Interesting Facts

This little fact cropped up today (don't ask why).  Seemingly during the Bush administration, on a presidential visit to Austria in 2006, the White House flew in a special portable toilet to Vienna for the president's personal use during his visit. (They were so concerned about Bush's security that a special port-a-loo captured everything and flew the waste material back to the United States in the event some enterprising foreign intelligence agency conducted a sewage pipe operation designed to trap and examine his waste material. I know this is called Interesting People, but surely he wasn't that interesting.  If it's true, the world has gone mad!) Source

According to a study carried out in Taiwan, shopping can help you live longer. (The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that elderly people who shop every day have a lower risk of dying over a 10-year period than those who don't shop as often. The study stated, "... compared to other types of leisure-time physical activity like formal exercise, which usually requires motivation and sometimes professional instruction, shopping activity is easier to undertake and maintain. ... Shopping captures several dimensions of personal well-being, health and security as well as contributing to the community’s cohesiveness and economy and may represent or actually confer increased longevity." Time to shut down the laptop and grab the shopping bag.) Source  This one has to be for  +april sis .  It's purely medicinal.  :)

According to German security expert, Karten Nohl, an eighth of all SIM cards used in mobile phones around the world are at risk of fraud, theft, or being bugged. (Once infected, hackers can remotely access the phone and send premium rate text messages, steal money and personal information, record calls, bug owners to track their location, and other naughty things. They'll be lucky to find my phone switched on.) Source

According to the news website Deutsche Welle, explosives detectors can give false alarms in the presence of substances such as chocolate or perfume. (It makes you wonder how any woman makes it onto the plane then.)

If you wear a T-shirt featuring rude words, bombs or cartoon guns you can be prevented from boarding a plane in UK airports. (Brad Jayakody, was wearing a Transformers T-shirt, which showed a cartoon character holding a gun. He was stopped from boarding a flight by the security at Heathrow's Terminal 5. Better not wear a T-shirt with a frying pan either, Tom and Jerry reek havoc with them.)

Qwerty is one of the most-popular passwords. (Not very imaginative is it?)

Until the late 1990s, the RAF's nuclear bombs could be activated using a bicycle lock key. (The BBC's Newsnight discovered that until the early days of the Blair government the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. Allegedly there was no other security on the bomb itself. Just imagine James Bond, no tamper-proof combination locks which could only be released if the correct code was transmitted, just get a bike lock key James. Not very exciting is it?)

According to Ken Munro, the managing director of SecureTest, you should never use a word that is in the dictionary for your password. (Seemingly online fraudsters have written programs that can try thousands of different passwords and try every word in the dictionary. A good password will mix letters, numbers and punctuation, but the strongest contain non-alphanumeric characters or symbols, of course not all password systems allow them, so we're stuffed.)

The UK civil service lost 25 million child benefit records. A Junior official from HMRC in Washington, Tyne and Wear, sends two CDs containing password-protected records to audit office in London through courier TNT, neither recorded nor registered. It goes missing. So what do they do? They send another one! However the public is not told that their bank details, national insurance numbers, addresses and date of birth have been "mislaid" until 21st November. Now that's a scandal.

powered by ODEO According to Tesco supermarket razorblades are stolen more than other products. (In a report in the Guardian it seems that Tescos take a digital photo of you each time you pick up a Gillette razorblade from the store's shelf - it only takes one to prompt the camera - and again when you present the pack at the checkout. Tesco says that the photos are "temporarily stored", but does not specify for how long. However, Smart Labels Analyst magazine explains that this system enables the store to "blacklist certain shoppers and keep an eye on them". In his interview with the magazine, Alan Robinson recounts an occasion when his Cambridge store was able to show the police a photograph of a shoplifter in the act of removing two packets of razors from the shelf: "The police were completely flabbergasted, having never seen anything like it in their lives.")