WR Phishing for Pterry
Posted: 3th May 2020
A few articles from a week of me cursing my 3d printer (I think I've fixed it but it's taken a while and we'll have to see how well it sticks).
Anatomy of a rental phishing scam by Jeffrey Ladish is a really nice dissection of a phishing scam they nearly got taken in by. As well as being a blow-by-blow of what the scammers were up to this gives good details on why it (nearly) worked and some of the tricks that scammers were using. An interesting read and timely reminder that not all scams are poorly spelt (which, research from Microsoft suggests, is used to filter for gullible people).
Terry Pratchett novels to get 'absolutely faithful' TV adaptations by Alison Flood. I really enjoyed the recent Good Omens adaptation (once I got over my internal screaming that the narration didn't 100% match the book[1]) and I'm always interested to see new attempts to adapt The Discworld. I don't think there're any that I've seen that I really like: the cartoon versions are faithful and fun but stilted whereas the TV dramatisations are beautiful but often a bit cold. But who knows, maybe these'll work, if nothing else they'll be an interesting thing to see and might be a nice contrast to the forth coming The Watch[2].
Content note on this one for coronavirus. Why the coronavirus is so confusing by Ed Yong. This is a really good look at why the current pandemic can be so tricky to follow (as well as being a strong primer on what you need to know to do that). Unsurprisingly a lot of it is that rapidly changing situations are hard to follow. This is especially true in the world of politics (where changing your position can be expensive to your credibility) and science (which doesn't really do fast and is a lot messier than people believe). And that's before we consider the effect of miss-information and the like. This article also has my new favourite description of the process of science:
a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty.
Anyway my printer is singing to itself beside me so I should check that it's not made me another plastic rat king so I'll see you next week.
[1]: I know Good Omens really well: I think I've probably read it, on average, at least once a year for the last 15+ years. [back]
[2]: Which I'm not too worried about the cyber/punk aesthetic of as others seem to be. I can see it fitting pretty well (especially given Guards Guards! noir colouring). [back]