1.5)USD isn't exactly thrilling. Endless junk like this leaches bandwidth from the network, wastes processing cycles, consumes bytes on disk and exercises my grey matter (admittedly, not a lot). I guess the cretins sending it have nothing better to do than annoy the rest of us.