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The Archers

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/catch/index.shtml

if you go to this page and click on the link to Sunday you can hear the episode we discussed today

Add comment May 28, 2008

Internet crime in Brazil – a BBC listening

OK so i don’t want to scare anybody but you might like to listen to this…

its a BBC radio documentary series about Internet Crime and they made a special programme here in Brazil about internet crime and fraud because this country is the home of this new phenomenon…

the listening is here http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/docarchive/docarchive_20080516-1749.mp3

and here is some background information from the BBC site

The fastest growing sector of global organised crime is cyber-crime. Internet banking and credit-card fraud is increasing at a rate of about 40 percent per year and is estimated to be worth around $100 billion annually.

Brazil produces more cyber-criminals than any other nation.

As Misha Glenny finds out in the final part of this series, How Crime Took on the World, there are particular reasons for this – not least the fact that Brazil has one of the most sophisticated banking systems in the world. This is because for many years, the Brazilians operated a protectionist economic system, and therefore developed its own highly skilled IT workforce.

And there is a rich, tempting market for cyber criminals in Brazil. Although only 14 percent of the population are regular internet users, that’s still close to 30 million people. Three-quarters of them do the bulk of their financial transactions on line.

In Sao Paulo Misha meets some of Brazil’s spammers and hackers. He has online conversations with a cyber criminal known as ‘Slack’ whose group makes over $7,000 a month – a very sizeable sum in this developing nation. He also meets ‘Fabio’, a poor man from one of the favelas who is unashamedly learning the skills of a hacker in order to commit crime.

At the Federal Police headquarters, the officer in charge tells Misha they receive an average of thirty reports of cyber crime a day – far more than the cyber unit can deal with. And the fear is that as more and more people become computer literate, there will be a still further exponential rise in this quintessential crime for the 21st century.

Misha Glenny is the author of McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld.

1 comment May 21, 2008

Chinese Terracotta Army

I just found a nice podcast from the Guardian newspaper about the exhibition last year at the British Museum of various parts of the collection of the Terracotta Army.

audio_meet_chinas_terracotta_a.html

I studies it a little at school but my knowledge is extremely limited, so it was good to have the Podcast. I then went to the Museum website and downloaded the educational guide which you might also find interesting.

teachers_resource_pack_30_8a

Add comment May 16, 2008

Heathrow

Remember the reading activity about Heathrow airport.

Well the original article was from the BBC Learning English site – you can find it here.

there are some extra activities on this site too

Add comment May 4, 2008

Online Translation Sites

Do any of you currently use any software or sites for tranlsating between different languages?

I tend to use Babylon. Probably because it was the first site i found that was quite good and i like the layout

You can find Babylon here …

Babylon’s translation and dictionary software offers results from a database of 1,300 sources in 75 languages. The database includes 25 professional dictionaries in 14 languages developed by Babylon’s own linguistic team: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, Russian, Korean and Swedish.

Do you have any other sites that you would recommend???

Add comment May 4, 2008