Police Fail

Never mind the slightly dubious issue of mapping crime hotspots, the announcement of a new service using data from the UK's police force to map crime was always going to generate a lot of interest.

The map is meant to look something like the image on the right (click to enlarge), but because this is the UK the server is clearly underspecified for the amount of interest that it is generating, because anyone who actually tries to visit maps.police.uk gets the rather predictable result below:


It's all a bit reminiscent of when the 1901 Census site went offline for months. Is it beyond the capabilities of the people implementing to judge demand?

Incidentally, the Met have a similar mapping system sensibly powered by Google, which seems to work quite well.

%SI_subj: miserable spam failure

Possibly one of the most miserable spam failures I have ever seen - the idiot spammer somehow forgot to populate the % fields with actual data. It just goes to reinforce that spammers are stupid.

Subject: %SI_subj
From: "Lily Lovett"
Date: Tue, June 30, 2009 2:47 pm

You don’t need to %SI3_rnd10
rod’s %SI3_rnd11 and %SI3_rnd12 %SI3_rnd13’ jokes!

This is a %SI3_rnd14 for
%SI3_rnd15 your
%SI3_rnd16! It will
%SI3_rnd17 in seconds after she %SI3_rnd18 and %SI3_rnd19 as good as if it was
a %SI3_rnd20 rod!

No more jokes – you will always get %SI3_rnd21 and moans! The huge pack
costs less than 30 %SI3_rnd22!

%SI3_rnd23 can be a %SI3_rnd24! No one will know about your %SI3_rnd25!

%SI3_rnd26 now and save more than $10 regardless of
your order’s size!

The hypertext link goes to %SI_link3 rather than a valid address.

Presumably this is a penile enhancement product. By the looks of it, the spammer you do with an intelligence enhancement product.

Amazon.com - reverse pump and dump or blackmail?

I received this unintelligible email from an IP address in Russia (213.221.29.19), probably relating to the recent mystery outage at Amazon.com.

Subject: Amazon.com In what a problem?
Date: Mon, June 9, 2008 7:14 am

Hello!
News agency Reuters informs about not to working capacity of a site amazon.com in
current of two weeks since June, 9th and corresponding it to falling of share price. Be close
at work with them.

What gives? My best guess is that someone is trying to either drive the share price down (perhaps they have a put option), or perhaps it is part of some blackmail plot relating to the amazon.com outage.

Unfortunately for the bad guys, the email is completely incomprehensible. As spam, this one is definitely destined for the failboat.