Gone Phishing
Which web browser do you use? Gone over to Firefox have you, to be safer? Think again.
The Register has an article about the rise in trojan horse programs. highlights include;

Of the 13 vulns affecting IE in 2004, nine were classified as "high severity". Of the 21 vulnerabilities affecting the Mozilla browsers, Symantec classified 11 as "high severity". Firefox users enjoyed an easier ride with just seven affecting "high severity" vulns over the report period.

Symantec says there have been few attacks in the wild against Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Safari, but the jury is still out on whether these browsers represent a more secure alternative to IE.

The article also comments on the rise in Phishing scams, this is where you get an email asking you to confirm your account details for internet banking etc, I get a lot of these pretending to be from ebay. The email will ask you to click a link, which takes you to a fake version of the website you think you are visiting, and then log in to reset your account, at which point they grab your password etc and steal all your money.
I would imagine that a lot of even fairly web savvy people get caught like this and it is obviously lucrative judging by this statement;

Symantec also noted a marked rise in email scams over second half of 2004. The firm's BrightMail anti-spam filters blocked an average of 33 million phishing emails a week in December 2004 compared to nine million a week in July 2004.

So get yerself a firewall and antivirus software, if you use broadband get a router/firewall, visit www.grc.com and use their "shields up" utility to find out how secure your pc is, and remember no proper company will ask you for passwords etc.
Be careful out there on the interweb because here be dragons, and thieving bastards.

The winds of change
Thought I'd mess about with the colour scheme a bit as this blog template has been the same ever since I started it.
Also I want to add some pictures and a random picture generator that I 've been playing around with in Dreamweaver. When I get time.

This weekend was the firm's "christmas do". A bit later than normal this year and a bit poorly attended but wifey and I still enjoyed it.
My in laws had the kids (this was the first night we have spent without the baby, who was 6 months old yesterday incidentally) so it was nice to get a bit of peace and quiet and a break from Big'uns constant pokemon obsession.
The format was the usual, night in a hotel, posh meal (remembering eat before meal or send out for pizza afterwards), disco and breakfast. The only difference was this year we had a live band as well which would have been a good idea if it wasn't for the fact that they were shite. This band would not have made it to the second round of X-pop-factor-idol-academy-stars.
Highlights of the do were watching certain people dance (it appeared that they were listening to a different song to everyone else, probably had an i-pod) and when another engineer came over to me and said "this band are crap, I could do better than that singer" and about a minute later the singer asks for volunteers to sing backing on "Mustang Sally" so up jumps the engineer and sings the whole song for them! (he wasn't any worse).
They also have a raffle with prizes that range from small items like a hair dryer or a handheld TV , medium items like X-box / PS2 right up to the daddy prize which was a 26" LCD widescreen telly. Wifey and I have never won. anything. nada. not a sausage. They also have a small table prize so that someone on each table is guaranteed to get a prize. The raffle is done completely fairly but it seems that certain people win something every year and you always find that both people in a couple will win a separate prize, this happened twice this year. I'm not bitter and twisted, no, not at all. not bothered, look at my face Am I bothered?.
Anyway this year I won the table prize Yay! Hurrah! Woot Woot!, I felt like jumping up and running round the room, arms raised, singing the Rocky theme. It was a cheapo MP3 player but it was still a prize that I won. So there.

Death toll so far is 5 mice.
None for 4 days now.
No mice were harmed during the typing of this post.

Her mind made up
she walks down the road
hands in her pockets
coat buttoned against the cold
She finally finds Mickey
down at the italian cafe
When he's drunk it's hard to understand
what Mickey says
But then he mumbles in his coffee
and he suddenly roars
IT'S A MOUSE TRAP WIFEY
AND TWO'VE BEEN CAUGHT!

Weapons of mouse destruction
it appears I have been outwitted by the furry fiend. Sunday evening I investigated where the mouse might have been entering, I removed the plinth board from under the cupboards where Wifey saw the little bugger and lo and behold I found some evidence. There were droppings. So I moved the traps and rebaited them (using chocolate stolen from my children). I put the traps under the cupboard against the wall and back to back, replaced the plinth and laughed evily to myself.
Yesterday after work I removed the plinth and both traps had been moved and were closed, ohmygod! ohmygod! my pulse was racing as I carefully lifted out the first trap. I had my plan in place, out the front door, across the road, into the access road that goes behind the houses opposite, spin trap round 3 times (to disorientate mouse) open the trap and run.
The trap felt light and kind of empty, quickly holding door of the trap closed I was off, gazelle like, out the house into the street.
The trap was empty, infact both traps were empty. Completely. The little fecker (or feckers) had gone into the trap, taken the bait, and got out again leaving only a few tiny mouse poos just to rub my nose in it.
So it's off to Robert Dyas for something a little more lethal.
Stop Press; as I'm typing I just had a phone call from Wifey saying that she can hear "stuff" from where the traps are and that I'd better get my arse down to the shop to get something to kill it .