So, your EncroChat phone is dead. It's the the end of the world, though. While the UK's National Crime Agency and other law enforcement bodies around the world were able to attack the EncroChat system, disable its web presence and take control of its servers, and to make an extraordinary number of arrests and spectacular seizures of portable assets, the tech that the criminals relied on wasn't particularly clever and while it may have been proprietary, it was not unique. In the UK, the same mobile phone number is used by some selling both EncroChat and a rival system. Private bankers, lawyers and others have a problem that has, so far, not been talked about in the excitement of the initial arrests.
When we all wrapped up at the end of the 2019 Formula One season, there was the usual end of season feeling: a bit excited, a lot deflated (the Abu Dhabi race does that to me every time - it just doesn't cut it coming after Brazil) and a feeling that the next few months would be punctuated with bits of news from factories, some driver chat and the testing in Barcelona so we northern Europeans get reminded of what sun looks like. And then, it's off to Australia - in reality or virtually - for the season opener that really tells us nothing much about how the season will go and - fun as it is, it's really a shakedown test with points for those that don't shake apart. A huge cock up saw the teams arrive, unpack, set up cars - and then put them all back in the box and go home without a single car doing a lap. Covid-19 had struck and chaos reigned. Until yesterday.
In his blog (here), Nigel Morris-Cotterill talks of chickens coming home to roost, a lack of attention by regulators too anxious to become FinTech hubs and the constraints on prudential management of FinTechs operating across borders, especially under the EU's central regulatory regime.
Public thanks: TechWarehouse in Kuala Lumpur. I bricked my primary PC and nothing else in the house was capable of handling its workload. I needed something urgently until I get the big box to ASUS so they can work out why the BIOS isn't working out and fix it.
Linux is almost infinitely configurable. For those used to offerings from Microsoft Windows or Apple OS, that's either great or scary. It also means that many things that users of those systems take for granted don't come in the box while many things that are fiddly or time consuming with those work without any intervention.
Sometimes, one has to shake one's head in wonder. on 23rd October 2017, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority issued a notice about what it calls a "cloned firm." It's not a firm, it's a company. It would be really helpful if regulators used language more precisely. Anyway, it was this "Century Finance/Century Finance Services Limited/ Century Finance UK Limited."
The idiot that's running the scam has just sent to me - me, of all people - his pitch.
Oh, ACCC, ACCC, ACCC. Have the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission not learned that success is expected and we are remembered by our failures?
And this failure is the result of one bad decision after another.
The USA and Israel are the two most prominent countries which refuse to recognise the International Criminal Court. But the International Criminal Court takes action where it finds it. And US President Trump doesn't like it when US Citizens are affected. Now he's taken the remarkable step of issuing an Executive Order on 11 June 2020 applying sanctions to those involved in the Court. And he's declared a national emergency.
This morning's crop of overnight spam that made it through the preliminary filters arrived via a contact form relating to this very site. Ordinarily, form spams are either destroyed or reported on, partly because, even using bots, the scams that get through the anti-spam systems on the forms are a cut above the junk that comes in by mail and, often, present new - or at least new to us - threats. This one is carefully crafted, almost as if it's been revised several times to get it right. And, if it were to hit its intended target - investment businesses - it would at least cause a costly waste of time. But only time because, good as it is, it suffers from a significant flaw.
While the world is in lockdown and many if not most countries have ordered the closure of barbers' shops and hairdressers' salons, there is something strange.
In the case of R (on the application of Walsh) v Secretary of State for Justice, a convicted sex offender applied for review of a decision to move him from one in-community supervised residence to another. He argued that, inter alia, since being released from prison and into such residence, he had formed a stable relationship which such a move would disrupt. He argued that this would breach his rights under Article 8 of the EU Convention on Human Rights.
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