Looks like NCP Car Parks has been hit by a virus that’s creating merry mayhem with all of the car parking meters across the UK. Details are sketchy at the moment but it appears the entire network is being taken offline. I happened to be chatting to one of the meter tech’s who told me what had happened and that every parking meter in the UK was ‘going all weird’ and had to be turned off because of a virus.
NCP, who run the largest network of privately owned car parks in the UK were unavailable for comment on the outage although customer services has confirmed all UK car parking meters are being taken offline due to a virus striking the network.
It’s unclear at the moment whether credit card information has found its way from the NCP meters to whoever planted the virus.
December 20th, 2007
Well, it was inevitable. Microsoft’s Vista will deactivate if someone does something to their own computer the operating system doesn’t like, such as changing a video card or updating a device driver.
Earlier this year I wrote in a post entitled, “
Ghastly la Vista, baby!” where I point out that “
Once a weakness is found in a particular driver or device, that driver will have its signature revoked by Microsoft, which means that it will cease to function“.
Now it’s official. Vista user, James Bannan’s copy of the operating system announced he had three days to reactivate his system following a graphics card change or it would cease to function properly! Although he was finally able to reactivate the operating system he was unable to do so automatically over the Internet and instead had to telephone Microsoft to speak to a customer service representative.
Pathetic. Microsoft sells you an operating system for use on your computer with your hardware but deactivate the OS if you make some simple (and common) hardware changes.
October 24th, 2007
