I suppose if he had not boasted so extravagantly, this liar might have been able to get away with his revision of history:

Mr Irvine, originally from Salisbury in Wiltshire, admitted to the St Petersburg Times that he had had made up parts of his CV because of social pressure.

He said: “When I first came down there and I met people down there with all this money, it was like trying to keep up with the Joneses. I was sitting in a bar one night and that came out. It was stupid.”

His apparent claims that he had cooked for US presidents were shown to be without foundation, as was his boast that he had helped construct the royal wedding cake in 1981.

His rise to fame and fortune came quickly, however, and it was surely hard not to arouse suspicion. Knighted by the Queen for cooking? Those are some Joneses he must be trying to keep up with.

Gizmodo reports that a small business owner has taken physical security of his property into his own hands:

When necessary, Terrill fires up the 400lb device and powers it from afar with a remote control. Using the control and a walkie-talkie, he approaches the vagrants around his bar and a local day care center to inform them via the robot’s loudspeaker that they are trespassing on private property. If that doesn’t do the trick, he gets rough with the water cannon. Apparently the robot has been so successful that the owner of the day care facility wishes she had three more just like it.

In the 1800s America had a notorious problem with armed gangs “defending” their respective territories. The British concept of a police force was adopted to help introduce a more democratic form of law enforcement. While far from perfect, the economy of scale made security more affordable to each person or even community who otherwise might not be able to pay for a special security force. Now the cost of police has reached a point where modern technology will increasingly be added to the mix to fill the security gap.

Exciting news. The Mounties have arrested seventeen people in connection with botnets:

Although the hackers operated from about a dozen towns all over Quebec, their botnet network was international in scope, infecting 39,000 computers in Poland, 28,000 in Brazil, and 26,000 in Mexico– the top three countries affected by the group. In all, they hacked into more than 100,000 computers in 100 countries.

Suspiciously round numbers, but nonetheless a good read.