- Culture
- 28 Oct 04
An online scam is costing Ireland millions.
Pigs have formed their own handgliding club, hell is bleedin’ Baltic and for once in its life Caught In The Net has a serious matter it wants to draw your attention to.
Yup, the weird fetishes, bonkers politicians and superimposing of Britney Spears’ head onto a 40FF porn model’s body are going to have to wait while we bring you this home.eircom.net/safesurfing/diallers warning about modem hijacking.
Already believed to have effected thousands of Irish surfers, “the scam occurs when a site you’re visiting purposely disconnects you from your chosen service provider and reconnects you to the internet through an international or premium rate number which can be charged at up to €5 a minute,” they explain. “These sites usually provide premium content such as pornographic material, shareware, music, children’s games, ring tones and movie clips.”
Stressing that “eircom.net cannot accept any liability for calls made under these type of circumstances,” the site lists a range of preventative measures that’ll hopefully save you having to sell your granny into white slavery to pay your next bill.
Now that we’ve taken care of our public service remit, it’s on to sexist football managers.
Bored with the usual “goals change football games, Brian” rhetoric, Queens Park Rangers gaffer Ian Holloway has taken to spicing his post-match interviews up with the sort of analogy that followed last season’s scrappy 3-1 defeat of Port Vale.
“To put it in gentlemen’s terms, some weeks when you go out and pull a young lady they’re good looking and some weeks they’re not the best,” he says to much laddish sniggering from the press corps. “Our performance today would’ve been not the best looking but at least we got a result. She wasn’t the best looking lady we’ve ended up taking home but she was very pleasant, very nice.”
You can hear the QPR manager dragging himself deeper into the mire at www.kontraband.com
As the US Presidential Election enters the home straight, you might want to check out the Bush as fascist ventriloquist’s dummy animation at www.jasonarcherpaulbeck.com/ .
Which just leaves time for quick visits to www.carllewis.com/video.music.1.html (come back David Hassellhoff, all is forgiven); www.terminal-insanity.com/z1g/steadyhand.swf (bizarre Oriental goings-on); and www.kcrw.com (The Zutons, Supergrass, Badly Drawn Boy and The Thrills are the latest session acts on our fave Californian radio station).