The erosion of standards

For homeowners and buyers, there’s a great guide from Moisture Detection Co. Ltd. called What You Absolutely Must Know About Owning a Plaster-Clad Home, subtitled The Origin of New Zealand’s Leaky Building Crisis and Must-Know Information for Owners to Make Their Homes Weathertight, and Regain Lost Value.    My intent isn’t to repeat someone’s copyrighted […]

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Facebook knows it doesn’t have as many users as it claims

In the ‘I told you so’ department, from the Murdoch Press this week: An internal Facebook presentation this spring called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts “very prevalent” among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32% and as many […]

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Why con?

  During the course of the 2010s, I came across two con artists. One thing that united them was they were men. But they could not have been more different: one was rather elaborate and was the subject of a Panorama documentary; the other was a rank amateur and, at least in the situation we […]

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Are you a scam artist? Facebook loves you, and protects you

The Royal New Zealand Ballet generously put its Hansel & Gretel performance from November 2019 online for free this weekend, choosing Facebook as its medium. That, naturally, attracts scam artists, putting in false links in order to charge credit cards. Many Kiwis were duped. The RNZB reported many, and so have I. All six of […]

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419ers adopt a new technology: the postal system

Interesting to get this letter from the UK today, sent air mail from the Croydon Mail Centre, Surrey, on September 5.    The Nigerian 419 scammers have figured out that email is ineffective, so they are moving on to this brand-new technology: mail.    As with the last time I blogged about clumsy 419 attempts—a […]

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