data

Amex, Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest customer details sold on eBay

Over 1 million American Express, Royal Bank of Scotland, and NatWest customers' details have been sold on eBay.

The details were stored on a server, bought for just over 35 British pounds ($64) by Andrew Chapman, an IT manager from Oxford, England, last week. Chapman told CNET News sister site ZDNet UK on Tuesday that the server, a network attached storage (NAS) box, contained unencrypted backups of CDs.

"A professional organization holding this kind of data should have tested the disks to make sure (the information) was destroyed," said Chapman.

The computer had been used by data-archiving firm Graphic Data to store the details on behalf of RBS, of which NatWest is a subsidiary. Details included names, addresses, bank account numbers, telephone numbers and customer signatures.

RBS said on Tuesday that it was in the process of investigating the incident. … Read more

AT&T expands iPhone international data plans

AT&T announced Tuesday it's expanding its iPhone international data plans, in a move designed to cut consumers' reliance on pay-per-use data services.

Under the expansion, which is slated to begin Wednesday, iPhone users can add one of two international plans to their existing service.

The 100MB iPhone plan will cost an additional monthly fee of $119.99, while the 200MB plan will run an additional $199.99 a month. Both plans can be added or dropped from users' existing plans at any time, without penalty.

On a pay-per-use data basis, users could pay as much as 0.… Read more

Iogear's KVM switch does more than control computer

Iogear introduced on Monday the first KVM Switch that enables control of a second computer using your laptop--the USB Laptop KVM Switch.

For those who are not familiar with this type of device, KVM stands for keyboard, video, and mouse. A KVM switch is a device that allows for working directly with more than one computer via only one set of KVM and therefore keeping the work space free from clutter, and saving energy as well as money. This is only applicable to situations where you don't need to directly interact with all of the involved computers at the … Read more

Data on 84,000 U.K. prisoners is lost

Unencrypted data on all 84,000 prisoners in England and Wales has gone missing after a Home Office contractor lost a USB stick on which it had been stored.

Contractor PA Consulting alerted the Home Office to the loss last Monday evening--and by midday Tuesday, the contractor confirmed "rigorous" searches had failed to uncover the whereabouts of the memory stick and its cachet of sensitive information.

According to a Home Office statement, the missing USB stick contains:

Data relating to all prisoners in England and Wales, including names, birth dates, and, in some cases, expected prison release data … Read more

Sandisk's Cruzer Titanium USB Drive performs automatic data backups

We're a big fan of USB keys for their convenience, small form factor, and price per gigabyte. They're a quick, simple way to transport data through a connection that can be found on every modern computer, but what happens when companies take an already good idea and add extra features? This is exactly the case with the 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Plus.

Sandisk partnered with BeInSync to build their automatic online backup software into the $50 Cruzer Titanium Plus, so every time you plug the key into a computer with an Internet connection, all of your data is … Read more

Microsoft's data centers growing by the truckload

Correction, 9:31 a.m. PDT: This story cited the wrong state for Microsoft's Quincy data center. That facility is located in Quincy, Wash.

Once upon a time, Microsoft used to fill its data centers one server at a time. Then it bought them by the rack. Now it's preparing to load up servers by the shipping container.

Starting with a Chicago-area facility due to open later this year, Microsoft will use an approach in which servers arrive at the data center in a sealed container, already networked together and ready to go. The container itself is then … Read more

The cult of Google

The Guardian had a fantastic set of articles this weekend addressing the role of Google in the world. One particularly intriguing piece comes from Adam Curtis, a documentary director, who notes:

Google is a paradox. It gives us the feeling we are wild and free individuals, powerfully reinforcing an idea of us as heroic figures in the consumer age. Yet at the same time it is powerfully proving the opposite - that we are completely predictable. Out of that is going to come some very interesting political ideas of how to organise society and also new artistic ideas.

I think we're going to see Google given a run for its money, with more and better ways of filtering information to consumers and businesses. Each of these, however, will take us one step closer to becoming assimilated into a Borg-like information-dense existence, one largely devoid of privacy and meaningful, individual choices.

Author Andrew Keen suggests:… Read more

$9 million in funding for data firm Media6Degrees

Media6Degrees, a firm that provides data on social-network activity to marketers and advertisers, announced Thursday that it has raised $9 million in venture funding in a Series A round led by U.S. Venture Partners.

The New York-headquartered company had already received seed funding from Contour Venture Partners, Coriolis Ventures, and a number of angel investors.

According to its Web site, Media6Degrees uses "patent pending algorithms and methods (to) connect a brand's existing customers with user segments composed entirely of consumers who are interwoven via the social graph." The company is helmed by Joe Doran, former general … Read more

Pioneer ups the ante, says 500GB Blu-ray-like disc possible

A month after saying it had figured out how to squeeze 400GB of data onto a single optical disc, Pioneer says it can do better than that.

On Tuesday the company said that it is "feasible" to produce a Blu-ray-compatible disc with 20 layers. At 25GB per layer, that amounts to a 500GB disc. The previous claim of 400GB meant just 16 layers were on a single disc.

Blu-ray Discs are currently available in single layer (25GB) and dual-layer (50GB) discs.

The company said that it was able to squeeze more layers in by stacking alternating layers of … Read more