Laptop From eBay Exposes Data For 1 Million Bank Customers

This goes to show no matter how careful you are, the stupidity of some company somewhere can still compromise your data. WHY was this data even kept on a laptop to begin with? Companies that do stupid things like this need to be held accountable for their actions.

Personal details of more than 1 million customers of Royal Bank of Scotland, American Express and NatWest are found on a computer sold on auction site eBay. RBS said the information included historical data related to credit card applications and data from other banks, but would not disclose further details.The information was being held by archiving firm Graphic Data, which copies paperwork from some of Britain's biggest financial organisations and stores it digitally.
The Daily Mail said names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, bank account numbers, sort codes, credit card numbers, mothers' maiden names and even signatures had been left on the hard drive.

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Sick New Spam: 'We Have Kidnapped Your Child'

SophosLabs™ is reporting that a new variety of spam is starting to make it's way into inboxes everywhere. A new spam email being sent out that claims your child has been kidnapped! The email is evidently UK based, asking for a £25,000 ransom ($50,000 USD) and most insidiously includes an attachment purporting to be a picture of the kidnapped child. Once a user clicks and downloads the attachment, of course, their computer is infected with a trojan horse virus.
The poorly worded email's subject line reads 'We have hijacked your baby.'

Experts at SophosLabs™, Sophos's global network of virus, spyware and spam analysis centers, have warned of a widespread spam campaign that pretends that the receipient's baby has been kidnapped.

The campaign tries to trick innocent computer users into opening a file claiming to be photographs of the infant, but are really malicious software.

Attached to the email is a file, entitled photo.zip, which contains a malicious Trojan horse that will download further malware from the internet to compromise PCs. Sophos detects the Trojan horse as Troj/Resex-Fam.

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Superman Movie News

Ready for a darker, more tormented Superman? Apparently WarnerBros is revamping the Superman franchise. Somehow 'disappointed' with the results of Superman Returns (it did within $10 million of that other 'disappointment' Batman Begins; the studio is looking at a darker tone for any future film.

Poor Superman. His last movie was a disappointment, and now his DC Comics stablemate Batman is getting all the box office glory. But Warner Bros. has a plan, according to the Wall Street Journal, to reboot the Superman franchise, and its DC superhero properties in general. That plan, in a nutshell: Do what Marvel does.
The two prongs of the plan: First, make a bunch of related movies about individual DC heroes (including Green Arrow, Green Lantern, the Flash, and Wonder Woman), then tie them together with a group tale (the planned Justice League film.)
Second, make the characters all psychologically darker.

Sound familiar? This obviously worked well with Batman, a dark hero if there ever was one, but Superman? His persona is a complete opposite of the Dark Knight. Superman represents the best potential of what humanity can be while Batman represents our darker nature. I'm not saying there isn't room for a more serious film, but Warner is misguided if they think Superman is appropriate to be a 'psychologically dark' character. If they really want to go down this path, they should make a Batman/Superman film and have the two characters play off each other.

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Huge Comet Discovered

A huge comet-like object has been spotted inside the orbit of Neptune. The object, at least 30 miles wide, is on the return leg of a 22,500-year journey around the sun, astronomers announced today.
Cataloged as 2006 SQ372, the interloper is just over two billion miles (3.2 billion km) from Earth, though its elongated trek takes it to a distance of 150 billion miles (241 billion km), or nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.
The only known object with a comparable orbit is Sedna — a distant, Pluto-like dwarf planet discovered in 2003. But 2006 SQ372's travels take it more than 1.5 times farther from the sun. Its diameter is estimated at 30 to 60 miles (50 to 100 km).
"It's basically a comet, but it never gets close enough to the sun to develop a long, bright tail of evaporated gas and dust," said Andrew Becker of the University of Washington. Comet tails form when solar energy boils material off a comet.
The object is not a threat to Earth, which is good. A comet that size would cause global devastation. For comparison, the asteroid thought to cause the demise of dinosaurs was about 6 miles (10 km) wide. The comet Hale-Bopp, which put on a spectacular display in the late 1990s, is about 31 miles (50 km) in diameter. Yet many comets are just a mile or two wide.

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Netflix Resumes Operations After Outage

(Reuters) - Online DVD rental pioneer Netflix Inc resumed normal shipping on Friday after the most severe outage in the company's decade of operations, a spokesman said.
"With possible rare exceptions we will get everything out today," said spokesman Steve Swasey.Netflix said all customers whose shipments were delayed will get a 15 percent credit to their next billing statement. New customers using the service on a free trial basis will have their trial extended by a week.
"We don't have in our terms of agreement that if you miss a day you get a credit," Swasey said. "We just do that voluntarily because it's the right thing to do."
Netflix did not disclose what caused the outage, which affected about a third of its 8.4 million customers.
The disruption prevented Netflix from mailing out any DVDs on Tuesday, but the company did have partial deliveries on Wednesday and on Thursday.

Partial Lunar Eclipse On Saturday

Ready the telescopes! People across the world will have the chance to see a partial eclipse of the Moon on Saturday.

In a lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and Moon are directly aligned as the Moon swings into the cone of shadow cast by our planet. Observers on Earth will see a Moon that is partly light and partly dark, with hints of color that depend on terrestrial conditions.

Lunar eclipses are visible wherever the Moon is above the horizon. This one will be best seen from most of Africa, Eastern Europe, central Asia, India and the Middle East.

From Western Europe and the United Kingdom, the Moon will rise during the eclipse. It will begin at 18:23 Greenwich Mean Time and peak at 21:10 GMT.

Follow the link for 97 images of lunar eclipses.

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8 Suckers Buy $1000 Worthless iPhone App

In its first 24 hours available, EIGHT people - six Americans and two from Europe - bought "I Am Rich," a seemingly useless iPhone application for $999.
Once downloaded, the app doesn't do much -- a red icon sits on the iPhone home screen like any other application, with the subtext "I Am Rich." Once activated, it treats the user to a large, glowing gem (pictured above). That's about it. For a thousand dollars. The app has since been removed from the App Store.
At least one buyer apparently thought it was a joke, posting "I saw this app with a few friends and we jokingly clicked 'buy' thinking it was a joke, to see what would happen. ... THIS IS NO JOKE...DO NOT BUY THIS APP AND APPLE PLEASE REMOVE THIS FROM THE APP STORE."

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Class M Planets Common?

A new study by Northwestern University astronomers, using recent data from the 300 planets discovered orbiting other stars, puts forth the view that Earth-like planets are not uncommon.
"These other planetary systems don't look like the solar system at all," said Prof Frederic Rasio, senior author of a study in the journal Science.
However, it does suggest that 'Goldilocks' planets such as Earth, which are not too hot and not too cold for life to thrive, could still be common.
The study illustrates that if early conditions had been just slightly different, very unpleasant things could have happened - like planets being thrown into the sun or jettisoned into deep space.

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Consumers Shun Blu-ray Players

A recent survey released by ABI Research gaging consumer interest in the Blu-ray Disc format states only 23% of consumers are likely to buy one and 40% said the picture quality was only "somewhat better" than DVD. The lukewarm response to Blu-ray shows that most consumers don't see enough of a benefit to switch to Blu-ray.

In a survey of 1,000 consumers, ABI Research found more than half of the respondents citing "other priorities" as their reason for having no plans to purchase a Blu-ray player. The 23% likely to buy one said they wouldn't until sometime next year.
In the case of movies in the Blu-ray format, more than half of the respondents said it was "much better" than standard DVD, but another 40% said it was only "somewhat better." Most of the respondents said they were very satisfied with the performance of standard DVD players.

In other news, Sony, evidently living in an alternate reality, is stating in just over 2 years, Blu-ray will outsell DVD. The only way this will happen is if players reach the under $200 price point and Blu-ray movies cost the same or almost the same as DVDs. Neither looks to happen this year.

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DHS Can Now Seize Your Laptop Indefinitely

Be aware if you're crossing the border...A pair of DHS policies (1 and 2 [pdf warning]) from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States."
The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, "absent individualized suspicion," seize electronic gear: "Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity."
An electronic device is defined as "any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form" including hard drives, compact discs, DVDs, flash drives, portable music players, cell phones, pagers, beepers, and videotapes.
This follows the recent news that Canadian border officials will begin inspecting your digital devices for copyrighted media if ACTA is enacted. How a customs officer is supposed to tell if a file is pirated vs. legitimately downloaded is not known. Online accounts of border agents/TSA not knowing what PSPs and MacBook Airs are and looking for illegal porn in the My Pictures folder on Windows do not bode well for any of these plans.

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Black Liquid Lake Confirmed on Titan's Surface

Scientists say that a dark, smooth surface feature spotted on the moon last year is definitely a lake filled primarily with liquid ethane, a simple hydrocarbon.
Mixed in solution with the ethane, the lake is also believed to contain nitrogen, methane, and a variety of other simple hydrocarbons.
University of Arizona professor Robert Brown: "It was hard for us to accept the fact that the feature was so black when we first saw it," Brown said. "More than 99.9 percent of the light that reaches the lake never gets out again. For it to be that dark, the surface has to be extremely quiescent, mirror smooth. No naturally produced solid could be that smooth."

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