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Contact Graeme
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graeme@datasecurityexpert.co.uk
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graeme@datasecurityexpert.co.uk
Something private to say?
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Should it take a newspaper article to get assistance from the (despicable, disorganised, slow and business minded) Home Office?
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- Category: Private Thoughts
If I had a pound for everyone who said to me as a British citizen, UK embassies will help you or since your wife married a British citizen she will automatically and instantly get a British passport, I would have a small fortune. Sadly, this is totally not true and perhaps it was true a decade plus back.
Previously I did not really care about immigration or govt services. Why? It did not affect me till the wife came along who has a non-Western weak passport which makes travel tough even in Eastern Europe.
This article is in follow up from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/may/10/couple-belarus-prison-surrogate-child-uk-visa-delays which covered our plight till Tuesday 10th May.
2 of 2: A Rare Look Inside Belarus’s “Chernobyl Exclusion Zone” - Polesie State Radioecological Reserve
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- Category: Travel Reviews
Ukraine’s Chernobyl is famous due to Top Gear, the HBO series and recent events but few people can tell you Belarus has its own version which gets barely any visits. Belarus being an odd place means I have been there! The country itself often scores as having the least visitors per year – 137,000. The number is likely even lower now for two reasons and the FCO used to claim 10,000 Brits go there yearly.
After going to Ukraine’s CEZ in 2015, Belarus was on my list and end of 2019 till January 2020 I flew directly from London to Minsk, hired a car, explored the whole country and post new year did a private government tour of Polesie State Radioecological Reserve. Unlike Ukraine’s CEZ I can firmly say I was the only tourist in the zone that day and likely for weeks.
The park is owned and run by the state, and tours are official with a driver and guide. In December 2019 I contacted the parks authority, received date options, provided them with my passport (scan) and filled out an A4 form. All was confirmed and one early morning I rocked up at the parks HQ out of the zone and signed a tonne of forms in Russian. I left my car, got in a mini bus with a driver and Russian only speaking guide. Formalities were done at the HQ, near the exclusion zone border and once in. Cost was around 150 Euros which is high for the country but is not bad for a single person on a tour.
An example of very dumb/poor IoT security and some free tips: criminals please do secure your internet connected cameras at your cannabis farm!
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- Category: Cyber Security
In one week some years ago I was training a bunch of apprentices in London. The five-day course was OSINT and of course it covered a module on Shodan plus a lot more. On the first day or two of the course, an enthusiastic boy called me on over to look at what he had found. When I was under 20 like him, I wouldn’t think too much about the dangers of looking into organised crime.
Swiftly I went over and laughed. By chance, without wanting to he found a cannabis farm on Insecam.org. This website has numerous categories including: bars, bridges, car parks, factories, hairdressers and farms where this “business” was listed some years back. Under the farm category typically you see cattle and on this occasion, it was an illicit type of farm.
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