Sony Does It Again

Well I was wondering why customers were bringing back copies of Casino Royale that wouldn't play. First rootkits, now this.

It is being reported that Sony is starting to add additional copy protection to regular DVDs, making them partially or totally unplayable on current DVD players. Even Sony DVD players.

To quote Vesper from the movie, "Arrogance and self-awareness seldom go hand in hand."
Time to do some self-examination, Sony?

Read to become even more outraged at Sony.

Have You Ever Shopped at TJ Maxx? Uh-oh!

In what is reported as the biggest breach of personal data ever, at least 45.7 million credit and debit card numbers were stolen by hackers who accessed the computer systems at the TJX Cos. at its headquarters in Framingham and in the United Kingdom over a period of several years.
TJX operates 826 T.J. Maxx, 751 Marshalls, 271 HomeGoods, and 162 A.J. Wright stores, as well as 36 Bob's Stores, in the United States. In Canada, the company runs 184 Winners and 68 HomeSense stores, and in Europe, 212 T.K. Maxx stores.
Holy Cow.
Oh, and by the way, this was discovered before Christmas 2006. Lovely.
But wait, theres more!
TJX now believes portions of the credit and debit card transactions at its U.S., Puerto Rican, and Canadian stores -- excluding debit card transactions with cards issued by Canadian banks -- from January 2003 through June 2004 were compromised.
Oh, but notice the small tidbit in this article from Information Week.
"TJX has also likely run afoul of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard created by Visa and MasterCard, as a number of documents sent by Visa to financial institutions that issue cards and manage Visa transactions indicate TJX was storing credit and debit card data in violation of the standard."
You see, companies are supposed to comply with the industry standard for retaining this data and it seems our friends at TJMaxx have been keeping transaction and other data for far longer than they are supposed to. But other companies may be doing the same thing.
If you have used a credit/debit card at any of the above stores in the last 4 years, call the helpline TJX has set up at 866-484-6978.

DVD is 10 Years Old

Believe it or not, the DVD format quietly turned 10 years old this month. Who knew that it would become the fastest adopted product in history with 125 million players sold in the US in these last 10 years? I never dreamed it would become so ubiquitous, so ingrained in our culture. Now a DVD is considered the definitive version of a film, the way most people will experience it.
It seems like forever ago that I bought my first DVD player, a Toshiba SD-2107, off eBay in November of 1997.
The format was launched in March, however, primarily backed by Warner Brothers initially with a wave of titles released to test markets in seven cities. Anyone wanting a movie on DVD in these early days had to mail order them or get someone in a test market to buy them and send it to you. Among the first titles to be released included Blade Runner, The Fugitive, Batman, Eraser, Twister, The Exorcist, Interview with the Vampire, Se7en, Goldeneye, and The Wizard of Oz.

Porn Spam Hits All-time Low, Says Company

According to results released by internet security firm Symantec, adult or porn spam represented only 3% of the total amount of spam detected during the month of February. However, the same study estimates 70% of ALL email sent in February was spam, an actual increase from previous months.
Most spam I now receive that gets through Yahoo's spam filter are variants on the Nigerian email scam (see previous posts) or ads for stocks, probably pump and dump schemes. These stock ads usually appear as an image rather than actual text, to confuse your email filter.
more

XM and Sirius to Merge

Satellite radio competitors XM and Sirius are planning to merge into one company.
This still has to be approved by the FCC and faces government regulatory approval. That it would form essentially a monopoly on subscription satellite radio is one concern.
But is it any different than ClearChannel owning 1200 stations nationwide, creating essentially a monopoly in many markets? The fact that now practically all sources of media are owned by just a handful of companies is very concerning.

Are YOU spreading spam?

PC World magazine reports spam is on the upswing compared to last year, thought to be mostly due to botnets, networks composed of broadband-connected PCs that, unknown to their owners, are used to send spam.
Yes, if you are one of those people who don't run your Windows update regularly, or don't have a firewall turned on, or routinely download pirated music from a P2P network, you could be contributing to the problem. It is estimated by some that 25% of all personal computers on the internet are compromised in some way that can be used in a DOS attack or to remotely send spam.
It is also being reported that cybercrime is now more lucrative then drug trafficking.
People, if you are on broadband, get a router. It serves as a hardware firewall. Don't click links in email. Don't download illegal music. You have no idea what is in that "music" file you are downloading.
Update to IE7 if you continue to use IE, or better yet, use Firefox. Use Thunderbird instead of Outlook.
And run Windows Update after the second Tuesday of every month for Pete's sake.

New Version of Nigerian Email Scam

A new version of the old Nigerian email scam, or '419 scam' has been seen in email inboxes lately. This time the twist is the email purports to be from a US soldier in Iraq. This scam is older than the internet, it used to be (and still is) distributed by fax before email became popular.
It basically is a money laundering proposal, a version of advance fee fraud, to supposedly smuggle funds out of Nigeria, or Iraq, using your assistance. It states you will be handsomely rewarded for your assistance.

Unbelievably, five billion US dollars have been scammed out of people worldwide that responded to this scam. This organized crime is said to be the third largest industry in Nigeria, where stolen funds are almost never recovered.
You can watch an ABC news segment they produced on this here on YouTube.
More information on this scam can be found here and here.

Do not respond to ANY email spam offers! It only perpetuates the spam problem for the internet as a whole, as there is practically no cost to the spammers to send out millions of emails to reach the small percentage of people who actually respond. Spam increases costs to ISPs that have to filter it and deal with increased email volume.