(You may be receiving e-mails from VirtualTech too; the way to tell is to look at the unsubscribe link at the foot of the message; if it’s a link to a web page in the domain interprofs.com then it’s a VirtualTech message.)

Now, here’s why the VirtualTech e-mails started to get on my flabby man-tits. (1) They’re broadly untargeted, selling things that I am not interested in (baby supplies? magical healing herbs?); (2) they’re mostly in Chinese; and (3) the unsubscribe button only removes you from that one single e-mail campaign. Nowhere do they provide the option to have your e-mail address completely removed from their master list.

Last week I ran out of patience, and called the owner of the company on his personal mobile phone. (How did I get that number? It’s at the end of the whois record for interprofs.com… just in case anyone reading this also wants to give him a call; after all, his own business model shows that he’s all in favour of unsolicited communications.) He noted my e-mail address and agreed to remove it from his list. A few days later I had another e-mail from VirtualTech. I called him again. He promised to remove my address from his list. Later that same day, another e-mail, another phone call, another promise… Now, I’m happy to play this game; I will cheerfully telephone the man every time I receive an e-mail for as long as he wants to send me e-mails. Really, it’s no problem. I think he’s going to give up first.

But imagine if you don’t have this opportunity for sporting redress. A letter in today’s SCMP really spelled out the amount of cognitive dissonance and disdain for the consumer in the direct marketing industry. The letter is from a Mr Eugene R. Raitt (who claims to be the Chairman of the Hong Kong Direct Marketing Association; if you’re reading this, Mr Raitt, please click on your name for an important message). The letter is about the Octopus company selling off personal information about people who signed up for its reward scheme. But that’s not the bit that stands out. Mr Raitt says:

Additionally, Mr Cramb has the option any time he receives a call he does not want to inform the calling company that he wishes it to remove his name from its call list, and it will gladly do so.

And as I read this, my blood boiled. Here’s the reality of the situation: I receive an unwanted sales call. When I answer the phone, the caller – hearing my English – immediately hangs up. Or says, “Sorry, wrong number” and hangs up. Or asks, “Do you speak Chinese?” and when I say, “Please do not call this number again” repeats, “Do you speak Chinese?” How, Mr Raitt, am I supposed to “inform the calling company”? Any suggestions?

Mr Raitt goes on to say:

The last thing any company wants is to spend money needlessly contacting people who clearly do not wish to be contacted.

Then where is our do-not-call list, Mr Raitt? Why are the direct marketers not at the front of the queue of people lobbying for a do-not-call list? All we have right now is a list to register our objections to recorded-message sales calls. See, this is exactly the same situation as I have with the VirtualTech Consultants: even if I can get myself removed from one company’s call list, it’s not going to prevent the next company from calling me, or the one after that. I do not wish to receive unsolicited sales calls, and Mr Raitt’s disingenuous claims do not address that at all.

Contrast Mr Raitt’s cynical distortions with the nice guy who runs VirtualTech Consultants. Mr VirtualTech knows he’s in a dirty business that wins you no friends, and yet is unfailingly polite whenever I phone him up to tell him I’ve received another e-mail from his company. I almost feel bad about pestering him. Mr Raitt, on the other hand, tries to pretend that he represents fine, upstanding, honest businesses, and comes across either as someone for whom shameless lies are part of the daily round, or the only inhabitant of a happy fantasy-land populated by community-minded telemarketers.

The Aviator has crashed and burnt! It’s been deserted, darkened, with a bike lock through the door handles for some weeks now. The varnish outside is flaking away. The whole place dragged out of the sky in a stall induced by epic fail.

But how could this happen in a busy, highly-populated area like Tung Chung, where there are so few other bars to choose from? Could it be:

• that they never, ever changed their tedious and bland menu?
• that their food and drink were recklessly overpriced, especially given the quality?
• that their beer selection was minimal and consisted of the same brews sold everywhere else (if I wanted Carlsberg I’d get it from 7-Eleven; sell me something interesting!)?
• that their buffet was covered in flies?
• that their staff had been taught a special facial expression of greeting (best described as “oh crap, here’s another one”)?
• that the place had the atmosphere of a food court, and did not encourage lingering (more like The Autopilot, quite often)?
• that the service was incredibly slow, and you’d often spend as long waiting for your pint as you would spend drinking it?

Or perhaps it was just bad luck. Who can say.

Moving on, fingers crossed that something actually good replaces it. Not just another chain restaurant/bar. Something with the pizzas of Wildfire, the beer selection of the East End Brewery, and prices from the Mainland. Not a chance, obviously.

The truth: oh lordy, it’s Captain Cyborg’s protege.

Captain Cyborg is Kevin Warwick, loopy professor of cybernetics at Reading University, who has been inserting bits of electronics under his skin for some years and making extravagant claims about the implications. He is most famous for taking advantage of the Soham murders by offering to implant an electronic tracking device into an eleven year old girl, (an offer that I think should earn him a place on some register or other).

Gasson is Warwick’s sidekick, although it seems the major lesson he’s learnt from the Cap’n is how to be a media whore.

So what about these claims he’s infected himself with a computer virus? I had a few concerned friends forward me the URL, seeking comment. Well, if I put a pregnant rabbit inside my PC case and then issued a press-release: “Computer Gives Birth To Bunnies!” – that would be about the equivalent to Gasson’s little achievement. (Full disclosure: that analogy is not mine, but it is far too superb not to share.)

Gasson, in short, has repeated a fairly dull RFID experiment. But before doing so, he wedged the RFID under his skin. He could equally have poked it into a sausage, or up his arse, and the results of the experiment would have been just as meaningful, but he’d not have got the press exposure because people would have been laughing at him instead, which would be the right response.

Of course, underneath the trashy sensationalist journalism and craven publicity-seeking there is a serious implication to this experiment: implants (pacemakers and such) that are integrated into the human body may become vulnerable to attack using technologies not dissimilar to RFID, and it is incumbent on the manufacturers to bear this in mind.

But the key word there is “integrated”. You achieve the status of cyborg when the technology has been actually integrated with your body, not merely inserted into it. You do not become a cyborg by placing electronics under your skin, even if you then scurry off outside looking for Sarah Connor. Although the whole concept of humans being infected by computer viruses is specious at best, you’d assume that this kind of integration would be a prerequisite.

So, in response to the concerned e-mails I received: you do not need to install Norton Anti-Virus on yourself. Not just yet.

Every day, dishearteningly, I see more and more examples of the kind of businesses to which my presentation and article were referring. Specifically, the ones that are culpably negligent in terms of information security.

Check out, for example, this news story. Nothing particularly unusual about it, but I thought the merchant’s statement was especially illustrative of the kind of attitude of which I see so much. They portray themselves as utterly innocent victims of a “senseless” attack. Bullshit! A senseless attack is when someone randomly punches you in the face while you’re walking home from the pub. Heisting a load of cardholder data makes huge amounts of sense: it’s valuable. And they’re hardly innocent. Wearing a short skirt does not mean you are asking to be raped, but leaving your payment card database hanging out most certainly does mean you’re begging for someone to come along and make a copy or two.

But it’s okay: “authorities” say the attack wasn’t the result of any “wrongdoings” by staff or management. Bullshit again! Management are responsible for securing their data. They neglected to do so. That’s a good, solid piece of wrongdoing right there.

Now, I really don’t mean to single out this one small restaurant, but I see attempts to substitute investment in security with affronted and unconvincing protestations of innocence like this all too often, and that was what sparked my pro-compliance presentation and article.

I sometimes consult for businesses that have got sub-par security. The fact that they’re addressing their poor security absolves them of negligence. Businesses like the aforementioned restaurant are in a whole different league of shame. And so I’m proposing a new terminology for them. Based on Wolfgang Pauli’s dry observation that something can be “not even wrong“, I am choosing to label the security negligent as “not even incompetent”. After all, you can only be incompetent at something if you’ve tried it.

But that’s not what this posting is about. It’s about Facebook’s censorship of this very important subject matter.

The web site Collateral Murder was set up to ensure that the video could reach a wide audience. But interestingly, if you try to post a link to Collateral Murder on Facebook, you get:

“Blocked Content”? Now how did that happen?

So here, just to kick things off again, is a restaurant review. La Comida, Staunton Street, the Spanish restaurant and Tapas bar. I was there last night and was confounded by the gap between their good dishes (amazing) and their bad (a practically inedible travesty of cooking).

In summary, if you go to La Comida stick to the tapas which were, without exception, bloody marvellous. The calamari with aoli were perfectly cooked and not at all chewy, enclosed in a firmly textured crust of tasty crumbs, and the aoli itself was an ideal match. The asparagus with parmesan was the ultimate vegetarian comfort-food. The sardines were crispy-skinned, full of flavour and enhanced by a dash of olive oil (always available on the tables).

Then comes the tactical error: instead of ordering more tapas, my companion and I tried for some of their main meals. She had salmon with dill sauce and french fries and it was not too bad. A generously-sized portion, but unfortunately with only the most stingy splashing of sauce; certainly not enough to actually allow it to be tasted.

I chose the rack of lamb with mashed potato and green salad and it was universally awful. The lamb itself was properly cooked (I like mine rare and they complied with that reliably) but the cut of meat was cheap, clotted with fat and sinew, and much harder to eat than lamb rack ought to be. The mash must have been instant as it had no taste at all, and was dry and had a suspiciously uniform texture. The salad had been dressed apparently with pure brine and was far too salty to eat. Nothing on that expensive plate gave me any pleasure at all. Luckily my companion had filled herself up with tapas so I ate her salmon and found it quite agreeable.

They also serve the roughest rioja in the world as their house red. Avoid at all costs.

Would I return? Yes, for the tapas, without any hesitation. I’ll never be ordering off the main course menu again.

And what have they decided to name this habitat? Human-hive? The Sardinecan? Pod City? No, they’ve opted for The Hermitage.

Perhaps it’s not standard apartments at all. Perhaps it’s over 40 floors of bijou columnettes, for the urban Stylite-about-town.

• 200g of minced chicken breast (that’s two nice-sized patties)
• 1 clove of garlic, chopped finely
• 1 spring onion, chopped finely
• One teaspoon paprika
• One teaspoon ground cumin
• A few finely torn-up coriander leaves
• Pinch of salt
• An egg-white (or the whole egg, if you’re not a health-freak)

Mix it all up by hand and have fun making a mess. It’ll be worryingly dark but don’t fret, when you cook it the colour will improve. Mould into two patties and splot them into a frying pan of hot olive oil. Flip ‘em until cooked through.

Serve on a bap with mayo, rocket leaves and sweet chilli sauce. Flail around trying to stop the cats from stealing one burger while you’re eating the other.

Perhaps the barbed wire really is there to keep the young Lutherans in. Otherwise, one day, maddened by years of people shouting “I have a dream!” over their walls, they’ll burst out en masse, snatch up an innocent passer-by and nail him to their door.

Here’s my thought for tonight: if someone is blogging pseudonymously, but their true identity is trivially googleable, does anyone have a requirement to keep that identity quiet?

[...] why should I be required to preserve the anonymity of people who are only anonymous to preserve their lifestyle which depends on human trafficking for sex?

[...] why should I preserve the anonymity of some overpaid expat who is using his blog to boast about how much sex he pays to have? While he supports the triad gangs who traffick in women? Or some wanker banker bragging about his conquests. Especially now that these banker types are profiting at everyone else’s expense.

Here’s my take, Dave, as one non-pseudonymous blogger to another. Why don’t you mind your own business?

Has anybody actually asked you to unmask somebody in this manner? No, didn’t think so. Why should they? What you’re actually saying here is, “Ooh, I’ve just done some slick detective work on Google and found out who $blogger is… I really want to spread the word so people can see how clever I am! But I don’t want to look like a playground sneak. I know, I’ll get rhetorical and hope somebody asks me, then I’ll have an excuse to spill the beans!”

Good man. You disapprove of prostitution and fatcat bankers. Me too. But you’re behaving right now like one of those tedious fundamentalist Americans who photograph men coming out of porn shops and post the photos on the web. And I had you tagged as a decent, sensible atheist fellow too.

Dave, if you know the identity of someone who is doing something illegal then take it straight to the police. I’ll applaud you for that, in public if you want; but this snide “I know what you’ve been doing…” business is beneath you. Get a grip.

Edit: Dave deleted his blog posting. Good stuff.