Blag

Woo! Swine Flu is coming to a person near you!

Or so the snake oil peddlers want you to think anyway. There seems to be no end of pharmacies selling “Swine Flu masks” on the cheap, or selfish idiots that stockpile anti-virals so that people who require them are unable to acquire them as they’ve been sold out. Also, I declare Jihad upon the unscrupulous GPs handing out Tamiflu prescriptions by the hundred to make some extra moolah.

Anyone for a dose of Swine Flu and MRSA preventing herbal supplements? Click here.

That looks just as effective as a dose of multivitamins twice a day, which would probably be cheaper.

Seeing as we’re in such a swine-ish mood, why not buy a few souvenir T-Shirts? Available here.

Speaking of snake oil peddlers, I never ceases to amaze people who buy “Magic Ceramic Water Filters”, guaranteed to filter out the secret chemicals added to the water supply by our governments to give citizens cancer, as a method of population control.

Same with “magic power magnetic bracelets” and shaman amulets to ward off terrorists. (Would a AK-47 not be more effective?)

I’m about to fork out $49.99 to buy a set of audio tapes developed by the Shaolin monks, which supposedly help cure common colds with the recorded auditory signals developed over countless millenia in temples and now available as a limited edition CD set with free gift if I buy now within the next 10 minutes.

Ohhh, I can’t wait…

Anyone wanna talk me out of it? I accept THX/Monster speaker cables as donations.

I came across (or to be precise, was given) this condensed kid’s version of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Despite being 2 pages long, it summarises 100 A4 pages of waffle very succinctly. It has to be said, the style the play is written in… reminds me of someone…

Click to download the full PDF! (90kb)

Happy reading!

I might transcribe it into a blag post or a text document when I have time, but for now, a PDF is your present.

Note: I have no idea if this work is copyrighted or not, the author or any details whatsoever -  the copy I received was a photocopy of a photocopy from a very old book. So if I am infringing on someone’s intellectual property, sorry.

Yay! This blag is PCI certified…

PCI Certified by Scanless PCI

WTF, is probably what you are thinking? More on this to come later…

I do like fancy meaningless certificates, they make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. All I have to do now is slap it on every php and static html page I can find and surely, my e-peen will grow in size – much more quickly and cheaper than using the snake oil sold by the charlatans over at AMI, with their nasal spray technology bullshit.

Edit: So what is PCI DSS? It is a set of requirements for a certification given to a website to guarantee that it has made attempts to enhance payment/transaction data security, or simply – there’s no blindingly obvious security holes that allow the website to be hacked and your particulars accessed. You can read about all this waffle and the requirements at https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pci_dss.shtml . (Was it really necessary to use https 256-bit AES encryption for a public website? I’m detecting more e-peen wagging here.)

PCI DSS certification services range from $1.95US (Nate McFeters promises not to hack your website), to McAfee’s HackerSafe service for $250USD  to Qualys for $1000USD. They’re supposed to verify the integrity of your website and show visitors that it has not been compromised, but in practice, they are about as effective as placing smiley stickers on your server to ward off script kiddies.

Well, I wanted to get in on some of this uber certification action but can’t afford to pay some corporation for the privilege for having their logo plastered on my website. Enter Scanless PCI – http://www.scanlesspci.com/. PCI DSS certification for free! How could I resist…