Category: Computers

FRAUD: www.silverjewellerysonlineshops.co.uk

Fake jewellery
Fake jewellery (Photo credit: Iain Purdie)

My other half just picked up some stuff from www.silverjewellerysonlineshops.co.uk as gifts. Their web site states that they’re genuine, and they’re not. All knock-offs and not at knock-off prices. The stuff we received was a) partially incorrect and b) crap. Damaged, badly made and obviously sub-standard.

There is no indication of where they are located – it turns out when the stuff arrived that it’s China. They also took more off Gillian’s debt card that they were authorised to do so.

Correspondence with them (via a Yahoo email address…) has resulted in them claiming that it’s “not worth” refunding as the postage charges would be so high to return it. They offered £10 (of a £70+ transaction). Then £13. Now £18. It’s like haggling.

Unsure if trading standards will touch it, but the web site takes GBP payments and is a .co.uk domain so I think I’ll be making a complaint to their registrar. A quick search on MoneySavingExpert.com popped up a story about “Operation Papworth” a couple of years ago where 1,219 similar Asia-based sites were taken offline.

We’re looking at talking to the bank and using something called Chargeback – further details on the Which? web site.

Please PLEASE share and repost elsewhere. If they won’t refund our relatively small amount after defrauding us, then perhaps some negative advertising will cost them more.

www.silverjewellerysonlineshops.co.uk – you are thieves, fraudsters, liars and scum. I hope you die a severely unpleasant death, that lingers for many hours until you are begging to be put out of your misery.

UPDATE

I contacted the four jewellery manufacturers for whom the frauds list themselves as authorised resellers. Tiffany & Co have already replied and were very grateful for the heads up, and the additional details I gave them about the domain registration. Apparently the domain is owned by a lady in Belfast, according to the whois data. I reckon this is a crock as well, frankly.

The domain registrar did have a look, but said there was nothing wrong with the site that they could see which is fair enough. On the front it looks genuine, it’s after the purchase has gone through that you find out they’re scammers. I’ve forwarded them the correspondence we exchanged with the thieving ******** afterwards.

Also, our bank have said they’ll issue a Chargeback against the transaction which means we get a full refund from the thieves’ bank account.

So as a result of trying to screw us over, they’ve lost not only a sale minus a small overhead but the entire sale, plus postage, plus the shoddy goods they sent out. In addition, there’s every chance their domain will be taken off them as well.

Do not mess with my other half. I will hunt you down…

FURTHER UPDATE

From their domain registrar:

Hello,

Thank you for your response. We have asked the owner of the domain to remove all the infringing content from their website within the next 24hrs, failure in doing so will result in suspension of his domain. We would also request you to file a complaint against this domain with your local cyber crime department.

Regards,
PDR Abuse Team.

Score!

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Internet access *is* a Human Right

English: Emblem of the United Nations. Color i...
Emblem of the United Nations (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thus sayeth the UN after a resolution was passed unanimously by their Human Rights Council.

This is a Good Thing, as the resolution declared that the right to be able to get online and express oneself freely was a right of every person on the planet. Wonderful, and something I wholeheartedly agree with.

However…

a) How could China, with it’s famous “Great Firewall“, sign this with a straight face? While Chinese people can access the internet, they do not get access to the same level of information as people in the West. They also certainly cannot express themselves freely as many recent news stories have demonstrated, with people being arrested for even drawing attention to certain topics let along going into detail about them.

b) France has a “three strikes and you’re cut off” policy for those accused of (note: not necessarily “found guilty of”) downloading copyrighted material. The UK has been looking at similar plans as have other countries. This resolution is going to knock that kind of legislation for six, surely? It’s worth pointing out that neither France nor the UK are current members of the United Nations Human Right Council, so did not sign the resolution.

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gTLDs

ICANN Logo
ICANN Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

First geeky post in an absolute age…

ICANN started selling new “generic” top-level domains for silly sums recently. There are the last bit of a web address, and originally were limited to the liked of “.com” and “.org”. They expanded to include “country level” ones such as “.uk”, “.ca” and so on.

The recent move is apparently the help companies spread their branding or make web addressed easier to remember or something. They also include non-Roman characters for the first time, which could allow those using different scripts to access the web entirely in their own languages.

All very money-grabbing, but the pointlessness of it was demonstrated by the example given by the BBC. Apparently Canon are one of the handful of companies which have jumped in to buy some of these domains, which would allow them to have:

www.products.canon

instead of

www.canon.com/products

Now, colour me skeptical but surely they’d be just as well off using a subdomain along the lines of:

products.canon.com

which would cost them the grand price of utterly bugger all, with the added bonus of not confusing an already overly-befuddled system?

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Resetting the sync on a Kindle book

[Full instructions further down after my waffle]

We’ve started getting quite a few books via Kindle apps, though none of us owns a Kindle. I have my phone and Transformer Prime, Gillian has her silly toy phone and fruit-based pad, and Little Miss has her tablet too.

Thing is, the Kindle software is missing some very obvious features. First up is the ability to catalogue your files in one way or another – you can do it on the Kindle itself, I believe, and also on the PC and Mac applications. Not on Android or iOS though. This becomes an issue when you  have 150+ books and no way to organise them into something as simple as “read and unread”.

Secondly is being able to have several “readers” on one account. We read the same books and as there’s no reliable way to transfer purchased ones from account to account, we use my Amazon account across all the devices. That way, one purchase can be read by us all. However, the WhisperNet software always syncs up to the furthest page read regardless of who’s got there. Which means only one person, realistically, can read a book at one time.

I just encountered a further problem with this. Gillian got to the end of a book and told me it was now free for me to read. I went to start it and it was synced to the end of the book. There seemed to way to convince the thing that I’d like to go back to the beginning and sync at page one.

Amazon’s “help” told me nothing. I trawled the ‘net. One site gave two sets of instructions involving stopping syncing, changing page on another device, re-enabling sync and crossing your fingers. Neither worked.

Another said “ring them and they’ll do it for you”. Hardly efficient.

One comment pointed me at a blog post saying that you could now do it via “Manage Kindle” page at Amazon. Yay!

Only I went to the page and the option wasn’t there.

Then I tried going to Amazon.COM (rather than .co.uk). Ta-dah, there  it is.

I can’t buy Kindle books from Amazon.com even though the site will take my login details and gives me an account. It isn’t even polite enough to redirect me to the same title on the UK site if I try to buy it. On the other hand, it’s the only site with full Kindle book management tools.

OK, here’s the skinny. Go to amazon.com and log in.

Select “Manage My Kindle” from the drop-down on the first page.

Step 1
Resync Kindle - step 1

 

 

 

 

Step 2
Resync Kindle - step 2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Locate the book you want to resync and click the “Actions” button to the right of it. Select “Clear furthest page read” and you’re done.

[update – just tried it for another book and found that Amazon US is now trying to force me to the UK page to manage my books – and only has one of my Kindle titles listed on their page. FFS, Amazon, let’s have some consistency!]
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“The Western World” <> “The USA”

Sorry, but I had to. I was reading a simple review of a computer temperature-monitoring program on VikiTech when  I read the following words:

“While the western world uses Fahrenheit as its temperature of choice…”

*face palm*

*seeing red*

*attempts not to paint all Americans with the same brush*

My response to them:

“While the western world uses Fahrenheit as its temperature of choice…” – sorry, but bullshit. The USA is not the total sum of the western world, only a small part of it. Europe uses Celsius, and it’s very much a part of this western world.

Population of Europe: 731 million
Population of USA: 307 million

On that basis, the USA is a minority shareholder in determining what temperature scale is “of choice” in the western world. Add to that the population of South America – on the same landmass as the USA, but also using Celsius these days – and your comment looks even more ludicrous.

In fact, let’s refer to Wikipedia (I know, I know – it’s not 100% accurate) which states that ” The temperature scale [Fahrenheit] was replaced by the Celsius scale in most countries during the mid to late 20th century, but it remains the official scale of the United States, Cayman Islands and Belize.”

So your “western world” consists of three nations with a combined population of approximately 735 million out of a world population of 7 billion, the rest of whom use Celsius.

Stop being so self-important and realise there is a whole world beyond your borders who aren’t quite so caught up in themselves.

Did I over-react?

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