The Register has a story about a 14-year old Polish boy who used a modified tv remote to derail the public tram rail system. Now there is genius in the making there, hope it gets channelled appropriately by the adults who has influence over the course his life takes.

“He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks,” said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police.

“He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change.

“He treated it like any other schoolboy might a giant train set, but it was lucky nobody was killed. Four trams were derailed, and others had to make emergency stops that left passengers hurt. He clearly did not think about the consequences of his actions,” Micor added.

Update: Just a week ago I did a View Source of my blog webpage and discovered some editURI entries that redirected to a domain i did not know and when I tried to look it up with domaintools.com, my browser bombed out… So far from wanting to appear to be wearing a tinfoil-hat, I embarked on a quest to ‘harden’ my blog and searched around for Wordpress security related sites. The most relevant and in-depth as well as valuable articles, advice, links and plugins are found over at blogsecurity.net

The result of all this lockdown madness was that I went a bit overboard and couldn’t even log in to my blog because of editing .htaccess on the server. DO NOT mess with that unless you know what you’re doing, you can seriously disrupt the flow of your blogging posts with this kind of tweaking and fiddling. As if that was not enough, afterwards posts I edited did not save and the result was a post title of Blog Security!!! for nearly a week with no content being able to be saved. It took over a week of hard graft down in the trenches and we’re happy to report everything is up and running again.

There comes a time in every blogger’s life, actually just right after installation and setup, when issues of security need to be considered. Not just securing your Wordpress installation against spam attacks, but also checking code for editURI entries in page source for example. Then there comes the issue of keeping those with malicious intent at bay and here one sometimes get to deal with some tough cookies, indeed.

A very valuable resource in every Wordpress blogger’s arsenal is blogsecurity.net. They have excellent articles and posts and guest contributions by people at the forefront of blogging security on the Wordpress platform specifically. There is even an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the godfather of all things Wordpress-ey.
The blogger’s quest for security should start with installing the wp-scanner and loginlockdown as well as WPIDS (WordPress Intruder Detection System) plugins.
It’s as easy as right-clicking on the download link at blogsecurity.net and clicking on Save target as… or any variation on that and unzipping the plugin and uploading that folder into the wp-content/plugins directory.
From the WordPress dashboard go to plugins and activate them and click on options to further configure them if you so desire and it is A for away.
You are now secure against most of the most harmful things that can befall a WordPress blog; just bear in mind that we are in a fluid dynamic system with platform upgrades, plugin upgrades and the ingenuity of the bad guys out there constantly evovolving.

So it also just make good horse kind of sense to check your blog every day and view the source and check the plugins and your wordpress installation for updates etc etc

And now for the news at 11. A new type of online money making scam has emerged from our friends in Nigeria, it seems. This time they break into people’s webmail accounts and send emergency pleas for money to your list of contacts, claiming to have been robbed while travelling in Nigeria.

Note to all people out there who has aspirations to become a netizen, there are no rules that will protect you from stupidity and these kinds of bottom-feeders. This guy was using Yahoo, don’t the yahoos over at Yahoo.com know to protect their user’s from this type of thing.

I have been using SSL encryption to log into gmail and i feel completely safe and secure, just bookmark your homepage to https://mail.google.com and login with your details and change your password and it is A for away. It’s like internet banking secure, promise!!!

       From the New York Times article:
E-Mail Scammers Ask Your Friends for Money

By David F. Gallagher

Tags: crime, phishing, spam

Nigeria continues to develop and export the world’s most innovative Internet scams. In one bizarre variation that seems to have ramped up in recent months, the scammers are taking a page from Facebook and leveraging the power of social connections.

Here’s how it works: The scammer somehow breaks into a victim’s Web-based e-mail account. He then impersonates the victim and sends an emergency plea for help to everyone in the account’s address book, asking them to wire money to Nigeria. The e-mail includes some variation on a story about getting mugged or losing a wallet while on a trip to Nigeria.

This happened recently to Drew Biondo of Port Jefferson, N.Y. He said he was at home early one morning when his wife alerted him to an e-mail she had received from his Yahoo address about his Nigerian money troubles. He scrambled to try to regain control over his account, but trying to find a phone number for an actual human at Yahoo was “ridiculously difficult,” he said.

Mr. Biondo, a public relations executive, used the Yahoo account for work e-mail and had about 600 people in his contact list, many of them journalists. He said he soon experienced “an influx of phone calls from every reporter I’ve ever spoken to,” including some he had not heard from in years. “I credit this Nigerian scammer with one thing: he made me feel good inside because these people cared enough to drop me a phone call.”