I got a curious call on Saturday night from my bank asking if I was in Sri Lanka. At this point alarm bells were ringing as No, I was definitely not in Sri Lanka and nor should my debit card be withdrawing money from any ATM’s there. Luckily it seems my bank has a pretty good fraud detection system - the card was canceled immediately and I’ll be getting the £250 they stole back.
A quick search on Google shows that I’m not the only one who’s been victim to this sort of high-tech fraud. Only last Friday were more than 5000 cloned credit cards seized in Sri Lanka -
“About 2300 of the fake cards had been encoded with genuine credit card data from England, one official said, adding that if all 5350 cards were used, the men could have withdrawn up to 400 million baht ($11 million).”
Apparently it’s believed that the credit card details are stolen in England then encoded onto fake cards in Thailand. What’s even more worrying is that there is very we can do to stop this as individuals aside from the usual precautions. At the end of the day it’s more of a hassle than anything else to sort out and one which I could do without!
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WOW - Thank you Apple (took long enough!)
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I just watched one of those foreign property programs on the TV and saw that I could easily afford a decent 3 bedroom house in a picturesque town in the middle of France on what I earn… In London I couldn’t even afford half a room let alone even dream of a house. It’s a rather sickening situation. Renting with a bunch of randoms is OK but I’d love my own space to do my own thing, shame it doesn’t look like it’ll be happening any time soon! Here’s hoping that my bonus will cover a nice holiday somewhere exciting 
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Whilst browsing through my feed subscriptions in Google Reader (highly recommended) today I came accross an interesting article on Read/Write Web about microformats and “The Web Browser as an Information Broker” - i.e. becoming the center of everything you do through standardising the exchange of data which in turn makes the applications that you use to view this irrelevant. For anyone who spends a lot of time online this is a pretty big deal as suddenly your data becomes so much more useful when it’s inconnected and easily accessible. In essance it brings structure to chaos - this can only be a good thing!
Could this be Internet’s next killer feature (or perhaps the final death nail for IE)? For a more indepth discussion on what this is all about check out this series of articles which provide a good introduction.
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