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Contact Graeme
Journalists, students, potential clients or anyone else, email.......
graeme@datasecurityexpert.co.uk
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PGP public key
graeme@datasecurityexpert.co.uk
Something private to say?
PGP public key
No AI Used Here
Buying a property in 2025 is setting yourself up for failure and seems like a suicide mission to me!
- Details
- Category: Private Thoughts
Being last year was a very expensive year (i.e. a baby arriving in not standard circumstances) savings were low and the plan was/is to use the equity to fund a deposit, legal fees, stamp duty, moving costs and more.
In the end I accepted the lowest offer since the man was chain free, single and I thought it would go smoothly. How wrong this turned out to be!
Just before getting the offers in, we hunted for a place to buy just past the boundaries of London for the reasons of price, congestion and to be in a greener area. We agreed to buy a place for £465,000. This price is seriously cheap for a small three-bedroom house near London and a similar place near where we live now would be more like £600,000 or more.
Remember in 2025 the economy is poor, the jobs market is even worse and with stamp duty changes getting on the property ladder is harder than ever before. The stamp duty threshold used to be £425,000 and now it is £300,000. For a first-time buyer the stamp duty on a place valued at £350,000 is £2,500 and if you are not a first-time buyer it is £7,500.
Let’s look at the costs to buy/sell and later I will cover the monthly costs post purchase.
- £60 photography fee to estate agent number two
- £1099 mortgage & survey fee to lender
- £67.20 additional search fee to Thames Water
- £599 survey fee for purchase
- £360 to freeholder for filling out a LPE1 form
- £2,716.80 purchase legal fees inc. search pack
- £2,208.00 selling legal fees
- £13,2500 stamp duty tax on £465,000 purchase
Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink - observations of an outsider in The Philippines Region V
- Details
- Category: Private Thoughts
Water is life yet many people in Region V and likely other regions in The Philippines do not have water at all or it turns on/off without warning or compensation. Back in the UK we take water for granted and if it fails or has bacteria or a parasite present it is big news with leaflets distributed and free large bottles of water dropped off at affected households till it is resolved. Water can be drunken straight from the tap – try convincing my wife this who is from Camarines Sur this!
In the West, water is there for hand washing, showering/bathing, flushing the toilet and using an electric washing machine. Water is heated also typically by a gas boiler or electric shower unit in the bathroom. It is taken for granted after paying the ever-increasing water & sewage bill. Water companies in the UK are private firms there for a profit and run a monopoly per area licensed by the state. Recently our water & sewage bill increased by 50% to close to 30,000 PHP per year. Far from perfect yes but the water is their 99%+ of the time and is not harmful.
Likely in Manila the facilities listed above are present in middle-class, upper-middle-class & upper-class condos as well as rarer houses. The water may not be drinkable directly but at least you can wash your dishes, shower, run a washing machine or purify the water to make it potable. This covers up to 15 million who live in the Manila area and what about the other 100 million? Many of them are poor and surviving on 7500 PHP a month for 5-6 days a week work.
datAshur Pro+C 256GB – The Crème De La Crème of Hardware Encrypted USB Sticks
- Details
- Category: Technical Product Reviews
Website: www.istorage-uk.com | Price: £213 on Amazon
| Simplicity | Value | Documentation |
| 5/5 | 4/5 | 5/5 |
| Functionality | Performance | Overall |
| 5/5 | 5/5 | 96% |
What Is It In Under 20 Words?
An USB stick with inbuilt encryption & authentication to protect data stored on it.
What Does This Solve?
Everyone will remember the stories of London Heathrow airport losing an USB stick or HMRC via a contractor (Atos). These stories were some years back, but I am sure it still happens and USB sticks, normal ones have become cheaper & faster over the years. For statistics around MoD device losses see: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/hundreds-of-electronic-devices-lost-or-stolen-from-mod/.
The earliest USB sticks only held 8MB of data which could store a few documents or a smaller number of photos. These days £12 gets you 128GB of storage which can gobble up the entire contents of your My Documents folder in minutes. USB sticks are small and can be lost in seconds without the owner noticing. Everyone can afford to lose £12 but what about the contents on it?
iStorage offers hardware encryption by default with brute force prevention enabled by default. Once the iStorage device is removed it locks and is useless if lost or stolen.
If you read up on the ICO (Information Commissioners Office) guidance on encryption it recommends using products which have a FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) certification which most of iStorage’s range do. After losing an iStorage device you have confidence the chance of a data breach is incredibly slim and you can tell ICO or the regulators you met their recommendations to reduce the chance of a fine or bad publicity.
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