Monday 4 February 2013

New phishing technique

Well, new to me anyway. The fisher writes to owners of domain names such as chemicalgalaxy.com and tells them that a whole lot of applications have been made for your domain name with a suffix like .asia, .in, .cn, .hk, .tw... The phisherman then offers to buy up these names at your expense. Even if I hadn't already guessed that this was phishing, I would know it because they also offered the .com name, and the only reason I didn't take it in the first place was that somebody else had already bought it. I wonder how many spurious websites are floating around cyberspace. As for Chemical Galaxy, I should get round to producing the third edition, as three more elements have been named since the second edition. But I needn't hurry; there are still six possible new elements up to no. 120. These ultra-heavy elements will never play any part in real life anyway, as they exist only as single atoms for a fraction of a second before decaying. They could only be stabilized if somebody found a way of adding many more neutrons, and even then they would not be likely to last more than a matter of seconds or minutes. Dreams of creating new elements are like fantasies of colonies on Mars. Much better to focus on reducing infant mortality - the best way of halting human population growth and saving what is left of our planet.

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