I tend to be fairly good at spotting internet scams. I also never click on any attachments or links that are in emails or texts unless I was expecting them or I can be sure it is genuine because the email also contains a personalized message that could not have been generated by a bot. I also tell everyone that I delete unread any link or attachment that is unaccompanied by such a message. But even after being told that, people seem to be so anxious to forward things that they find interesting, that they fire them off that I still keep getting such emails and texts that are promptly deleted.

Then there are those scam messages where the sender’s name is someone you know and they claim that they are stuck in some foreign country where their passport and wallet were lost or stolen and they urgently need money to get home and asking you to help by wiring them money. That is an obvious scam but I have read that elderly people have been persuaded to send money to people they thought were their stranded grandchildren.

Yesterday I received the following message

Hi,
 
Just reaching out. Hope you are keeping safe on this pandemic?
 
Regards,
 
Jane

[Read more…]

This took place on September 13th.

A Spanish athlete is being applauded on social media after he sacrificed a top tier win in the 2020 Santander Triathlon to give it to a competitor who took a wrong turn on the course.

British athlete James Teagle was on course to win third place in the competition in Spain last weekend when he made a mistake metres from the finish.

Diego Méntrida overtook him but noticed the error and stopped to allow Teagle to cross first.”He deserved it,” Méntrida said later.

El triatleta madrileño Diego Méntrida dejó pasar a su rival cuando éste se equivocó de camino antes de la meta. Peleaban por el tercer puesto en el Triatlón de Santander, que ganó Gómez Noya https://t.co/ZCgxlZQIeL pic.twitter.com/b83zwDTAVX

— EL MUNDO Deportes (@ElMundoDeportes) September 17, 2020

This is what sports, indeed all areas of life, should be like.

We know that big companies collect vast amounts of data on us based on our online presence and know our likes and dislikes in the minutest detail. So it is not surprising when we get emails recommending products for us to buy. But I was struck by an email I got from Amazon recently that said “Hello, Mano Singham, We have found something you might like.”

And the recommendation was … my own book.

The pandemic has cut deeply into the airline business and they are seeking to lure people back. Surely one of the most bizarre attempts is offering people the opportunity to buy tickets to fly to nowhere, i.e. where the plane takes off, flies around for a few hours, and then returns to the airport.

Singapore Airlines (SIA) is looking to launch no-destination flights that will depart from and land in Changi Airport next month, in a bid to give its ailing business a lift.

Sources told The Straits Times that the national carrier is working towards launching this option for domestic passengers – dubbed “flights to nowhere” – by end-October.
[Read more…]

We all get pesky robocalls and each one presents a problem. If we do not recognize the number, should we answer? Ignore? Block the number?

Apparently, the answer is that none of these actions make much of a difference.

To better understand how these unwanted callers operate, we monitored every phone call received to over 66,000 phone lines in our telephone security lab, the Robocall Observatory at North Carolina State University. We received 1.48 million unsolicited phone calls over the course of the study. Some of these calls we answered, while others we let ring. Contrary to popular wisdom, we found that answering calls makes no difference in the number of robocalls received by a phone number. The weekly volume of robocalls remained constant throughout the study.

[Read more…]

As you may have noticed, the site was down for almost two days. This is a really shoestring operation and I am really impressed how smoothly it runs almost all the time, so I hope you will bear with us when this kind of thing happens occasionally.

Via Carla Sinclair:

A group of skydivers jump at the same time, when one is accidentally kicked in the head by his buddy. He goes unconscious, but is miraculously saved when one of his partners is able to catch him and activate his chute.