What's worse than credit card fraud?
http://www.pogowasright.org/article.php?story=20071109193618106
VA: Dozens of Henry County residents are victims of debit card fraud
Friday, November 09 2007 @ 07:36 PM EST Contributed by: PrivacyNews News Section: Breaches
At least a dozen or more debit card customers in the Henry County area are finding they're victims of fraud.
Hackers have gotten into financial data banks where they've obtained valid card numbers.
They're actually manufacturing debit cards under some of the most common bank names: Wachovia, BB&T, SunTrust, and various credit unions.
Then they're apparently selling the cards on the black market to third parties in various states.
Source - WDBJ7.com
Want to do your own lead generation? (Not sure how you differentiate a true business-related visit from a casual browsing-while-at-work visit.)
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/domodomain--Look-Whos-Clicking-Now/
Domodomain.com - Look Who's Clicking Now
Domodomain turns your any web page into a lead generation machine by automatically identifying business visitors by company name and capturing detailed information about them, in real time, and without visitor registration required.
http://www.domodomain.com/main.asp?page=home
Want to see what they could learn about you? (Attention DHS: Think of it as targeting information for a cruise missile...)
http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/yougetsignal--Get-Details-On-Your-Network-Location/
YouGetSignal.com - Get Details On Your Network Location
YouGetSignal.com gives you all of your location information. Once you enter the site a google map is displayed on the homepage with an icon on the city you are presently in along with country information such as, region, city, longitude and latitude. Besides your geographic location YouGetSignal.com tracks your network information. YouGetSignal.com lists your IP address, you external address, and your port number. This is useful to see if your service applications are being blocked by a firewall.
A Dilbert Moment: “So what if it doesn't work – do it anyway!” (They have better lobbyists than you do)
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/09/1831248&from=rss
NY Rejects E-Voting, DOJ Trying to Force The Issue
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 09, @02:42PM from the please-let-use-vote-in-peace dept. The Courts The Internet United States Politics
CompaniaHill writes "Hastily passed in the wake of the 2000 election mess, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) supposedly offered funding to help states update their voting systems. In reality, the short deadlines have been used to push the sale of untested and uncertified new e-voting systems. Many states continue to demonstrate that the new e-voting machines are not reliable. The New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) took the time to pass their own voting legislation with additional testing and certification standards which far exceed the HAVA standards. As a result, they missed the HAVA deadlines. In March 2006, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued New York to comply with HAVA. Now, the DOJ is serving a motion to try to take away New York's right to select and acquire their own voting machine systems — in effect, to force e-voting machines on New York anyway. At the moment it's too soon to say how the NYSBOE will respond."
This is 12 months less than Google's “reduced” retention period.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/09/213232&from=rss
Germany Implements Sweeping Data Retention Policies
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 09, @05:33PM from the bad-day-for-leaving-people-alone dept. Privacy Government Communications
G'Quann writes "Starting next year, all communication providers in Germany will have to store all connection data for six months. This includes not only phone calls but also IP addresses and e-mail headers. There had been a lot of protest against the new law, but it was ignored by the government. 'The content of the communications is not stored. The bill had been heavily criticized. Privacy advocated had organized demonstrations against the bill in all major German cities at the beginning of this week. In October there had already been a large demonstration with thousands of participants in Germany's capital Berlin. All opposition parties voted against the bill. Several members of the opposition and several hundred private protesters announced a constitutional complaint.'"
This is interesting. Does it suggest that the cost of retail operations in Japan exceeds the synergies of vertical integration for foreign firms?
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9814133-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Samsung retires from Japanese consumer electronics market
Posted by Erica Ogg November 9, 2007 10:02 AM PST
As of the end of October, Samsung no longer sells its consumer gadgets in Japan, according to the Associated Press.
The Korean electronics giant had actually pulled its products out of Japanese retail outlets a year ago, but as of the end of last month, it ended its Web presence also.
"We judged direct sales to individual consumers are less profitable than business-to-business sales," Lee Eun-hee, a Samsung spokeswoman, told the AP. Samsung will still sell flat panel monitors, LCD panels, and memory chips directly to businesses.
While Samsung is the largest provider of flat-panel televisions in North America, reaching 11.8 percent of the market, the competition in Japan is much stiffer. There it has to compete in a gadget-crazed country on the home turf of Matsushita (Panasonic), Sony, Sharp, and others.
Convergence? Not a joke? La Cucaracha was bad enough, now you can blast out your entire mp3 library! (Imagine all those mommy vans playing “Its a small world” over and over and over and over and over...)
Video: Horntones FX-550 MP3 car horn
Nov 9, 2007 2:52:00 PM
Now you can customize your auto's alert
CNET's Brian Cooley shows off new tech at the 2007 SEMA show in Las Vegas: a way to download MP3s to your car horn. If you hate other people's booming car audio systems, Horntones might push you right over the edge.
This is one of a whole bunch of handy dandy tools available online. They are easy to use and generally free, but locating exactly what you need when you need it is still very difficult.
http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9813848-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
Goldmail: Talkie slide shows made super-easy
Posted by Rafe Needleman November 8, 2007 9:01 PM PST
Goldmail is a new service for creating narrated slide shows. I've seen other multimedia presentation products, but never one as drop-dead easy as this. It's a great tool. And I say this despite the fact that Goldmail's CEO, Guy Longworth, introduced the product to me with worst pitch I've ever heard anyone give a writer: "Text is lifeless." Gee, thanks.
To create a talkie in Goldmail, first you grab your images, either from your hard disk, by taking screen grabs, or by creating text slides in Goldmail. You sort the images into the order you want. Then you press Record, and while you're talking, click the "next slide" button to advance the show (you can also use an audio file from your PC). Goldmail records the transition points. It's a more natural authoring environment than any other I have used.
Once you've created your presentation, you get an option to e-mail it, link to it, or embed it. I like that the app doesn't pretend it's an e-mail client or a blogging tool--but it gives you just what you need to work with the tools you already use.
The image uploader in the Goldmail download is better than most Web-based image apps.
... The consumer version of Goldmail is free and allows unlimited views for your talkies, but all messages end with advertising. There's a pro version for $9.95 a month that has no ads and that offers tracking, so you can see who's viewing your messages and when.
[Here are a couple similar sites: Vizzvox and VoiceThread Bob]
Towards automated education?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/09/1422211&from=rss
Open-Source Early Literacy Materials Gaining Some Attention
Posted by Zonk on Friday November 09, @06:27PM from the not-often-you-can-say-children-and-free-in-the-same-sentence dept. The Internet Education
phooky writes "Although open teaching materials have been available at the university level for a while now, there have been very few materials for younger learners. That's beginning to change now with the advent of Free-Reading, a free, wiki-based resource for early literacy instruction. The availability of free materials could free up millions of dollars from school budgets for more teachers and training. From the USA Today article 'Last fall, a Florida textbook adoption committee approved Free-Reading, a remediation program for primary-school children that's believed to be the first free, open-source reading program for K-12 public schools. It's awaiting approval by Eric Smith, the state's incoming education commissioner, who could approve it by mid-December. Florida is one of the top five textbook markets in the USA, so its move could lead to the development of other free materials that might someday challenge the dominance of a handful of big educational publishers.'"
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