Moynul Haque, 21, paid about £900 in Bitcoins for the slide, barrel and recoil spring of a Glock 9mm pistol.The unnamed seller hid the parts in an antique radio and posted it to Haque from an address in Michigan.The parcel was intercepted by US customs officials, who promptly contacted the UK’s National Crime Agency. The NCA searched Haque’s home in Smethwick and seized a laptop and a small quantity of amphetamines.With the assistance of the West Midlands Police Cyber Crime Unit, they found that Haque had tried to check the status of the parcel sent from the US.Haque paid well over the odds for the parts. And his motives remain a mystery, according to local paper The Express and Star's court report.Prosecutor Philip Beardwell said: There is no evidence he was part of a network or received money to buy the parts on someone else's behalf. There is equally no evidence of any links to terror groups. It is a very curious case.According to Haque's defence counsel, he was unemployed when he purchased the gun parts – and playing a lot of video games. His somewhat reclusive client may have simply not thought through the full extent of what he is doing when ordering the parts, The Express and Star reported.

Haque pleaded guilty to the importation of firearms and possession of class B drugs. He was sentenced at Wolverhamption Crown Court on 28 June. Comment As Brexit sends London's tech sector and Silicon Roundabout into post-traumatic shock, and protesters out onto the streets of London, inventor Andrew Fentem wonders what sort of hippy free-for-all is this anyway?While some sections of the British press celebrate the Brexit vote in the UK, in the technology press there has been much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.Forbes interviewed a clearly traumatised Brent Hoberman – of Lastminute.com fame – who seems to be in need of a reassuring cuddle: People feeling rejection. I think this is what the Leave campaign underestimated: the psychology of rejecting openness.Preening international elitists like Hoberman are exactly what Brexit voters so dislike. While the self-styled “digital elite” talk in therapy-speak about European peace, love, and understanding, they are masking their true motivation – which is the freedom to exploit low-cost mobile tech labour. Cheap labour was the top reason cited by Tech City startups for voting Remain.

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Whatever happens after Brexit, tech poseurs will remain in the UK because the global elite just love London – it's a wealthy, well-connected, cool, creative city with a ready supply of precarious labour and an impressive money-laundering infrastructure.Last week, I met up with a friend who is the head of software for a large, well-known British technology company. Like a lot of the Remainers in the tech press, he was complaining that he had to do most of his recruitment abroad – such as from Eastern Europe. So I asked him what levels of salaries he was offering. The answer, it turned out, was £25k a year for junior roles. I was quite shocked. In the very early 1990s I was briefly employed as a junior coder and was paid about the going rate back then: £19k. Since those days, general compound inflation has been approximately 100 per cent, and rents have increased approximately 200 per cent.When I asked why they were offering so little, my friend replied that with the EU’s mandatory freedom of movement, the owners of the company know that they can get away with it.In the early stages of my career I was an engineering apprentice and benefited from a considerable amount of on-the-job training. Apparently British tech employers no longer feel the need to provide that, either.

Meanwhile, over at the BBC – among their deluge of Project Fear articles – was a piece about London's apparently endangered Tech City. What is most interesting about this BBC article – and is unwittinglyly ironic to the point of satire – is the image they used to illustrate the UK's thrusting tech sector. The photo is of a young man sitting alone in an empty cafe with his laptop, presumably waiting for his next tech gig.This not a picture of UK tech success – this is a picture of the precariat: no steady job, not even a desk to work at, living in cramped and expensive housing. These same young people have spent this past weekend petitioning, protesting, and marching for the right to be further exploited.Silicon Roundabout is not an economic phenomenon, it’s a lifestyle scene, and this “tech lifestyle” is underpinned by taxpayers' money. The European Union is the biggest investor in UK venture capital firms, according to Adrian Drodz of Frost & SullivanThe beneficiaries of this public money in Silicon Roundabout are simply disguising their self-interest as modernity.During these protests, I received an email from a well-known Silicon Roundabout innovation agency urging their mailing list to “Save the UK” by signing a referendum petition. I reminded a worried friend that in 1974 (when I was very small) the UK only had commercial electricity for three days a week, and sometimes after school we would just sit in the silent darkness until bedtime. Amazingly, the UK survived.

KPMG's sensible head of technology, Tudor Aw, also sought to reassure us, saying that, Technology is a sector that will only increase in importance and works without borders. He's right. Speaking personally, very few of my own activities in the high-tech sector have involved anyone in the EU; almost all of the significant collaboration offers that I have received over the years have come from the US, China, South Korea, Japan, and from within the UK. The EU has primarily been a source of legal headaches – as I explained here on The Register two weeks ago.Moving on from Brexit and the referendum, what will damage the UK more than Brexit is a continuation of the angst and disunity being driven by the losing Remain camp’s Project Fear. I suggest that, in the interests of true peace and understanding, technology entrepreneurs, VCs and pundits take a break from jetting between London, Berlin, and New York, and instead go on a Brexit Safari – taking in the delights of Grantham, Sunderland, Bolton and Merthyr Tydfil.Forget master passwords, literally. Password manager LogmeOnce has come up with a new-ish way to log into websites – selfies.

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The cloud-based biz told El Reg today it has added a new PhotoLogin option which takes a photo of you and uses it to unlock the services you're trying to access.It works by getting you to take a picture of yourself on one machine – a laptop, for example – and then sends that snap to an already set-up trusted device, such as your mobile phone.If you confirm on that second device that the pic that appears is the same one that you just took, LogmeOnce authenticates your access to your online password vault, and from there you can log into other websites.Therefore, if your phone flashes up a photo that you didn't just take, you know that someone else is trying to access your vault and you can stop them. The pictures self-destruct after one minute.The big advantage to this system is that it yanks out the need to remember a complex master password and replaces it with a one-time login requiring a trusted device. Within their vaults, people can follow best practices for passwords: such as coming up with randomized passwords using upper and lowercase, numbers and punctuation, and using a different password for each website.That side of things, the use of non-password authentication, is far from new – there is a wide range of password managers on the market and security experts are increasingly advising people to use them – but the real-time use of photos is novel and potentially more secure.

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