Neil Hopcroft

They missed Disneyland
(contains small blue people and an adult theme. Worksafe: no Smurfette porn here)

History proving someone right – DJFood providing an all the pop you can eat extravagansa

bleh, i’ve just been woken up by the citilink man trying to deliver my cables – of course he didn’t wait for long enough for me to get downstairs so now I’ve been woken up earlier than anticipated *and* not got my cables to play with. grrr. But at least I can go out ‘cos I’m not waiting for him any more.

part time/evening/weekend jobs London: Potential Flirters needed for feedback

The world is enough

Flying high, falling far

Shame these don’t project – the ultimate drive-in.

For those who remember the 888 – how times change.

Spalding launches John Peel Commemorative Tulip

Hmmm…this is an interesting security risk….I was making an instruction submission to my stockbroker earlier through their ‘secure email gateway’ on the their website. I’ve just received a bounce message from that submissision to the email address they have for communicating with me. What has happened is that their web gateway is set to package the secure messages (they are on https pages) as internal emails but with reply-to set to my email address.

The address this message was sent to is unrecognised, so the mail server has sent a bounce to the reply-to address containing the entirity of my original message, which I had submitted into what was advertised as a secure system, with the implication that (i) you didn’t have to worry about saying confidential things (ii) they could identify it was you saying them.

So there are two risks here, information I thought was protected was leaked over a non-secured network outside of my control and the bounce message contains some information about the internal structure of their systems, like the name of their internal exchange server and the name of the account to which ‘secured’ emails are sent. I wonder if anyone receiving those emails actually checks they came from their webserver…?

Now it happens that what I was saying wasn’t actually that exciting (buy 42 Trifast shares at 67 pence each) so I’m not particularly worried that any of my information has leaked to people it shouldn’t do, so its actually not too much of an issue *for this email*.

(and I’m not even going to ask why uu.net are routing my stockbroker traffic through the phones4u customer gateway…)

This is scary
(warning: contains picture of goths, do not click if you are of a nervous disposition or otherwise weak constitution)

Last night I went to beermats housewarming party, down in Woking. I was there early having gotten myself lost in the wrong bit of Woking – too much reliance on technology, I had no backup plan for when my navigation system didn’t know about his road, so had to phone to get directions. Twice. It would have been a third time but I just spotted their road when I was looking for somewhere safe to pull over.

We spent most of the night experiencing small world syndrome – with various people independently known to other party attendees, I’m not sure if its just the internet thats done this to us, or whether the world has really always been like that and I’m just noticing it now.

Still, there was a nice amount of geeking, to the point we were offered a whiteboard to help consider build tree annotations, an offer we politely declined. The boysenberry juice seemed to go down quite well with varied success in attempts to mix with available alcohols.

A fun night, made all the more disturbing by the collection of My Little Ponies in the roof.

I’ve got mice.

I’ve just been through my ‘big box of junk’ since it had gotten too heavy and was making my shelves fall over, lurking at the bottom of it were mice, six of them, in various incarnations from the oldstyle Microsoft inport busmouse all the way through to PS2.

So if anyone can think of anything to do with the kinds of electronics you get in mice I’d be interested to hear about it.