Panning for Gold

Just over twenty-three years ago, I entered into a Faustian pact with Bill Gates. He would provide me with access to this magical thing called Internet email, without charging me for it. I would allow him to snoop around my online life, learn what he could about my personality and behaviour and sell that knowledge to people who want to sell me stuff. Later on, Bill and I even extended our deal to include him storing my digital images for me - up to a certain limit on volume - and using them to train his systems how to use images like mine to make a profit. He even gave me a program to edit those pictures - anyone remember Picasa? I stuck to my side of the deal, and have never paid him a penny

Bill had now moved on to eradicating communicable disease from the planet and solving the climate crisis - both still a work-in-progress. His successors have discovered that making a fortune out of digital tech is not as easy as it used to be. Revenues and share prices are down; tech companies are enemies of democracy; AI is a monster set on wiping out humanity, and its creators are Dr Frankensteins. Many software developers and other employees have been sacked; investment is being scaled back; anything saleable is being sold

In this bracing environment, son-of-Bill is no longer happy with our deal. They are very happy to retain their access to my emails, images, files and attachments, but they think they are tired of giving me the space to store for free that stuff they need. With almost no warning, they wrote to me to say I could not receive any more emails unless I either found ways to remove some of the files they are storing, or pay them a monthly ransom subscription

I spent 30 years working in the technical side of IT - I know my way around computer tech. Extracting, securing, moving, deleting, downloading and uploading across the public Internet is time consuming, intricate, technically quite demanding, and tedious. It is not something most people who find themselves in this situation will want to do. It would be much easier to pay the negligible sum of money they want to give me back my account. Referring back to what I wrote yesterday, I find it curious that I'm more than happy to spend three times what I need to spend on a cauliflower, but I'm not (or not yet) prepared to spend less than the cost of a cauliflower per month to remove my email worries. I'm sure most people will have sensibly taken the opposite view

There is a type of computer software called ransomware. Criminals find ways to install it on vulnerable computers and then use it to lock organizations out from their own data and computer systems. They demand money - almost always paid in bitcoin, itself a system designed with the explkcit purpose of transferring money in a way that authorities cannot trace - to provide a password to regain access. The Royal Mail is one of the most recent high-profile targets. Victims almost always pay a ransom; perpetrators, who are often located in countries with lax law enforcement and/or sympathetic to, or complicit with, their crimes, are rarely caught. Microsoft would, of course, be shocked to think that there could be any common ground between them and these contemptible vermin

Today I collected our honey jars - these are 12oz 'hex'(agonal) jars, which must be labelled as containing 340g. I like the idea of putting honey into hexagonal jars. I'm the coordinator for bulk purchases by our beekeeping association. These are part of a consignment cottaging over £1,800 - that is a lot of optimism. I promised you I would retort back on the progress of the oilseed rape, which is still not flowering in our valley - see the green extra; the same view will have significant patches of golden yellow in a week or so. The bees must be patient