Zentelligence

Gradually reaching what I hope is the end of a very expensive instrument rating course at Stapleford Flight Centre; I've been doing it since March.

Having added somewhat to the size of the national debt, both in the simulator and in the aircraft, I'm rather hoping it leads to a future flying larger and more interesting aircraft but in the present economic climate, I'm not so sure! Have to stick to tugging advertising banners about!

Labels: Airads, DA42, Instrument, Stapleford

Strangely enough, I was flying a 'Jury Team' election banner all the way along the M25 from Rochester to Reading yesterday, having had no 'takers' for my 'Save Gordon' campaign.

While I was in the air, I could hear the rescue services looking for the reportedly missing light aircraft from Cambridge to Lydd; a helicopter and the Coastguard Cessna from Manston (pictured). I rather think that the pilot, a Swiss, I hear, may simply have gone somewhere else and forgotten the strict rules governing letting ATC know of a change of destination. I hope so anyway

Based on today's election results, I'm wondering, like many other, if our Prime Minister will survive the week or perhaps go down in history as Labour's worst poll performer since Michael Foot. The PM who nobody voted for and the Chancellor and then unlucky Prime Minister, who supervised the greatest 'Boom to Bust' phenomenon since the Great Depression of the 1930's

With both Hazel Blears and Jaqui Smith, very publicly jumping ship before the election, I'm guessing Chancellor Darling is next, as Gordon wasn't prepared to say whether the former would last the week either in Prime Minister's questions yesterday.

Labels: Election, Jury, Team

Quite by accident this morning, I found myself towards the front of hundreds of motorcyclists on the way in to Marine Parade at Margate for the Ace Cafe Bank Holiday ride-in.

You may recall that last year ws a complete gale-blown washout and this time, I jumped on my BMW this morning and decided to go and have a look at what was happening. As I reached the seafront at the Nayland Rock, I could see a number of bikes ahead but glancing behind me, I found I had picked up a small army of bikes that had obviously been rolling along the Canterbury road from London.

The very efficient marshalls shepherded everyone in to park along the front and by the looks of it this afternoon, a good day was had by all, the occasional shower and late thunderstorm aside.

The Harbour Arm was busy with different stalls and the cafes appeared to be doing a roaring trade. Next time, if anyone can whip up a full english breakfast for 1,000 bikers, they'll do very well indeed!

Labels: Ace, Cafe, Margate

Just before I run off to fly a banner for Havering council over Romford, here's a link to an interesting BBC Radio 4. programme which was mostly recorded at the ecrime congress in March.

Jolyon Jenkins asked if he could interview many of the speakers at the congress and the result is a very good, balanced and intelligent layman's summary of the current state of hacking, the malware supply chain and the current vulnerability of all of us in the on-line world. I strongly recommend that you listen to it and perhaps modify your own online behaviour in line with the information it offers.

Labels: BBC, ecrime, Hacked, Radio 4

You might have thought that the kind of the political smear campaign that came out of No10 last week was an isolated example but it clearly has its imitators here in Thanet.

Sometime before lunch, I plan to hand myself-over to the authorities having been revealed by a leading local fantasist and anti-Tory/Council Blogger, Matt Brown of Garlinge as ‘The Evil Hood’ that many of you will fondly recall from watching ‘Thunderbirds’ when you were young.

Investigative sleuth Matt, reports that I am “Connected to promoting casual sex, gambling and hacking as well as other "Black Hat" online practices,” which comes as a surprise to me. He mentions the “Computer Miss-use Act” which I’m not familiar with but which may be loosely connected to the UK’s The Computer Misuse Act 1990, which was created to criminalize unauthorized access to computer systems.

Now, according to Matt: “Has Dr Simon Moores taken to pushing gambling, casual sex and hacking? Are things so slow in the Air Ads industry that spammy blogs pay better than talking about ecrime.” It would be a shame”, he adds “for all that reputation building to be burned to nothing.”

But Interpol has rather a different view of what I do and Bernard Otupal the Head of the High Tech Crime Unit at Interpol’s General Secretariat writes:

“Simon Moores is a key person in bringing people together from all key players in the high tech security world from private industry, law enforcement, and academia. His activities in awareness building amongst the public audience made the Internet safer and computer more secure in general.”

Jeff Bauer, Supervisory Special Agent at the Federal Bureau of Investigation also writes:

“Simon's reputation extends to this continent. When I was looking for IT expertise in a niche area, I was passed from one "expert" to another until I was connected to Simon.”

So there you have it. ‘The Evil Hood’ has apparently deceived, Interpol, SOCA, Europol, the FBI and only Matt Brown of Garlinge; AKA Lord Matt of Margate, knows the real truth through the brilliant cobbling together of speculation, personal obsession and several loose facts. It’s all rather like arguing HydroCarbon and Carbohydrate are so very similar in sound and name that you can run your car on loaves of bread rather than gasoline but it’s hardly investigative reporting at its best.

You have to wonder why anyone might do such a thing other than looking to improve his own search engine ranking by using my name and other key links which will help improve his own rating. What possible motive could there be behind such consistent efforts to trash the professional reputation of a local councillor whose politics you don’t like?

I had better get going because the Thunderbirds and Lady Penelope are closing in on me again and who knows, I might be the evil genius behind the local cash point failures too!

Labels: ecrime, FBI, Interpol, Moores

A rather long day away from home, that challenged the boundaries of the different 'hats' I wear.

The Times newspaper apparently want to do a story on Margate's regeneration and the many challenges that seaside towns face in general and so I'm trying to help the journalist along with the information she needs and perhaps a visit to the town next week. I should remind her that Ramsgate, the millionaire's playground of the far South-east is certainly worth a visit as well. She hasn't discovered ECR, Michael Child or even Tony Flaig yet but I'm sure she will in time!

Meanwhile, I've been buried in the depths of the ecrime congress watching a trickle of enquiries for aircraft banners trickle into my Blackberry. The season normally starts in a week and from now on, recession aside, the calls start coming in; starting with a marriage proposal over Brighton on Friday

Several fascinating presentations today, among them, Chris Kelly from Facebook (pictured), I forgot to turn on-on the flash as you can see. Online crime continues to defy efforts to contain it, leaving the head of the German Federal Police Intelligence Unit to comment in his lecture: "As long as we play fair, we will lose""

An old FBI friend, re-appeared to explain how he' dismantled' the entire Dark Market forum, used by organised cybercriminals around the world to buy and sell credit card data, user names and passwords. after becoming a highly trusted operator, he became the global crime network's administrator. Unfortunately, thanks to US freedom of information laws, a journalist after a scoop, released his name into the public domain. It would come as no surprise to me if Hollywood chose to make it into a movie, it's such a remarkable story.

Another fascinating lecture from the intelligence community today, was on crime, money-laundering and terrorism involving virtual worlds and games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. Where the latter is concerned I'm still trying to digest the fantastic scale of the criminal opportunities and the money that can be made and laundered outside the control of law-enforcement agencies and Governments. I hadn't realised until today that you can set-up your own virtual bank and from there, you might guess, the opportunities for crime are almost endless and almost as lucrative as running a real bank, given recent events in our domestic financial markets!

One encounter might amuse you. One of our foreign speakers had a British minder.

"Have you a badge for me too?" The minder asked.

"May I have your name sir", I replied, "So I can have one printed at reception for you."

"How about Peter", he replied. I looked quizzical. "And the surname?"

"I can't tell you that", he said.

"Your'e not from 'across the river are you?'" I asked.

"Yes, I am", he said.

"Ahh, I quite understand", I replied. "How about 'Peter Smith' then?

"That will do nicely", came the answer.

Of course he didn't look much like James Bond or even much like Jason Bourne either!

Labels: ecrime

There was an episode, in that classic political television satire, 'The New Statesman', when the Government was trying very hard to lose the next election, because it knew, the country was in such a mess, that the best option was to let the opposition take the blame for trying to clean it up. It would then make a swift return to power at the polls in five years, once that same opposition had become unelectable as a consequence.

I rather suspect that's the position that the Government finds itself in today. There's certainly talk among people I know, that a change of Government would be a 'poison chalice' for the Conservative opposition, with the economy on its knees and a legacy of ten years of misguided experimentation which has caused such damage to the fabric of our society.

The media are headlining a new warning from the Bank of England today which reports that the country is displaying early symptoms of being trapped in a so-called “debt deflation trap” where families find themselves pushed further and further into the red every month.

The Bank says that families with high debts could fall prey to the debt deflation trap. This means that the cost of their debts, which are fixed, would rise compared to average prices throughout the economy. While inflation erodes debts, deflation makes them relatively higher.

The report suggests that Britain is particularly at risk because there is a high proportion of families with significant levels of debt, and many of them are on fixed mortgage rate, which means they will not benefit from rate cuts.

Britons’ total personal debt – the amount owed on mortgages, loans and credit cards –now stands at £1.46 trillion, more than the value of what the country produces in a year.

Total personal debt has risen by 165 per cent since 1997 and each household now owes an average of about £60,000.

The Conservatives claim this is the highest personal debt level in the world but our Government may claim that it's worse in Zimbabwe, which is comforting!

Elsewhere, I'm seeing real fear among businesses as trade shrinks and more people I know are worrying about their future and that of their families as Government desperately tries to plug the gaps in the economy with more money.

I really hope that a collective effort on the part of the G20 Finance Ministers works but I suspect the pendulum of financial chaos has now swung so far in one direction that it will not rebalance itself to a point of equilibrium for a matter of years. By then, I'm certain we will have a new Government that will have to take all the blame for puttingthe economy and our broken society back on its feet again.

Labels: depression, economy, government, recession

I have been up and about over the big wedding in Hertfordshire this afternoon. I did shoot some video footage from above which I have now added to YouTube.

Labels: Airads, Jade, Wedding

It's Valentine's Day and the first in three years where the weather has been good. I should know, because Valentine's Day for me is normally a busy date in the flying season for my Airads business, as men - and sometimes women - all over the country propose or send special messages - pictured - to their sweethearts with a banner towed by one of my aircraft.

This year, nothing! Several enquiries and for the first time an attempt to pass-off a stolen credit card for a booking. the latter attempt was almost laughable, because my 'other job', as readers may know, involves a specialisation in crime and fraud.

Being suspicious about the telephone transaction for a flight over Bradford, I told the client, who was booking on behalf of someone else - sounds dodgy - I would call her back and then quickly used some subscription-based tools of my own to cross check her details, discovering that she should be 56 years old. As the caller clearly wasn't, I double checked the registered card address, found a related business telephone number and then called the real "Mrs Smith" to double check 'her' authorisation. The poor lady was really quite surprised and concerned to hear she had earlier booked a Valentine's message flight over an address in Bradford for a girl named "Jaan" and I advised the she immediately contact her bank and cancel her Maestro card; probably get on to Equifax too and make sure her identity wasn't being used for other fraudulent transactions too!

I did try and warn the credit card company, after all, I had the bogus client's mobile phone number too but I if you own a Maestro card, there's no way of people like me reporting such a thing and Visa don't want to know either. It's part of the reason why credit card fraud is such big business and policing it is a shambles; there's too much of it happening and so the banks simply absorb it. However, if you happen to be the merchant involved, even if the card authorises, which this one would have done, the funds would have been reversed the moment a fraud was discovered and so its the business that loses heavily and the fraudster that wins.

Ironically, the other job this week was for Greater Manchester Police with a neighbourhood policing message over the city.

Card fraud aside, even my local greetings card shop tells me that while business was brisk this week, customers are seemingly more cost conscious of their choice of cards, "Me to You" love bears et al. So perhaps under Labour even the price of true love is now becoming too high, which may explain yesterday's figures that married couples are now officially in the minority; perhaps because they can't get a mortgage on the cost of the wedding.

Labels: Airads, Aircraft, Message, Valentine

If you've nothing better to do on a dark February evening and feel tempted to Google the political archives, then you'll find that some twenty years ago, the UK's present workforce skills deficit was writ large upon the wall.

Gordon Brown's famous statement announcing British jobs for British workers has returned to haunt him this month but one has to ask why foreign companies, such as Total, think it more sensible to bus in their specialist workers from as far afield as Italy rather than recruit the necessary skills locally?

Back in the mid eighties, when I first dipped a toe in the political waters, I was asked to join Shirley Williams, Anne Sofer, Dr John Rae and several others in writing a House of Lords report on the UK's existing skills deficit. It was published as a Parliamentary White Paper (or was it Green, I can't quite recall) but it's in the archives somewhere because stumbled upon it quite by accident recently against a Google search against my name.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, those distinguished politicians and academics and this rather wet behind the ears IT columnist, looked at the education record of countries such as Japan and Germany and concluded that good old Britain would be up the creek without the proverbial paddle within a generation, unless Government, of any colour, woke up to the fact that as a nation we were becoming increasingly uncompetitive in a world that demanded a higher level of education and skills from developed nations. At the time, countries like Japan and Germany were churning out ten times the number of university-trained engineers and skilled apprentice jobs.

Fast forward to the 21st century and we've happily been creating millions of expensive finance, service and above all, public sector jobs, at the expense of the skillsets that we need to be competitive and which may go some way to explaining why UK manufacturing is moribund and why some companies might be tempted to offshore their workload or look for their skilled workers from abroad when they can't find what they need at home.

So there you have it, every Government since 1985 has known what it had to do to make this country competitive but none has managed to put in place the urgent programme that we needed as a nation to catch-up and compete on equal terms with our European neighbours, except perhaps in terms of 'Smoking Cessation Officers', Health & Safety Inspectors and of course a legion of overpaid and increasingly unemployed bankers.

"British Jobs for British workers"; it does sound a rather hollow promise twenty years too late.

Labels: British, jobs, skills

Time for a brief posting as outside, the world turns steadily whiter with the arrival of cold high pressure weather from the heart of Siberia.

In a week's time I could be finally free of written exams after two years. Over at Gatwick I have the last two remaining CAA theory exams to sit for my instrument rating, to add to all those that I previously sat for my commercial pilot's license. Ironically, I've probably sat almost the same exams before, Meteorology and Airframes, Electronics and Instrumentation but the CAA in its wisdom, rather than test on 'differences' between the ratings, (e.g polar streographic navigation) insists on throwing the entire kitchen sink at the poor candidate all over again.

Once the theory is out of the way, then it's fifty hours in the simulator and the real-thing before I can take the multi-engine flight test on instruments; likely to be the second most stressful experience of my life after having passed the original commercial flight test last July.

The other week, I was asked to fly the twin-engined Cougar back to Rochester from Andrewfield and when you are on your own, it's amazing how rusty one becomes moving between the more complex aircraft types after a period of not flying one. In fact, the biggest hurdle was the 'all singing and dancing' Garmin GNS430 comms and navigation integrated GPS unit but thankfully, I've now found a PC simulator for the damned thing and I'm alot happier with it.

The bitter cold weather that day also caught me 'on the hop'. I ran through the engine start sequence on the checklist, primed the left engine and pressed the start button; nothing happened. OK, so perhaps I'm an idiot, so I try exactly the same on the right engine; nothing happens.

I sit there for a good ten minutes wondering what on earth I might have done wrong before I give up and call-in some help. The answer, the cold weather has flattened the aircraft's battery and the only solution is to call an engineer in from maintenace to jump the battery, much the same as an car. So when the left engine starts, I can start the right engine and then finally taxi out to the runway and head for home.

My biggest project this year, the 2009 ecrime congress is coming along nicely for next month. I had a long chat last week with a Radio 4 presenter about a programme that the BBC will be doing on the subject and explained that whatever we try and do to mitigate the impact of online crime, we are always behind the curve in an arms race with very well funded and highly organised criminal interests across the globe.

So that's my Blog entry for the day done. Back to the revision I suppose. What I'm going to do when I finally stop having to study, I don't know. I'm sure it will be a shock.

Some three years ago, I caused a real fuss at the Irish Software Industry's annual conference when I made a speech that pointed-out to the distinguished audience - including a Government Minister - some of the facts behinds the country's 'Celtic Tiger Economy' image.

Ireland had been described as a 'Software sweatshop on the edge of Europe' by one large vendor but I rather suggested that the real figures had been massaged to suggest that Ireland was a thriving software development economy on a par with Israel and India when the facts suggested otherwise.

Anyway, I see today that the Register publishes some sad news about heavy job losses at the Dell factory in a rather critical editorial:

"Dell opened its assembly operations in Raheen, Limerick, in 1991. They have lasted just 17 years before the Irish tiger was shown to be just another costly overfed western European tabby cat which could be replaced by a skinnier Polish moggy. It's probably only because Dell needs to be as responsive as it can be to European customers, building to order their phoned-in and web orders, that it needs a European manufacturing base at all."

Rather ironically and at the same time as my presentation, I did have access to the internal European marketing assessment for one of the world's largest software vendors. Being under NDA I couldn't share it with my Irish audience but suffice to say that at the time it did rather reflect what I read in The Register today.

All this didn't help me much though. I was lucky to escape Dublin intact and today, Gordon Brown is in danger of the same self-delusionary approach when he talks about 100,000 new jobs for the UK's 'Dead Parrot' software economy.

Labels: Celtic, economy, Ireland, Software, Tiger

I was up over the Bluewater and Lakeside shopping centres at noon today as a photo flight for one of the national newspapers. While everyone, the media included, appears to expect a record number of shoppers, I can tell you that neither one of the two shopping centres had what I would describe as an unusual amount of traffic and I did actually wonder if John Lewis was closed.

If I hadn't known it was Boxing Day, I might have thought of it as being a normal Saturday afternoon's trade!

According to the Dail Mail: "At Bluewater near Dartford, Kent, bargain hunters began queueing at 7am for a 9am start, clogging up surrounding roads. The centre's 13,000 car parking spaces were full by mid-morning."

That's not what I saw with my 'Birds-eye view' at the same time and not much traffic on the motorways either!

Labels: Bluewater

Captain Snap was flitting about just before noon today, taking photographs of the Christmas Eve activity below and particularly at the Westwood Cross shopping centre on the Isle of Thanet.

Labels: Cross, Thanet, Westwood