Sunday.

I finally got all of my reading list transferred onto both the Safari reading list and Bloglovin.  The one good thing about the process is that I culled a number of blogs I no longer read or whose writers are no longer blogging.  I had felt the growing need to do that but always put it off.

We decided to put off our weekly shopping so we can be here for when ever the rose will be delivered.  I don't want it to remain on my door step for very long.  I plan to take advantage of the warmer temps to get some cleaning done out on the patio.  It has indeed been a hard winter and a lot of debris has blown in.  I also need to clean out the fallen leaves I put on several of the containers to provide a mulch for the plants.

I am sure you remember the toxic spill in West Virginia a couple of months ago that shut down the water supply for towns along the Elk River and, eventually, along parts of the Ohio into which the Elk River flows.  Here is a nice retrospective of the not-so-nice event and I don't think the title is at all alarmist.  Or, rather, I think we all should be alarmed about what industrial companies are storing, shipping, or otherwise exposing the public to.

Earlier this last week we saw a news special on counterfeit health and beauty supplies.  I shouldn't have been surprised but I was at the range of the brand name products crooks were counterfeiting.  And some of the counterfeits were often ineffective, of insufficient strength, or even toxic.  Then I found this item and wondered if some of this was not tampering by itself but also counterfeiting.  The two frauds may have very different motives and perpetrators.  In any case, our commercialized world is becoming very dangerous.  Reuters has better coverage here.

I thoroughly agree with this court decision.

So, cyber criminals have moved from stealing the customer info to demanding payment from companies to go away.  Not much of a leap from theft outright to theft by extortion.  I read about similar hackers locking up people's computers and demanding payment to unlock them.  Once upon a time protection rackets depended on thugs with baseball bats to confront their targets.  Now all they need is a computer.