Terence Eden’s Blog
on 
Recently, I've been getting a lot of spam notifications from Google Drive. Here's a sample: The notifications come direct to my Android phone via the Drive app - they don't appear in my Gmail spam folder. There is no way to report the abuse. If I go to the list of notification in the Android…
Continue reading →
on 
User Generated Content is great, innit? As a company, I want users to submit photos, so I don't have to do any content curation. Moderation? Nah mate, stick some AI on there to filter out anything offensive and we're golden. *sigh* Searching for Loch Ness on Google Maps is certainly an eye opener if you…
Continue reading →
on 
Earlier this week, my holiday was interrupted by a sophisticated SMS scam. Rude! Let's take a look at it. Let's take a look at all the ways we can tell it is a scam. Firstly, and most obviously, I am not a customer of Lloyds Bank! But these scammers send out to multiple people hoping…
Continue reading →
on 
In the last few months, I've received dozens of spam calls which appear to come from a similar phone number to mine. If my number is 07700 900 123 I get calls from 07700 900 124 or 07700 900 456 Here's my working theory on why spammers do this. Americans. In the UK, there's a…
Continue reading →
Like most of you, I'm inundated with spam calls. So I have a new solution. When an unknown number calls me, they get routed to this audio file. This was created with Amazon Polly which is free for casual use. I was pretty impressed with the voice quality. Although there are limits to how well…
Continue reading →
on 
Like many of you, I'm inundated with spam calls. I've suffered endless car accidents, my National Insurance Number has been suspended multiple times, and my broadband will be cut off imminently. Wouldn't be nice to screen out all the fraudsters? So I've set up a Bananaphone. When people ring me, they get 30 seconds of…
Continue reading →
on
The UK is facing an epidemic of SMS fraud. Scammers know that we're all at home eagerly waiting for deliveries. So they send out phishing messages saying "Sorry we missed you" or "You need to pay a delivery fee". If you click on the link they send, you'll go to a very convincing website which…
Continue reading →
on 
Twitter has never really solved its spam problem. It is a constant irritation that ordinary people get booted off the service for minor infractions, while large spam rings go unpunished. For the past few months, some of my old tweets have been getting liked by random women. I'm sure you've see something similar. The idea…
Continue reading →
on 
Marketing really is crap. Recently, SE Railways sent this piece of email drivel to my wife: We don't have any kids, thankfully - and are not having any in the future. My wife was literally recovering from a sterilisation procedure when the email arrived. So it seemed a bit weird that they'd send her a…
Continue reading →
on 
tl;dr you have to keep complaining to Virgin for several months and then take them to the Communication & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme then complain to their Data Protection team by contacting them on LinkedIn. Background Virgin have a spammy DNS hijacking service. If you accidentally misspell a domain - for example example.coom - Virgin…
Continue reading →