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
Way back in the early days of the Firefox web browser I enthusiastically embraced what was then the new browser on the block, ignoring the glitches and occasional crash. Through it’s various incarnations from v0.7 I stuck with the gutsy little browser as it stood up to the mainstream and security plagued Internet Explorer - and then the unforgivable happened - I lost my bookmarks. All of them. To my dismay I realised I had neglected to make the regular backups I normally did. All in all I lost 2 months worth of top-notch websites not to mention my carefully structured bookmarks layout. I was gutted. It was a glitch of course but I never forgave it and stopped using Firefox, only turning to it when I was doing some Internet related work and required some of the plugins that make Interneteering that much easier.
So what has tempted me back to using Firefox? Simple. A nifty little plugin called Adblock Plus that blocks all those irritating, cumbersome and seizure-inducing ads that have become the blight of every surfer. This little plugin virtually eliminates them all! Bliss.
December 6th, 2007
