Here we are at another Bank Holiday and sadly as per usual, the weather’s not up to much – but what did we expect?
Anyway today we heard about the woman who it seems has been living in a supermarket store sign for over a year.
Over in the town of Midland in the US state of Michigan, a contractor working on the roof of a Family Fare supermarket, was astonished to find a woman living in a 5 foot by 8 foot triangle-shaped store sign.
Police called to evict the woman from her crawl-space were amazed to find that she had equipped the area with flooring, bedding, a houseplant, clothing, a kitchen area including a coffee maker, plus a mini-desk, computer as well as a printer.
She obtained power by connecting a lead to a power outlet on the roof.
Amazingly she’d been occupying the area for over a year and said it was an “old safe spot” that was known to her family and secret to most others – although probably not any longer!
Police even complimented her on the cleanliness of her cosy apartment.
She said she was trying to get away from people and commented, ‘Trust me, it’s safer up there than it is on ground level right now,’ revealing that she ‘can’t go to shelters or soup kitchens.’
She also politely asked officers not to contact her family.
But no-one seems to know quite how she got up there as there were no signs of any nearby ladders.
In spite of being evicted, the woman kindly offered officers non-alcoholic beverages, and the store promised to collect up her belongings and return them to her.
After the story became public news, Family Fare donated $10,000 to the local homeless shelter, who’s executive director reached out to the woman, an offer that she declined.
Meanwhile from China comes news of a young man who’d been living under a staircase at a shopping mall in Shanghai for over 6 months.
Equally resourceful he had fitted out his area with a tent, table, computer and even an ergonomic chair.
He had managed to evade security guards for a considerable period of time in spite of sneaking out to use the charging sockets in the mall, but was eventually discovered and arrested last October.
In the second hour we took time out to consider just what happens after you comply with an instruction from a website to prove that you are a sentient human being.
You know those websites where in order to proceed you’re obliged to click on a button to prove you’re not a robot?
In order to do this you’re often presented with squares bearing images of bikes or bridges, and are then obliged to select specific matching squares just prove that your are a living breathing person.
This is something called, CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.
But what you might not know is that when you click on the appropriate box, you’re giving the website in question, permission to check things such as your browsing history, the apps you’ve been on and the messages you might have sent.
So broadly speaking if you’ve been on a dodgy website or looking at porn, all that information is now sent to the website in question!
That being the case before you intend accessing a website that’s going to ask you to prove that you are indeed a human being, you might want to first visit a few innocuous websites.
If the website is unsatisfied with your answers you may well be directed to click on pictures that don’t even appear so if that happens, it means that the website you’re trying to access doesn’t think your a human being after all!
Well I never!
I very much hope to see you again tomorrow,
Scott
