Did you know what with someone’s name, bank account number and sort code, you can set up a direct debit in their name and clean out their account?
Maybe you did. Maybe you had heard about it but thought it was just an urban legend. Maybe you didn’t. The issue came up in 2008 when someone used Jeremy Clarkson’s bank details to set up a fraudulent direct debit, after be made his bank details publicly available to prove that you couldn’t commit direct debit fraud simply with a few numbers. Of course, you actually can.
Ideally of course your bank details wouldn’t be in the public domain, but for some individuals and organisations, charities like ours for example, it’s fairly unavoidable that they end up getting out there.
This results in rather a lot of direct debit fraud.
The Gym, PureGym, Sky and Elephant are just some of the companies that seem apparently happy to let people pay for their services by using a charity’s name and bank details.
Is to too much to ask for banks to ensure the direct debits are legitimate? At HSBC, you have the option of placing care messages on your account. So you can be notified of all direct debits set up – it’s nice to get a letter to tell you there has been direct debit fraud on your account, but that they let it go through anyway – really reassures you that they know what they’re doing.
Worse still, however, is that we have now blocked all direct debits now need to be confirmed with one of the trustees – yet when I checked the mail the other day I found no less than five new direct debits that had been set up without our authorisation. Ridiculous.
April is unfortunately suicide month. It’s the month when more people kill themselves than any other. It’s generally believed this is because the lighter days and better weather provide people will the motivation to to do it – ironically, what keeps people alive in the depths of depression is that they’re too depressed to kill themselves.
It’s timely then that the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) recently published a report claiming that suicide is now the biggest killer of young men – causing more depths than road accidents, murders and HIV combined.
This report echoes the issues already raised in our Men’s Issues awareness campaign. 75% of suicides are male, partly due to the stigma that surrounds men getting help for mental health issues – only 17% of men in need of help will seek it, compared to 29% of women.
Everyone loves porn. That’s a well known fact. Indeed, even in countries were porn is banned (Islamic countries, obviously), porn sites are still some of the most popular sites on the internet according to the Huffington Post, reporting on findings by Alexa.
No wonder sites have been launched to cater for such a niche.
Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised religious states are trying to act against it.
This is all part of religion’s attempt to control the basic desires of human beings, and therefore keep them down. It’s the most sick and twisted part of religion, worse than the killing, the wars, the torture of non-believers and abuse of children that all in themselves are at least on the level of the kind of thing you would call a war crime.
Luckily, as these results show, it doesn’t work. Because as good as god might be, porn is better.
If you’re using Synergy for mouse and keyboard sharing, you may find that it suddenly disappears from Ubuntu. It will show up as installed in the Software Centre, but you won’t be able to remove or reinstall it, and there will be no icon on the unity bar.
If you try running it from the command line using the following command.
synergys
You may get an error similar to the following.
no configuration file found
The easiest way to solve this is to download the .deb package from the Synergy website, then open up a terminal and install it from there.
cd /home/your-name/Downloads
sudo dpkg -i synergy-1.4.10-Linux-x86_64.deb
This will then reinstall it and you should then be able to find the programme listed in the dash home.
Last weekends Malaysian grand prix turned out to be a bit of a sour one.
There was simply outright anger between Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel, as Mark thought he deserved to have the race win, while Lewis Hamilton felt similarly guilty about taking third place ahead of team-mate Nico Hulkenberg one suspects entirely due to team orders.
As I mentioned in my post about the Australian GP, being a Button fan is only ever going to end in disappointment, as he retired only a few laps before the end of the race, with Di Resta well below him and Max Chilton spent most the race in last place – only Hamilton was flying the flag for Britain, and that was in dubious circumstances too.
Meanwhile, over in my adoptive nation, Kimi Raikkonen only managed 7th. Let’s hope for better results in China.
For the March meeting of Leeds Skeptics, Professor Barry Cooper from the University of Leeds presented a talk entitled “Alan Turing: The Building of a Brain”.
Seems like no time at all since we started the 2012 Grand Pix season, yet here we are, back at Albert Park for the start of the 2013 season. Indeed, by the time this is actually published we’ll probably be a few races in!
As a Jenson Button you would think I would be used to constant disappointment by now, but unfortunately not, as I watched him cruise home to 9th place, beaten by fellow Brit Paul Di Resta in his Force India, while Lewis Hamilton led the way for British drivers, finishing 5th.
Luckily, as an adopted Finn (I assume, Elina’s mum seems to like me), I can of course now legitimately support both nations and luckily for me, Formula One, along with rally driving and ice hockey, is one of the few sports that Finns are really good at. Kimi Raikkonen might be the only Finn in the sport at the moment, but what does that matter when he leads the world championship.
I was only four years old when Margaret Thatcher stepped down as Prime Minister. But to say that I, or any of us in my peer group where after Thatcher’s time is naive – we were born to a generation entangled with Thatcherism and grew up in a landscape that had been radically altered by her eleven years in the post.
My interest in the debate is greater provoked by the outpouring of vile and hatred that has spewed forth since Baroness Thatcher’s passing. This is of course different from the calm and rational discourse surrounding her policies and impact that should, indeed must be had.
But if you are unable to separate a discussion on ideas, from a personal attack designed only to draw offense, I am going to treat you with the same contempt that the simple minded religious bigot deserves. In fact, I’m going to argue against you, to take up arms I don’t even believe in, to provide Devil’s Advocacy against your arguments.
As Norm points out, it seems you are refused permission to have a balanced argument on Thatcher. You must hate her with every cell in your body, or prostrate your unworthy self at her feet in admiration – god help you if you were to think some of the things she did were good and some of the things she did were bad.
This black and white vision of reality, insisting she is the Devil himself in female form (by the way, we had a female head of government 34 years ago, is nobody else proud of that?) has no place intelligent conversation. A debate on the evils (or otherwise) of the 1980’s Conservative government however, is very much welcome.
