More 'you've been hacked / Carnival Cruise' spam - posted in hope of reassuring anyone googling

I think the age of people worrying when they get an email like this may have passed as it seems pretty much everyone knows it's baloney. But I suppose they wouldn't keep trying if it didn't occasionally work (and perhaps the people it works on aren't going to be googling and finding this anyway so ultimately this may be pointless of course...).

Carnival Cruises is the parent company for a lot of cruise operators and had their database hacke, so if you've ever been on a cruise your data has likely been stolen resulting in rather a lot of spam emails. I've not noticed any other problem though, just spam.

The email below is exactly as it was sent (they may have managed to spoof someone's real email address so I have left that out).

Edit: I've reported the bitcoin wallet to ChainAbuse https://chainabuse.com/report/9cb50f02-bbe0-4a0a-b0ad-da961eba0532

You've been HACKED
<XXXXX@rinku.zaq.ne.jp> 

Hello,

We wrote you an email some time ago, but you seem to have ignored it, so we resent it to you.
We are the ShinyHunters hacking group.
A few months ago, we gained access to your devices and started monitoring your online activities.

What happened:
We gained access to the Carnivalcorp.com database where you have an account and easily accessed your email.
You weren't very careful about the links you opened.
A week later, we installed an exploit on your devices, including your phone, giving us access to your microphone,
camera, keyboard, and all your data.
We have your documents, photos, browsing history, conversations, and contact list.

Among other things, we discovered that you visit adult websites and watch explicit videos.
We managed to record you and created videos of you pleasuring yourself.
With a few clicks, we can share these videos with your friends,
colleagues, and family or even make them public.

Proposal:
Send us $2000 in Litecoin (search online how to buy) to the following wallet:   ltc1qua85znuqqqgfwrc5cwudp0wyk32078xzwt2xk0

We'll delete everything immediately.
You have 48 hours from the moment you open this email.
Once the payment is received, we'll remove the malware from your devices.
We'll also remove all your personal information from darkweb for you to be safe from now on.

What you should NOT do:
Do not reply (email was sent from a hacked account).
Do not contact the police or anyone else—we'll release the videos along with other stuff all over the internet.
Do not try to reset your devices—everything is stored on remote servers.

What you don’t need to worry about:
We will see your payment immediately—the wallet is generated specifically for you.
We will not share your videos or other things after payment—there is no reason to continue causing problems.

You're not the only one in this situation.
Be smart and cooperate; otherwise, you're going to regret it.

 

A very nice short 4-day stay at The Clermont, Charing Cross

I decided last week that the hot weather would once again propel me towards a hotel with air conditioning. I couldn't count the number of times I've passed by The Clermont right by Charing Cross* station over the years and it had never really occurred to me to stay there before (given I live about half an hour away in Blackheath) but this was the week I did. (There's also a Clermont hotel in Victoria).

Loved it. Really nice hotel. To be fair I was staying in a nice room as I think everyone else had the same idea so rooms were at a bit of a premium. Strongly recommending it to anyone considering it. Lovely cool room (17˚C though I slept at 22˚C), room service, and possibly my favourite small delight was a little fluted glass jar filled with biscuits and sweets. If you read my disappointing experience of avoiding the last heatwave in a different hotel you'll know that the apparent lack of a biscuit anywhere within it nearly sent me doolally ;)

 
There's a lovely staircase to sweep down, admittedly not as dramatic when you're wearing jeans. Very nice restaurant where I had my breakfast (self-service) and I had a go of their rigatoni on two nights as room service. Unbelievably delicious (there were toasted pistachio nuts and artichokes in there, all in a lovely sauce). Everyone was friendly, helpful and amiable. Every time I rang reception or room service the phone was answered promptly and I'm sad to have left and come home again, though it is going to be much cooler^ for the next few days.

You don't have to be a hotel guest to dine there so I definitely recommend finding a way to try out the rigatoni when it's available. Also you are right next to a 24 hour Co-op (I didn't test this out later than 10pm but if you need an emergency snack...). The room I was in also had a bag of crisps, popcorn and some minibar stuff plus coffee / tea stuff.

Even the shower was easy to use! Free wifi.

100% thumbs up from me. I could have done without the (not awful just could do without it) music in the reception and restaurant areas but it wasn't loud or intrusive. They'll also look after your bag for you after checkout if you want to wander around London (too hot today).

*I've lived in London all my life bar university, initially zone 5 so I'd arrive at Charing Cross via the Jubilee Line (until 1999) or via the 176 bus from Camberwell, and now via Blackheath (train) or Greenwich (to Embankment Pier by ferry). 

^My flat is currently 32˚C but it will soon start to get a bit more tolerable as it's actually quite a bit cooler outside now.

More photos

 

Interesting essay from Cory Doctorow: Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers

Via his thread on Bluesky.

Read the whole thing at

Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers

Doctorow, Cory. (2026). Pluralistic: Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers (27 Jun 2026). Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow. https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/27/zuckerstreisand-2/ (Accessed on June 27, 2026 at 05:17)

You may have heard that Meta (Facebook's parent company) has legally silenced Sarah Wynn-Williams, forbidding her to utter another word about her book or promote it it any way ('Careless People', a whistleblowing memoir of her time there between 2011 and 2017). This has resulted in a slightly horrifying / bizarre / almost comical series of situations in which Sarah is a panellist at events but is not able to speak and her book cannot be on sale after her events. Meta has now told her that her sitting mutely on panels is also against their wishes so she's now suing them to try and get herself released from the contract.

I remember back in 2006/7 (soon after Facebook permitted 'the public' to have accounts) logging in to discover that I could see other people's accounts, as if I was logged in as them. I remember emailing Facebook (which was possible back then!) to let them know, and they wrote back that there had been a short term glitch which was now fixed. I remember writing back 'Good save ;)' with a sarcastic winking face - but presumably sent it from my work account as I can't find any mention of it on Gmail (which I got in 2005 I think). 

While I didn't find a news report specifically about that event they did plenty of daft things in 2006 and 2007.

Facebook founder apologises for 'messing up' (8 September 2006) The Guardian

Facebook dismisses privacy fears (12 September 2007) BBC News

Grateful that Angine de Poitrine are visiting Earth, and wondered how they heard of us

Angine de Poitrine will likely appear on Later... with Jools Holland on 21st June 2026 from a recording made yesterday (I wasn't there and am jealous of the lucky people who got tickets through BBC Shows & Tours, well in advance - they wouldn't have known who was performing).

- - - - - -

[A] Thanks to the 1997 sci-fi film Contact I first learned that radio waves carrying our planet's earliest radio and television broadcasts might be emanating out into space (footnote 1) so possibly that alerted them to our presence.

[B] Or maybe their planet’s cosmic record players were able to listen to the Golden Records on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes (footnote 2) which were launched in 1977 and are the furthest-travelled-from-Earth things ever - Voyager 1 is over 25 billion miles kilometres (16 miles) from Earth! (3). 

"The musical selection is also varied, featuring works by composers such as J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky. The disc also includes music by Guan Pinghu, Blind Willie Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Kesarbai Kerkar, Valya Balkanska, Kamil Jalilov, and electronic composer Laurie Spiegel." (see 'Contents' in reference (2).

[C] Carl Sagan wrote the book that Contact was based on and he was project manager for the Voyager probe records. His friend and colleague Frank Drake, of the Drake Equation (4), pinged (with a team, not just him!) a message via a radio signal into space and my money's on this one being the thing that sparked their visit to Earth ;)

The team wanted to demonstrate the impressive signal strength of the then-recently upgraded Arecibo radio Telescope and settled on the idea of sending a message into space that could reach, and be translated by, alien beings that had the technological prowess to have developed radio receivers of their own, and who could understand mathematically-mediated signals - prime numbers. 

They beamed an image, known as the Arecibo Message (5), which is made up of 1,679 "bits" of data in a stream of "1"s and "0"s. The actual signal was a high frequency radio wave (as you might expect for a radio telescope!) modulated, so that to transmit a 1 the frequency rose a little and to transmit a 0 the frequency dropped a little. Basically a very high-pitched warble, inaudible to human ears but detectable by radio receivers and clearly containing two different 'sounds' representing 1/0, ON/OFF, HIGH/LOW etc.

1,679 is a semi-prime (a number that can be formed by multiplying two prime numbers: 23 and 73) so that's why it was chosen. If you are a clever alien receiving this string of 1,679 1s and 0s you might try and split them into a grid of 73 x 23, or 23 x 73 - but only one of the grids will look like there’s an image there, see below.

You might colour the 1s in black and leave the 0s white (or colour the 0s black and leave the 1s white - it makes no difference as you just get the 'negative' of the same image and it works fine either way).

 

Left: Arecibo Message monochrome version by Pablo Carlos Budassi under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Right: Arecibo Message colour version by Arne Nordmann under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

For human-readable clarity the image is usually depicted in colour as on the right (the original image-signal didn't have any colour information) and the purple bit at the bottom represents the Arecibo telescope, the bits in yellow above are the planets in our solar system (as of 1974, count 'em... Pluto... (Sun is the square on the left)), little red humanoid - see (5) for more info on the image.

Incidentally during the transmission there were lots of press people attending the event so they patched a human-audible version (6) through speakers and one of the engineers spotted that the first few bleeps and bloops coincidentally spelled out 'Hi' in Morse Code ••••   ••  (7).

My assumption is that it was a case of “We like your black and white dots and modulated signals and thought you might enjoy some of ours…”

Much higher resolution images have regularly been sent, using sound, from the International Space Station to people on Earth via radio waves - this is Slow Scan TV a version of which was also used during the Moon landings to transmit image data.

🦶🎵🎵…

(1) https://earthsky.org/space/earths-radio-bubble-extent-of-radio-signals/, but “might be emanating” is doing a fair bit of heavy lifting here as signal strength would be feeble and degraded, likely combined chaotically with other signals and also wasn’t really pointed in a particular direction. See also https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/dkb5c/if_aliens_are_monitoring_our_tv_broadcasts_then/ 

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record 

(3) https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/ 

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message - the Arecibo telescope (in Puerto Rico) collapsed in 2020 (it also features in the film Contact). See also 'What we said to aliens' episode of the The Rest Is Science podcast.

(6) https://soundcloud.com/nadiadrake3/arecibo-message-1974

(7) https://archive.ph/hBe7G - the original requires an email address to read https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/40-years-ago-earth-beamed-its-first-postcard-to-the-stars 

 

Edit: I just spotted this after finalising this post! 

If an alien landed and asked you "what is music?", what would you play for them? (31 May 2026) The Guardian - this is just the 'provocation' for readers to respond to and at some future point they'll publish the responses.

Reddit's UKjobs sub - I have a 7 day ban for having shared some jobs boards (I think)

I've become a more regular user of Reddit ever since I found out that AI companies hoover up its content as training data. I want all my answers in the 'corpus' :) 

One of the subs I visit is r/UKjobs. Posters and commenters aren't allowed to advertise jobs (moderators are volunteers and they'd be run off their feet whackamole-ing spam and bad-faith job postings) which is understandable. 

Someone asked 'Where do people even find jobs?' and I replied with the post below, which was later deleted. Because I've had posts deleted there before (did not learn my lesson!) I've been given a 7 day ban from the sub.

I will bide my time until I'm allowed back on the sub, and I normally wouldn't write posts bleating about being banned (to be fair I've never been banned from any platform, ever, and I've been on most of them!) but I have a couple of observations. 

The deletion notice said "Your post/comment has been removed breaking rule #3 - we are not a job board, CV reviews go in the megathread, we don't allow solicitation and broad interview/job search topics are also better suited to the megathread."

1. The state of the UK job market is understandably causing people a phenomenal amount of distress with people struggling even to get feedback with their rejections, let alone (not) getting jobs. 

I think people need all the help they can get. I do accept that I can't post job ads (I don't think I ever have) and that the sub is not a jobs board, but I'm a bit sad that I can't signpost people to other places which are jobs boards. Possibly I shouldn't have linked to them as I can see that other comments haven't been deleted and they mention some of the same types of thing, but don't link to the website.

2. The recommendation is for the person who asked this general questio to have instead posted on the 'megathread'.

(I was drafting this bit last night, it has improved slightly since then). I had a look at the megathread and it seemed to be full of day-old posts with no answers, whereas people are pretty quick to respond to questions on the main forum. The megathread isn't that obvious (I was linked to it in the note about my post being deleted) and it's possibly not something people would go looking for, when they have a whole menu of recently added posts from people at the top of the main board.

Of the 10 posts there only 2 had any response, whereas on the main board almost every post has at least one reply. Four of the posts are from 6 or 7 days ago and no-one's said anything in response. I didn't really know about the megathread until today (I'd heard of it in passing but this is the first time I looked at it to see what people might post there). Of course, with my temp ban I'm unable to reply to any of the posts there anyway!

My next comment has nothing at all to do with Reddit.

3. I wish there was a centralised Labour Exchange kind of thing in existence. 

The Job Centre Plus places will only help people if they are in receipt of benefits, which is fair enough of course. People who want a job but who aren't eligible for benefits can use the National Careers Service, great idea. 

What I think would be nice is a Goverment version of recruitment agencies where someone interviews you, finds out about your working likes and dislikes and suggests roles, or sends you off to work at a particular place for a couple of weeks. I've written about this previously. I expect it's a bit unlikely though as would probably be very expensive to organise.

- - - - - - - - -

EDIT: would help if I included the comment that I said I would ;)

My deleted comment

 

Comment from mods explaining why my comment was deleted

The sad little note that appears if I look at any posts on r/UKjobs telling me
I'm currently banned. This will lift a week later (i.e. in six days from today).