Reports by Consumers

So apparently CardSystems, the company responsible for the biggest compromise of consumer credit card data in history, has settled with the Federal Trade Commission. From the eWeek article, “FTC Settles with CardSystems Over Data Breach“:

Last week I ran down to Huntsville, AL to my old ISSA Chapter. We had a great luncheon presentation on Identity Theft. At the presentation I found out the Alabama Attorney General Troy King put together a wonder primer on ID Theft, what to do if you are a victim, contact tracking forms, phone numbers etc. Here is a link to his primer. I hope you never have to use it but it can really make a stressful situation a little better if you do.

Which means that when I surf the web, my behavior is recorded with the same frightening level of detail. Even the books I read can be connected to me, if I bought them on Amazon or at a physical store with my credit card. At work, most of what I do on my computer is logged and my e-mails must be stored for 7 years.

Now fuzzy self-programming will be used to help gadgets learn about human emotional response, and try to emulate it. A little robot dinosaur called Pleo will be hitting consumer electronics shelves soon.

Our requirements were simple. We want HD and we want a DVR/PVR (Digital Video Recorder.) We just can't live without "Tivo"-like functionality. We don't want too much TV now, and we hate the idea of "appointment TV." I don't know when Will and Grace is on, and I don't care. We watch TV when we want to, not when it's on.

Sanofi-aventis, the manufacturers of Clexane Syringes, yesterday announced a product recall after it emerged that some syringes may contain an over-concentration of the active medicinal substance, enoxaparin, which is injected to thin the blood.

I did a lot of research and figured out that the most efficient propane hot water heaters are the new tankless models. At around 87% efficiency, they looked like they could take a huge chunk out of my propane bill (no residual heat loss and infinite hot water). However, at $700 for a 4.2 gpm model (enough for ~2 simultaneous showers) I had to ask myself, “Is propane even worth it?”

There's a lot more on ID cards on the No2ID site and in Phil's speech, particularly on the potential introduction of a surveillance state - very scary stuff. And if you don't think it affects you personally them, as Phil says, consider this: why do you have net curtains? Would you be happy for the government to take them away forever (and allow others to peer in)? This is worse, a lot worse. It'll make identity theft easier, not harder, just from a common sense point of view (lots of your personal data, stored in one easy place for criminals to get at the database via the Net or simply through one of the government employees who will be able to access your info - you think of those hundreds of thousands of people not one of them could ever be bribed or persuaded?)

Between bites of pizza, Dale told us that he had gotten "stuck" on our blog for quite some time Tuesday afternoon. Sure enough, he seemed pretty up to date on all of the ins and outs of our lives, and was even citing details from some of our archived posts. (He must really have gotten stuck.) At some point the conversation turned away from the specifics of certain blog entries and veered toward a somewhat philosophical (and, at times, nonsensical) discussion about the purpose of our blog. Dale asked why we write the blog, and commented, I can't believe you tell the world so much about yourselves...I mean, aren't you worried about telling people so much? As with many things Dale says, I wasn't sure, even by the end of the night, how many meanings were buried in this comment. Did he mean aren't we worried about the emotional vulnerability of disclosing details about such things as the fodder of our occasional marital speedbumps to friends and strangers? Or did he mean the more simple concern of telling so many people so many things about us, leaving us vulnerable to such things as identity theft? Or is there yet some other concern I've not considered?

“Some of them are doing a better job than others at preventing infections,” said Lisa McGiffert, coordinator of the Stop Hospital Infections Project at Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. “They all need to improve. Any hospital doing average or the same as everyone else, that’s not good enough.”

Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I’d ordered a new optical disk drive from an American mail-order company and, because I live in that strange and remote place called “Foreign,” and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.