Dude where’s my laptop?! Ohh the Police stole it!! – Complaint to IPCC
In this society we are suppose to be protected by the police and be made to feel safe, however sometimes this just isn’t the case as I’ve come to learn. Continuously I feel let down and perhaps even victimized by them, if I’m treated like a criminal should I start and act like one? This is the question that crosses my mind. Why try and be a good person and help others out when it simply boils down to the fact that we’re little people and to a jobs-worth they are happy to walk all over us.
In 2005 I reported some content I’d come across on the internet, it both disturbed and disgusted me so I reported it to the police. I was later visited by two police officers who confiscated my laptop and took me to the police station to interview me under caution.
Hold on here!!! I’m trying to help them rid this world of smutty illegal and sickening content and I’m being criminalized for it!!! I really just couldn’t believe what was happening, I was trying to do the right thing and as a result I get cautioned and I lose my laptop.
I was told they would check my laptop out and then once cleared I would get it back, well its now 2010, 5 years later and still no laptop. The laptop is currently worth nothing as its so old and as such I’ve lost money as it was worth about £1,500 back then I believe.
I complained in around 2007 or 2008 and was told that someone would get back to me but it might take some time.
In between these times I simply forgot about it and carried on with life whilst my laptop continued to depreciate in value.
so now, 5 years later and still nothing. How is this acceptable by any standard?
Isn’t theft depriving someone of their rightful property?
This is the first of two complaints this week to the IPCC.
Is this a lesson to all, don’t trust the police? They say report things in confidence, I no longer have any confidence in their abilities.
Joy!!! – Google phases out support for IE6
According to the BBC website, Google have started to phase out support for Microslow Internet Explorer 6 despite Microslow supporting it until 2014.
Here’s a snippet from the BBC:
Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a cyber attack on the search engine.
The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work “properly” with the browser.
It recommended individuals and firms upgrade “as soon as possible”.
Google threatened to withdraw from the Chinese market following the “sophisticated and targeted” attacks, which it said originated in China.
Hackers used a flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) browser to target the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
Full article can be found here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8488751.stm
Now what about Windbloze Internet Explorer 7, because 8 is out now and I don’t believe it’s long until IE9 is out.
Some IE history for those interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer
And for the designers: http://www.ie6nomore.com/
Removing cPanel Catch All E-mail
So your using cPanel and you’ve got a ton of spam sitting in it using up valuable server resources, you’ve Googled the problem and found out how to disable the catch all address but still it’s showing that the mail exists and is wasting space.
For those looking to turn off the catch all address first, this is how you do it in cPanel:
First log in, then click on the ‘Default Address’ icon:
You will then be presented with a list of option, you need to change the radio from ‘Forward to email address’ to ‘Discard with error to senter (at SMTP time)’:
This will then reply to all e-mails sent to addresses which have not been set up (all catch all addresses *@domain.com), the message sent can be specificied on that page but if not it will simply send ‘No such person at this address’.
As you can see, you can also discard the message totally (no reply to sender) but keep in mind if someone sends a genuine email they will not be aware they mistyped your e-mail address and thus assume . The other option is to pipe all e-mails, this is commonly used in scripts like help desks (PHP, Pearl).
Disabling catch all by default for new cPanel accounts in WHM:
If you are running WHM on your server and want to have catch all disabled by default then it’s simply, log into WHM and go to ‘Tweak Settings’:
Then scroll down to ‘Mail’ and change the setting from ‘Local’ to ‘Fail’:
Save the settings and then all new accounts will have catch all disabled.
Removing existing emails.
So now you won’t receive any more, you still need to get rid of the existing mail which could be taking up copious ammounts of space, for this you may require assistance from your web host depending on how they have everything set up because you will need to delete some files outside of your web root.
If it’s your server the path should be ‘/home/user/mail/’ if it’s not and you just have a cPanel account then you should just see ‘/mail/’.
Within the mail directory you will see three folders, cur, new and tmp:
You need to delete the ‘cur’ directory and then recreate it (basically, your deleting the contents of the folder), you then still have a cur folder with absolutely no contents.
That’s it, that’s everything!
Note: In cPanel you might still see the usage for the catch all account still takes room, well that’s not strictly true, the server simply needs to update which it will do but be rest assured the space is not actually being taken up.
As you can see in the image, there is a note stating that space usage is recalculated every few hours.
You can force an update, but I wouldn’t bother, just let cPanel do it, it’s safer. 