Cat Man Do

Ninja Cat

I reckon there are three clues in the header alone.

From: “UK National Lottery” auto@[obscured].com
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 16:55:56 +0000
To:
Subject: [Spam] Results 2009

First, the email address used isn’t from the domain used by the national lottery (even if it was, this wouldn’t necessarily mean it was genuine, as they can be spoofed). Secondly, my email client has identified it as probable spam. And the most telling is that it is not to me. I’ve been included in the BCC box, meaning that I can’t see exactly who the email has been sent to. This is probably because they have sent this one email to a considerable number of people.

They have actually used the correct postal address information for the National Lottery, so I’ll give them a point there, but then they start being a bit dodgy again…

The National Lottery Day wishes to inform you that you have won the sum of £900.000.00(Nine Hundred Thousand pound Only). The National Lottery Day. draws was conducted from an exclusive list of 13 lucky emails of individual and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search. No tickets were sold

Okay, where do I start here? I reckon seven clues in this paragraph that it was spam. First is this new invention The National Lottery Day, which I’ve never heard of before. Secondly, what is common practice in the UK for spacing out large numbers is to use either a space or a comma. A stop is rarely used to indicate a thousand separator in countries which use a stop as the decimal separator, because of obvious confusion.

Third and fourth, there’s “Thousand pound Only”. Here, I’d suggest two cues: we would normally use pounds, and it also seems odd that the word pound is the only one not capitalised.
Fifth is the full stop after the second National Lottery Day which means the uncapitalised word ‘draws’ begins a sentence. Sixth you’ve got the suggestion that the draws were made from a list which only had thirteen emails on it in the first place — as opposed to the idea that 13 winners were chosen from a much larger list.

Seventh is really the key one. It says “no tickets were sold”. Given that the premise of the National Lottery is to raise money for ‘good causes’, it would seem rather illogical of them to simply start giving money away.

It then specifies my ‘unique’ claim codes before the next bit of spiel… in which I reckon I’ve found eight more cues that indicate that the whole thing is spam…

You are required to claim your winnings before January 14th, 2010 otherwise it rolls over to the next draw.

Prize claiming procedures.
Full Name, Sex . Age, phone number, Address, Profession,
Please quote your Reference number in all correspondence with the claims officer.

Failure to provide the information above to the claims officer will result to immediate disqualification !!

Claims Officer
Mr Greg Peterson

Email:national.claims@[obscured].com

Furthermore, should there be any change of address do Inform the CLAIM AGENT as soon as possible.

AGREEMENT: The National Lottery day and the Local Organizing Committee (LOC) of the 2009 National Lottery day celebration hereby Agrees, That the winning information written above are the orignal winning information as it was selected by the computer on 30th day of December 2009, And that the winner who these winning information has been sent to,will be paid the winning sum of £ 900.000.00 without fail.

Congratulations once more from our members of staff.
Once again on behalf of all our staff CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Note: Anybody under the age of 18 is automatically disqualified..

Congratulations.
Mrs.Marie Young.
Winnings Coordinator

Right. Where do we start?

One. There’s the fact I’ve been given 11 days to claim the prize, when if you have a winning lottery ticket, you’ve got 180 days to claim. Why on earth would this suddenly be cut to a rather paltry 11 days? Unless of course it’s spam, and it’s there to try and generate a bit of time impetus to try and get you to hand over your details without bothering to check anything.

Two, three, four and five. There’s a list of things broken up by a random full stop: “Full Name, Sex . Age, phone number, Address,” — which also demonstrates a rather inconsistent approach to capitalisation. And why does it need my profession or my gender? Surely these are not actually relevant as to whether or not I’m entitled to win the money…

Then there’s the strangely strangled phrase “will result to immediate disqualification !!”. Result to? Result in, methinks. And although I think anything which uses multiple exclamation marks to try and give the impression that it’s extra important or really we’re just all CRAZY!!!! is worthy of nothing more than throwing straight in the bin, I wouldn’t put it past the National Lottery to think that’s cool, so I’m just scoring one there, taking us up to six.

Seven. Then another non-National Lottery email address. Eight: a reference to a CLAIM AGENT whereas elsewhere the details of a Claims Officer has been given — a little internal inconsistency there. Nine: The Local Organising Committee reference suggests an Olympic Games motif to me, but there is no reference to this at all, and why would you need anything local if you’re talking about a national lottery with a draw carried out at that same national level?

Then there’s a reference to the National Lottery Day celebration — which can’t have been celebrated particularly well in 2009, since I’ve never heard of it. And while the National Lottery was 15 years old in 2009, that anniversary was in November, not December, and there’s a distinct lack of “15 years” mentions in the email. Ten.

There’s more examples of bad language, or uncommon usage: “the winning information written above are the orignal winning information”; “selected by the computer on 30th day of December 2009, And that the winner who these winning information has been sent to”. Fourteen. I’ll let them off with the thousand separator, as I’ve counted that before, and at least they are internally consistent.

Then they congratulate me “once more” before they had congratulated me in the first place. 15. Then they congratulate me again — once again — on the very next line, which seems odd. 16. And then it seems odd to disqualify anyone under 18, when the rest of the National Lottery works on a minimum age of 16. Seventeen

One spam email, trying to get me to part with information needed for identity fraud (I’m sure had I attempted to claim, my bank details would have been required at some point). But when it contains twenty seven separate clues to indicate that it is spam, I find it difficult to believe that people are sufficiently credulous to fall for this sort of thing.

PS — if you’ve managed to spot a spam clue that I missed, let me know…

Of course, even if they did brush up their act significantly — such as by reading this blog and finding out where the errors in their email were! — then there’s still a page on the National Lottery site which tells you how to identify scams.

Right. Now I just need to win the National Lottery for real.

So I just got a call from my girl friend that she has been fucking around with my uncle!!! So like any angry boy friend I have choosen to share every naked photo I have of her to the internet. I have downloaded the pics…Spammer

To start with, I think you mean uploaded. Downloaded would suggest that the pictures were on the net in the first place. Secondly, I don’t think you’re entirely accurate in assuming every angry boyfriend would behave in such a manner. For a start, I believe that those actions would very likely be considered illegal in many places, if they are published without her consent. And I would like to think most people would be more gentlemanly than that, anyway.

Although by the sound of it, your girlfriend isn’t exactly behaving like a lady…

So I just got a text from my girl friend that she has been sleeping around with my brother!!! So like any good boy friend…Same spammer

Personally mate, I probably would have dumped her after the uncle thing. Although frankly it doesn’t say much for your family either, if they’re prepared to sleep with your girlfriend.

So I just got a text from my girl friend that she has been fucking around with my dad…Same spammer

Look mate, just get rid. She’s no good for you. And for that matter, I’d be having second — or quite possibly third — thoughts about the rest of my family too.

So I just got a msg from my girl friend that she has been fucking around with my little brother…Same spammer

Sheesh! You’re just bringing it on yourself now. I did tell you she was no good for you, didn’t I? Seriously mate, it’s obviously not working out between you two; just drop the whole thing. The only possible reason I can imagine for you going any further with this is if you’re trying to get on some Jeremy Kyle special…

So I just got a voice mail from my girl friend that she has been sleeping around with my dad…Same spammer

Um… didn’t she tell you that already, via text? Although to be honest I can understand her not necessarily wanting to break the news to you face-to-face. Having said that, if your girlfriend’s name actually is “DirtySlut232″ then I think you maybe should have had some suspicions from the outset…

But, even so…

So I just got a voice mail from my girl friend that she has been having sex with my friend…Same spammer

Hmm… I can’t help but feel that there’s some sort of problem with your relationship, you know. Coincidentally enough, if you’re experiencing some form of er… failure to function, or you have um… length issues, then the spammer immediately following you seems to think that they can help.

So I just got a email from my girl friend that she has been fucking around with my best friend…Same spammer

To be honest mate, I’m starting to suspect that it’s you that’s the problem. After all, there’s always the possibility that you’re suffering from some sort of delusional paranoia and none of this is actually real, the other possibility is that it is real, which would then pose the question as to why so many people who would be expected to know you well would behave in such a mean way towards you.

And I can only presume it’s ‘cos you’re a complete bastard.

Obviously, as we all know, it’s not actually real. It’s not a real person, it’s not a real story about a real girlfriend, it’s thinly and rather badly disguised spam attempting to get me to visit a site which purports to host pictures of naked ladies but is probably considerably more likely to host a wide variety of malware.

Come on spammers, you can do better than this! Put some bloody effort into it!

My spam filters had done their job pretty well — by my reckoning, only around 1-2% of the spam comments actually made it through to publication (although of course even those have now been disposed of). But that left an awful amount of spam in the queue.

Since I normally blitz any spam before it has a chance to build up, I thought it might be nice to take the opportunity to look through the spam and work out the different types of spam it consisted of, and the relative proportions these took up.

This was a somewhat time consuming exercise as it required me to manually classify each item from over 800 items of spam. I also decided to place each item into only one category (“jokes”, “online pharmacy” and so on) which was of course not wholly reflective of the actuality, as some spam items may, for example, tell a (crap) joke and then direct me to places where I might buy various pharmaceuticals.

And there were a lot of those telling me where to buy pharmaceuticals.

With 845 spam items altogether, online pharmaceuticals were by far the biggest category, making up 22% of all spam. There’s a lovely advert (I think produced by Pfizer, but I could be wrong) which illustrates the danger of buying fake medicines online, pointing out that you don’t know what’s actually in it: it may contain rat poison…

Although given that in my youth (sorry, earlier youth) I worked in a pharmacy and was fully aware that doctors would prescribe stuff such as Warfarin (which was used as a rat poison) for treatment of certain medical conditions, leads me to wonder exactly what sort of rat poison the advert is talking about.

But anyway, don’t buy this crap.

What next? Oh yes, the random or pseudorandom string of letters. I tend to think this is a tester for spammers: it gives them the chance to later on search for “fzzbx” or whatever it was, and if it is online, they know those sites aren’t particularly well protected. This made up a further 17% of the spam, closely followed in size order by ‘other’ on 12%.

Of course ‘other’ doesn’t mean much by itself: it is only meaningful once we know what it is other than, so moving swiftly on, we find that the next biggest section of spam sent to my site is piano-related. Yes, piano-related. 91 spam comments, almost 11%. Can anyone explain why?

I wouldn’t have thought my site would score particularly highly in piano-related searches. I am not, after all, a music maestro… well, maybe I am, but the wife, kids, and anyone else who has heard me would tend to disagree.

Then there’s the people who say stuff like “Very Nice Site” (I know) “MegaCool Blog” (I know) “Great Article” (I know) or “You’re really hot and sexy” (goes without saying) in order to try and get me to publish their links (around 10%). I wouldn’t mind, but when they’re just stating the bleeding obvious like this, it’s hardly even flattery, so I’m certainly not going to put their links on.

Then we’ve got meaningless lists of links and unsupported characters… where the spam appears like this:

????????? ????????? ??????? ????????? ????????

…which I tend to presume is submitted in a character set my computer doesn’t support — this makes up just over 8%. This is followed by those 6% who seem to think I would have some interest in actually paying real money to obtain gold in World of Warcraft or similar games. Quick tip: I’m happy to be paid money, I’m not so keen on handing it over. I also included “other techy” spam in this category, where I found a wonderful quote from someone saying how bulletproof their server was, and how the uptime was really fantastic:

my server is managed uptime 2×4

Not 24×7, you note. It’s 2×4, which sounds a bit more like a plank of wood, or possibly suggests that their server runs for two hours a day, four days a week. I don’t know about you, but I’d be looking for a bit more uptime than that.

There was another one in this section which I classed as ‘techy’ because they talked about online reports, even though it sounded a bit detectivey…

If you know someone around you who is being a little shady and you are getting uncomfortable around them, then maybe you might want to run a small background report on the person in question

E.g. Your spouse is particularly attentive or particularly inattentive towards you.

I like that. If your spouse is being attentive, they must be cheating. If they are not attentive, they must be cheating. Nothing like paranoia to drum up a bit of business, is there? But wait a minute, I can think of someone who is definitely a bit shady…

Then you’ve got 5% which are links to sites which sound pornographic and with varying degrees of dubiousness. I’m sure that there are niche markets for all the content they claim to be providing, however. And as I’ve said before, if you really are Angelina Jolie (or Paris Hilton), and you want me to see you nude, just pop round and take your clothes off, rather than bothering with this dubious website business. You might want to give me a ring first though, just to make sure the missus is out.

Then we had the bloke who kept being reminded of stuff that wasn’t really relevant. There were forty two (5%) comments along these lines:

This makes me remember something funny that my brother used to say…
However its so not appropriate right now…

The relative in question changed from time to time — father, mother, sister, and grandmother all got a mention — but at no point did the person ever specifically say what was funny. Bloody spammers.

The credit crunch wasn’t causing quite the spam explosion I had expected though, with only 3% of the spam relating to making money online, credit reports and the like.

But there was a single piece of spam I had to single out as my favourite:

The Women’s Party brought centuries of enlightened rule to this planet. We had prosperity, there was a good tourist trade, no one suffered. So maybe men voted a few years later than women or couldn’t get the best jobs.

Can’t remember what link they were trying to get in, but I can appreciate their taste in literature. It’s a quote (possibly slightly mangled) from a novel by Harry Harrison, featuring one James Bolivar DiGriz, also known as “The Stainless Steel Rat”: international master criminal. If you’ve not read any of them, may I suggest you start your collection with The Stainless Steel Rat Omnibus?

Afghanistans nomination commission has ordered a runoff selectionSpammer

Err… yes… thanks for letting me know. I always seek to find out the latest international and political news through people posting comments on my blog which have nothing to do with the subject in question. You won’t catch me reading the paper, reading online news or watching the TV news when I can instead be informed of the latest news by spammers, no sir.

Great website HOT Pianoforte LinksSpammer

I mentioned this sort last time: what exactly do people mean by a hot piano? Are they referring to some smokin’ blues or jazz, is it a piano that is on fire (you know, something you could probably expect Stan and Ollie to be associated with) or are they referring to a sexy piano? The last idea is probably the most disturbing…

to set my initial plants up, it took me about 30 minutes. I bought this with a Co2 system as well. Lo and behold this box is not only growing my plants at a rate of 1 inch per day, but by the time my first harvest came in, the younger plants were tall enough to move to the flowering chamber. This is pretty good and my first experience with a proper hydroponics systemSpammer

Well, I’m pleased to hear that you are having such a fun experience… gardening. Although I presume that, while you don’t mention what sort of plants you have, they are a very particular sort of a plant. Which I have no intention of growing myself, so I’m not really interested in a review of hydroponics equipment, thanks. Although I love the way these adverts (e.g. in the back of Viz) normally look to imply that they should only be used for growing perfectly legal things. Yeah, like anyone would want to grow tomatoes in a secret compartment in their attic…

Buy [specific pharmaceutical]. Your physical health outcomes will be loweredSpammer

Well, that’s probably very true: at least you can’t accuse them of false advertising. But I can’t help think this isn’t exactly going to encourage people to purchase their product…

1. Many thanks for the help in this question. 2. I did not know it. 3. weight loss pills 4. I consider, that you are not right. 5. I can defend the position. 6. Write to me in PM, we will talkSpammer

1. No problem.
2. Well, now you do.
3. Eh?
4. Eh? I thought you just said thanks for the help…
5. So can I.
6. No. I won’t. We won’t.

exploit your babysitter’s porn site! grandad gay pornSpammer

You know, it might just be me, but I’d probably be less likely to have someone as a babysitter if I knew they were running a porn site. As for the second, while I have no objection to that sort of thing per se for people who do like it, I have to say that it’s really not for me…

1. You are not right. 2. I suggest it to discuss. 3. Write to me in PM. 4. safe weight loss pills 5.I congratulate, your opinion is usefulSpammer

Does this sound kind of vaguely… familiar to anyone?

They used to have a wonderful wiki to document White RussiansSpammer

To be honest, I don’t think it really needs that much documentation. Vodka, coffee liqueur, and cream. That’ll do yer.

If you are struggling with a shoe-string budget to maintain your website, our web solutions offer you unique cost advantages.Spammer

I think this is perhaps failing to research your market. A lot of people would probably be reluctant to purchase web design services from spammers, but offering your web design services to me — when I offer these services myself — is even less likely to get a useful response. I may indeed charge more than these people suggested: but on the other hand, if you go with me your website will not only be of better quality, but it will actually appear…

Right now, I spend about $53 per month on my phone bill…Spammer

Look, I’m not sure exactly how to phrase this without seeming slightly rude, but what precisely was it on my post about upgrading wordpress that made you think I’d give a flying fuck what your phone bill is, or how many free texts you get per month? Just wondering…

Hi there, my home page is http://www.google.comSpammer

If by home page you mean the one your browser is set to by default, I believe you. I just don’t understand — and here we have some similarities to the last message — why you think I would care?

She has such a great ass!Spammer

Ah, do you mean Dragon from Shrek? Who obviously is married to Donkey…? No?

1. I agree with you. 2. This is useful information. 3. weight loss pills. 4. I think you have been deceived on this issue. 5. Contact me to discussSpammer

Ah, no… I think we’ll just leave it there for now, okay…?

Well, Ian Cuddy of PSF has been compiling a Public Sector Data Breach log showing data breaches in the public sector only (and this is of course not counting the private sector breaches).

Ian has kindly given me permission to republish some of this information here for those of you who aren’t PSF subscribers, and it’s quite shocking reading. In this calendar year, and going only up to the end of September, he’s so far recorded around two hundred and fifty breaches. Two hundred and fifty! At least when everyone dealt with paper records they would only send out one record incorrectly at a time…

So here’s some of the highlights: I’ve selected only one item per month:

• In January, a person wandered into Oldham Civic Centre, and walked out again, unchallenged, wheeling 17 council laptops in a recycling bin.
• In February, NHS Brent were reprimanded by the Information Commissioner after two unencrypted laptoops were stolen containing personal information of 389 patients.
• In March, Lothian and Borders Police has launched a review of data security procedures following the loss of an unencrypted USB memory stick containing information on hundreds of police investigations.
• In April, the Ministry of Defence confirms that an unencrypted hard drive, containing names of SAS soldiers and top-secret training exercises, has been lost.
• In May, Cambridge Police Authority accidentally published confidential complaints about police officers on its website. One of the complaints concerned ‘improper disclosure of sensitive information to a third party’.
• In June, Tendring Council apologised after a sack of documents containing personal details of elderly residents was discovered dumped in a rubbish bag in a street.
• In July, a GP exposed a security flaw in a electronic database accessible by NHS smartcard holders after he was able to view personal records of colleagues and staff without their consent and without the unauthorized access being reported.
• In August, the Crown Prosecution Service has handed personal details of prosecution witnesses (including addresses and phone numbers) to defence lawyers by mistake.
• And in September, the DVLA was ‘urgently’ investigating after its database of millions of motorists was sold to oil firm Castrol to use in a marketing campaign, apparently without its knowledge.

It would appear that the only way to keep your data safe is of course not to have any. Anyone who has access to personal data needs to take particular care not only not to disclose it ‘by mistake’ but also to keep it secure. Whether we need heavier penalties for those who expose someone else’s data either by act or omission may be something that needs to be looked at.

We need to be clearer as regards data protection: organisations must not collect any data they don’t need; they must dispose of that data when appropriate, and they must keep it secure until then. If they fail to do so, then I would suggest not only must they notify everyone who has had their details exposed, but they must also be prepared to stump up any transfer costs (whether financial, or time-compensation) for anyone who decides that they want a different bank account…

Don’t buy your next mobile phone until you know about our free gits

Hmm. There’s an offer I can refuse. Entertainingly enough, it wasn’t the only offer I could refuse. Here are a selection of the others:

Buy Cipro for rectal bleeding

Er… no thanks. I’m fine without the rectal bleeding, thank you.

Hey guy’s. I’m new here, and to be honest, im here to promte a product, called [........]. It’s the new generation of Anti-Virus scanners.

Yeah. And it’s not one of those scare-ware things at all which will tell you you have a virus and if you download and pay for their product, it will then confirm that it has got rid of the virus it had invented in the first place, is it? And even assuming it was genuine, when I’m looking for an anti-virus product, I’m looking for a company who pays attention to detail, rather than ones who don’t know that ‘guys’ is a plural word that doesn’t require an apostrophe, or know how to spell ‘promote’.

But I don’t know if it’s one of the laws of spamming: you are legally obliged to put together a slap-dash message so that anyone looking at it with an ounce of sense is capable of determining that it is spam. Of course, that’s not true, and anyone relying on this might be taken in by any spammer who has gone to the trouble of actually paying attention to detail…

I bought my wife a car, renovated our kitchen and took her on a cruise but the thing that stirred her the most was without a doubt my intention to [link] buy loose diamonds

Sssh! For God’s sake be quiet! I was hoping to maybe get my wife something a little cheaper than that for our anniversary. Maybe a new bottle of bleach or some toilet paper. Perhaps an ironing board cover. You know, some romantic gesture that’s not too expensive.

I’m 25 from Sydney Australia, been training for about 4 years, pretty hard for the past year and a half. I’m about 5?8 and weigh 101kg currently bulking and hoping to compete earliest May 2010. Do you want to get in touch about [link] stocks?

Er… that sounds a little creepy to be honest. So I’ll call that one as a no. Generally, if I was interested in discussing potential investments in the stock market, I’d look for a financial advisor, rather than a blogging bodybuilder who seems to think that this is somehow relevant to the stock market. Still, on the bright side, if you keep taking those steroids, you’ll soon have veins the size of mooring ropes bulging out the sides of your neck, which is what bodybuilders seem to like. And, I must add this was quite impressively off-topic, since the post you attempted to comment on was about blogging policies in Local Authorities.

Have you been a naughty boy? Do you want to be whipped?

Well, probably to the first, and definitely not to the second. I just don’t have the right sort of personality type to be a submissive, I’m afraid. I’m too bloody-minded, belligerent, argumentative, and, most likely, convinced of my own superiority. So don’t you dare threaten to whip me again, or I’ll spank you.

I will however leave the last word to someone who goes by the name of ‘budget hotels’ and helpfully also included a few links to his own site, for sheer barefaced cheek:

Who says the internet is full of garbage and SPAM? This is a great article…

…yes, and it’s even better ‘cos it doesn’t have your spam on it.

I have just been informed that:

We are a professional internet consultant organization in Asia, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company. On Sep,8,2009, we received an application formally, one company named [company name] applied for the brand keyword “thepickards” and following domain names:

• thepickards.asia
• thepickards.cn
• thepickards.com.cn
• thepickards.com.hk
• thepickards.com.tw
• thepickards.hk
• thepickards.net.cn
• thepickards.tw

with our organization.

During our preliminary investigation, we found that these domain names’ keyword is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned [company name] to register these domain names with us? Or is [company name] your business partner or distributor in Asia?Unsolicited Email

Note that not only does the unsolicited email think that I am somehow going to be concerned by someone registering ‘thepickards’ domains in China (.cn), Taiwan (.tw) and Hong Kong (.hk), but they have gone to the trouble of addressing me (not by name of course) as the president and CEO of the company.

Well, that’s very nice of them, but this is really just another cut and paste job using my domain name and looking to see what other domain names in their registration area are available and then no doubt trying to get me into panicking to think that I simply must get them registered, where no doubt this company would offer me first dibs on the domain names for an appropriate remuneration.

It could be a complete scam: i.e. I could pay the money and get buggerall in return, or it could simply be a scare designed to drum up business. Either way, I see it as something at least a little underhand, and to be honest, I’m not actually desperate to ensure that any references to ‘thepickards’ is owned by me. And even if I was (and I’m not), I’d be more interested in stuff like thepickards.com, or thepickards.eu, or thepickards.net, rather than some obscure (to me) Chinese domains.

Of course, one of the minor clues that it’s not entirely a full-on legit query is the fact that it wasn’t addressed to me. It’s not exactly difficult to find out what my name is, if you have a poke around the website. There’s even a contact form people can use. If you don’t use either of these and your email to me looks (presumably with very good reason) like you’ve simply mailmerged my details into a standard letter that you’re spamming out to others, then I will tend to assume your email is spam.

And that’s before we start looking at minor details like the company name you provided appearing to be fictitious (they certainly don’t have a website and I can’t find any reference to them). For goodness sake, if you’re going to send me spam, at least do me the credit of realising that shit spam will be recognised as such easily.

…and dealt with accordingly.

But it’s all the rest of you that I wish to complain about. If spammers couldn’t make money out of doing this sort of thing; if people didn’t buy goods, services, or in this case domain names from unsolicited spam, then people wouldn’t do it. Those of you out there who do click on the links and buy the goods are encouraging the spammers to perpetuate the spam. You are therefore equally to blame. So stop it.

Message ends…

Also, the few I have actually read tend to be crap, and I’ve been publicly scathing about them from time to time (although generally polite to the people they have originated from). It’s always possible that this is just down to me being a bad-tempered so-and-so as well. But while I find it easy to ignore the ones which don’t interest me (I might read the bad jokes, I will skip ‘inspirational messages’), I find it impossible to ignore the ones which are told as truth but are actually full of racist bullshit.

The Infidel Papers

There was a diatribe called ‘The Uncomfortable Definition of an Infidel’ which describes how a prison officer attended his annual training session for maintaining his security clearance as a prison officer, where he had to sit and attend a presentation by preachers from the Protestant, Muslim and Roman Catholic faiths, and basically it turned out that according the the Muslim preacher, every good Muslim should kill anyone who wasn’t a Muslim.

The message was from a John Harrison MBE, and contained the tag line ‘this happened in London’, and closed by saying:

Everyone in the U.K. should be required to read this, but with the current political paralysis, tolerant justice system, liberal media and p.c. madness, there is no way this will be widely publicised.

Anyone reading that message, and accepting everything at face value, would presume feel a little more uncomfortable about Islam, see it as an intolerant religion incapable of coexisting peacefully with other religions. Maybe we should be asking the question “why hasn’t this been widely publicised”? Isn’t it something everyone should know about?

Well, no. Because it’s all bollocks. A big fat racist lie.

Firstly, while I’m quite happy to believe that members of the prison service may be required to attend diversity seminars, I fail to understand how a diversity seminar is necessary for them to maintain their security clearance, nor why a diversity seminar would include two Christian preachers, one Muslim preacher, and no representatives of Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism or Atheism.

Secondly, there’s the matter of John Harrison MBE. Wondering how and why a prison officer got an MBE, I looked him up, to discover that he’s not actually a prison officer at all, it would appear that he’s a photographer. And, more than that, he’s actually gone to the trouble to explain on his site that the whole thing has nothing to do with him:

There’s a link on his site which says ‘click here if you have received an email from John Harrison ref. religion’, which then goes on to say:

An e-mail purporting to be from John Harrison MBE is currently circulating following the release of the New Years Honours list, this e-mail is in no way associated with John Harrison MBE of Harrison Photography.

But he’s just the John Harrison MBE that it is most easy to find, he wasn’t actually the John Harrison MBE MIDSc referenced by the article. This one is:

John Harrison, MBE. MIDSc. 2006 saw John’s 50th year in the health service having worked in military and civilian hospitals around the world. He has been heavily involved with training and became
a member of the Institute of Training and Development as well as continuing as a full time sterile services manager, currently at The North Hampshire Hospitals NHS Trust.November 07 issue of ‘Medical Device Decontamination’

Only it didn’t have anything to do with him either.

Right. So if the details about the seminar are incorrect, and the details about the author are also incorrect, should we not then begin to treat the rest of the message with a little less respect — and maybe a bit more contempt?

If anyone actually bothered to try and corroborate the details in any way shape or form, then as well as discovering that the details and the author or incorrect, they would find that this has been circulating around the internet for about four years and is an editorial written by someone from a Christian ministry, purportedly about his experience at a prison in Missouri (so look, the location was a load of bollocks as well). Only it would appear that he wasn’t telling the truth exactly:

the event described was a training program for prison volunteers, for which ministers from several faiths were invited to give presentations in order to acquaint prison volunteers with the varied religious beliefs of the inmate population. The man who gave the presentation about Islam was not a Muslim minister; he was an inmate pressed into service [...] Mr. Kniest, the prison’s Volunteer Coordinator said that “The inmate did a good job,” adding, “He was asked a few questions that were beyond his ability to answer. But he was not asked anything like that question [in the editorial]“snopes.com

And as snopes.com points out, if you cherry-pick your points from the Bible, you can find references suggesting that anyone who works on a Saturday should be put to death (Exodus 35:2). But of course the minister would ignore the bits from his Holy Book which suggests Christianity may be intolerant, and instead invent stories relating to another religion suggesting instead that they are intolerant.

That’s hardly what I call Christian behaviour. But then again, I’m not a bigot.

And what worries me is that people see this as plausible, as if the majority of muslims worldwide are somehow hiding the secret that really, all of them want to kill all of the rest of us. Fortunately, when I pointed this out to the person who had sent it to me, they quickly realised that they had been taken in and that it was indeed a load of bollocks (and took the time to assure me that they were not indeed a racist — which I already knew, although some degree of piss-taking for having fallen for such obvious racist crap without any checking may indeed be in order).

But that is really the thing that worries me: not that there are racist bigots out of there, pumping these sorts of stories out by email, but the fact that ordinary people are doing their work by believing them and then forwarding this poisonous crap on to everyone else. Whether I’m going a bit far by describing this as everyday racism I don’t know, but I think there’s certainly at least some element of this in the matter — would people have been so quick to believe a similar sort of nonsense relating to baby-eating Catholics?

Not only do we, as members of society, have a responsibility to correct this sort of garbage when we hear it (it isn’t really that hard to check, if you’ve got an internet connection and understand how a search engine works) but the media also need to take their share of the blame for promoting negative attitudes towards Islam.

And the media seem happy to promote the idea that Islam is something we should be worried about:

Counting the Mohammeds

Just look at the Telegraph from yesterday (HT to @antonvowl for bringing this article to my attention):

The ONS was criticised for treating the various spellings of Mohammed as different names. It only published the top 100 names for each sex which meant figures were only released for three variations of Mohammed. Mohammed was placed 16th with 3,423, Muhammad 37th with 2,068 and Mohammad 65th with 1,100.

Figures for five other alternative spellings – Muhammed (496), Mohamed (428), Mohamad (40), Muhamed (11) and Mohammod (10) – were later released to the Daily Telegraph. That made a total of 7,576 and put Mohammed and its alternative spellings ahead of the official second place name, Oliver, of whom there were 7,413. There were 8,007 Jacks.

Telegraph: Jack pips Mohammed to be most popular boys name

The Office of National Statistics is accused of being disingenuous by not lumping all the ‘Mohammed’ names together. Presumably therefore the Telegraph would expect ‘Jack’ and ‘John’ to be added together? And certainly all Bills, Williams, Wills and Liams would need to be added together, would they not? After all, they are just variations of the same name also, aren’t they?

And if you add Billy, William and Liam together, you get 8,824, making William (and variants) the most popular boys name, more than 800 ahead of Jack (or only about 10 ahead if you count ‘John’ in with Jack), and a comfortable 1250 or so ahead of the entire combination of Mohammed variants (and don’t take my word for it: check the stats yourself (xls)). But for some reason the Telegraph don’t seem to mention this…

Or is it just that the Telegraph wants to add the Islamic names together to generate a little bit of scaremongering about Islam? After all, what is there for the ONS to be disingenuous about? It’s not as though there would be a problem if the most popular boys’ name was Mohammed, would there be?

Or is it just that we are being conditioned to believe that there’s some sort of problem with Islam? Who wants us to think this — and why? Is it just to sell papers? Frankly, I’d expect better from the broadsheets, but maybe I’m just a romantic.

And if you’re going to go on about traditional “British” names, please take note: unless you’re prepared to change your name to (or name your children) Egbert, Æthelwulf, Oswald or Cœnwulf, then you’re just using the usurping Christian names yourself and you’re not exactly following the British “tradition” either.

Bloody Normans. They come over here with their Domesday Books and their fucking tapestries…

It’s particularly important to have protection against (or at least a way of scanning for) rootkits because of their stealth:

Rootkits can lie hidden on computers and remain undetected by anti-virus software. Although new rootkits can be prevented from infecting the system, if you had any rootkits before you installed your anti-virus, they may never be revealed.Sophos Anti-Rootkit

So take a moment to download, install, and ensure that your PC is not infected with rootkits. And a big thank you to those nice people at Sophos.

Oh, and while you’re on, why not check whether you are part of the koobface botnet. If you are, then for goodness sake sort your antivirus/ security precautions out…