Just an Anti-Phishing rant

Hey world! It's been a minute...

Today I received a couple phishing e-mails, like the one in the screenshot below (not that this is a first) and I decided to do something about it.

 

So.. I tried to find the report button on my email account. I couldn't! I could only mark the email as spam, but I could not report it.

Then I tried to inform the relevant bank and I was surprised to realize that the don't have a system for that... They only provide self-protection instructions.

So, I decided to escalate this... As the sender's domain was from inside EU (one of them was Germany actually) I decided to go and report it to the appropriate German authority.  I ended up in the Cybercrime page of BNK which also seems to only provide information and not have a report form (or email)...

To be honest, I found this sketchy site which seems to ask you to report spam email from Germany to them, but at best FSM seems as a volunteer organization and at worse it's a fraud itself.

Going forward, I check the EU aspect of this, but my search drove me to OLAF which is something like EU's internal affairs.... anyway, they ask you to visit Europol's site on the mater (also the bank had this link as well). 

So.. I went there.

Guess what!! Europol just instructs you to contact your local authorities!!!

And we already know by now what is going on in Germany, is there any chance it's better in Greece ??

Well.. you guessed that right: Of course there is no way other than actually calling the police. And of course I will not spend the phone operator's and the duty officers' valuable time for a phishing email of which I'm not a victim... There should be a separate second line service for that... 

In the end I quit, I just reported the domains to Google and Microsoft, to make sure the domain's existence will be blocked from practically any browser but that's not the way. It is not the responsibility of corporations to protect the public... It's the responsibility of the states.

Why is it so difficult for EU to have a centralized service to protect the public proactively by shutting down those sites? Or at least for each country to have one ? 

Just by searching "Report Phishing" in Google I can easily find:

1) USA's CISA

2) Google's safebrowsing page 

3) UK's report-a-scam NCSC

4) Microoft's  support page

So, it seems to be easy for US (a big federal country - comparable to what EU wants to be) and UK (a medium sized country, not bigger or richer than Germany).

Pretty sure that if I managed to search in different languages I would find options to report spam in countries even smaller than Greece actually.... But why is it so difficult for EU countries ?

#phishing, #report, #EU, #Greece,  #Germany

Snapdragon 800 Samsung Galaxy S4 (Sept 2013) vs Samsung Galaxy S5 (Febr 2014)

Is there really a reason to buy the all new Samsung Galaxy S5 when it's 30% more expensive than the September's Samsung Galaxy S4 with almost the same clocked Snapdragon 800?
To be exact:
Samsung Galaxy S5 costs €675 in Amazon.fr
Samsung Galaxy S4 I9506 costs €520 also in Amazon.fr 

I won't go into the price comparison further, as one can find the S5 for ...€759 here in Cyprus but obviously one could find it cheaper than in amazon also. But what's important is that the price difference between those two Samsung Galaxy SXs is at the range of 30%. And this for what? Let's see..

Processor: The Samsung Galaxy S5 does have a better processor chipset but only marginally. It's got the Snapdragon 801 clocked at 2.5GHz while the September's S4 has the Snapdragon 800 clocked slightly lower at 2.3GHz.

RAM is the same

Storage is the same

GPU is the same

Display Resolution is the same Full HD, although you do get slightly bigger screen for the S5, 5.1'' over 5'' of the S4 meaning thought that the pixel density is lower for the S5.

Size The increased display size of the S5 comes at the expense of the phone's size. At 142x72.5x8.1 mm over 136.6x69.8x7.9 mm the S5 is taller, wider and thicker than it's predecessor. In fact the 0.1" of gained screen size (meaning 2% more screen) comes in expense of being 11% bigger! Is this technological advancement?

Battery capacity is also slightly better for the S5 but still not enough to cover the size difference.Samsung put a 2800mAh battery instead of the previous 2600mAh of the S4.

The Camera is the only bright component for the S5 since it does have a significantly better camera. Although it doesn't seem that the 16MP is way better than the 13MP camera of the S4, the S5 does allow for 2160p video or for 60 fps at the HD one...

Finally we've got the Software... Many would say that it doesn't matter, the specs might be pretty much the same but still S5 worth the huge difference due to better software... Well apart from the Fingerprint scanner nothing much here too.. The S5 does come with the Android 4.4 KitKat but so can do the S4 if you just... update it!

Overall, I cannot really think of a reason to pay 30% for the S5 instead of buying the Snapdragon 800 edition of the S4... To be honest I don't know if I would consider the S5 worth it if it were at the same price. I don't think that the differences justify the size difference.

And that's only Samsung vs Samsung battle. I did not even take into consideration the LG G2 (bigger screen, bigger battery, less size) the close to perfection on value for money LG Google Nexus 5 the Sonys (Z1, Z2, Z1compact) etc.