How to gain a reputation... (Strange that they didn't blame it on the courier...)

http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20080706105410777

Hk: HSBC hit by new lost data scandal

Sunday, July 06 2008 @ 10:54 AM EDT Contributed by: PrivacyNews

Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp says it has failed to find a tape containing confidential customer information that was discovered missing on June 19 but not reported until Wednesday.

... "Fifty-five tapes were dispatched, but only 54 arrived in Hong Kong. It is a backup tape that contains a total of 25,000 recorded calls." The lender said the missing tape contained records of calls made between April 18 and April 24. The calls were related to "credit card inquiries, business internet banking for commercial customers, and general outbound calls to customers." It will advise affected customers once they have been identified.

Source - The Standard

I will need to study this carefully, since I have little comfort based on what has happened so far...

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/07/0232234&from=rss

Avi Rubin Has Some Optimistic Words About E-Voting

Posted by timothy on Monday July 07, @07:38AM from the let-the-las-vegans-run-the-show dept. Government Security Politics Technology

An anonymous reader writes

"For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems. In this interview Rubin talks about the recent US presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November US elections."

[From the article: Most states have switched to paper records, Rubin notes

A topic for my Business Continuity class. As thousands of companies move to “Cloud Computing” the cost of a major outage skyrockets...

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/06/1719251&from=rss

Keeping an Eye Out When Sites Go Down

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 06, @02:08PM from the he-said-go-down dept. The Internet Communications Networking IT

miller60 writes

"Are major web sites going down more often? Or are outages simply more noticeable? The New York Times looks at the recent focus on downtime at services like Twitter, and the services that have sprung up to monitor outages. When a site goes down, word spreads rapidly, fueled by blogs and forums. But there have also been a series of outages with real-world impact, affecting commodities exchanges, thousands of web sites and online stores."

“I was a COBOL programmer” is equivalent to saying “I was a Mastodon hunter.”

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/COBOL-Dont-Call-it-a-Comeback/

COBOL: Don`t Call it a Comeback

By Darryl K. Taft 2008-07-07

... According to some estimates, there are about 200 billion lines of COBOL code in business applications still running today, with 5 billion new lines of COBOL code developed each year.

... A few companies that are focusing on helping organizations upgrade their COBOL applications include Veryant, Micro Focus and Microsoft -- working to move legacy COBOL applications to the Java and Microsoft platforms.

So rather than a full-fledged “comeback,” many are focusing on ensuring that COBOL code continues to run in modern environments.

The future?

http://www.killerstartups.com/Video-Music-Photo/veetle-com-live-video-content-in-hd/

Veetle.com - Live Video Content in HD

The Tour de France, that most renowned of all cycle races, just recently began. Now of course, many fans can’t actually make it France to watch the event, but they can get all the latest coverage from the web. Veetle, an online broadcasting site with 14 channels and over 25,000 viewers from all over the world, is the perfect place to go. Not only can you catch the Tour de France, you can also catch Wimbledon highlights, and for those with different interests, there’s anime, movies (James Bond, the Departed, and La Vie en Rose are just some of the films in line today), music, travel programs, and news. As a member of the site, you can upload your videos in TV and HD quality or broadcast live using DVD, a tuner card, webcam or your own TV. To watch programs, you will have to download the Veetle TV player [Somewhat of a negative... Bob] (it’s rather slim at 3.9mb); from there, you can watch from your browser.

http://www.veetle.com/channelList.php

Business model: This should be easy to automate...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-9984218-52.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

July 6, 2008 7:31 AM PDT

Making a living taking digital snapshots of passers-by

Posted by Daniel Terdiman

... They park their cars at strategic curves in the road where they can shoot pictures of drivers coming from either direction, and then they sell the drivers--at least some of them--the pictures.

... He said that he routinely shoots thousands of pictures a day and sometimes, if there's a motorcycle rally in the area, can take as many as 17,000 in one shift.

Clear illustration of the effect taxes have on prices...

http://digg.com/travel_places/Heat_Map_of_US_Gas_Prices

Heat Map of US Gas Prices

gasbuddy.com — Now you can see what gas prices are around the country at a glance. Areas are color coded according to their price for the average price for regular unleaded gasoline.

Remember, Iraq was not interested in nuclear weapons...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/06/1637205&from=rss

550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq

Posted by Soulskill on Sunday July 06, @01:01PM from the war-on-gas-prices dept.

Orion Blastar tips us to an AP report that 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" uranium has successfully been removed from Iraq. The operation lasted three months, and it required 37 separate flights and an 8,500-mile trip by boat to reach a port in Montreal. Quoting:

"While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth 'tens of millions of dollars.' A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors."