The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.

The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.

“The purpose of the system . . . is to provide a single central facility within the Department of Defense to compile, process and distribute files of individuals who meet age and minimum school requirements for military service,” according to the official notice of the program.

Privacy advocates said the plan appeared to be an effort to circumvent laws that restrict the government’s right to collect or hold citizen information by turning to private firms to do the work.

Source: Washington Post

CROOKED call centre workers in India are flogging details of Britons’ bank accounts, a Sun probe has found.

The Sun’s undercover reporter Oliver Harvey was sold the top secret information on a thousand accounts, and numbers of passports and credit cards.

Harvey, who paid a total of 5,000 US dollars (£2,750) for the information and was asked for another £275 to be sent later, was told details usually cost £4.25 but he was getting a special deal.

Getting a special deal (source)

Kkaran Bahree, who said he got the details from a network of call centre workers in Delhi, also boasted that he could get up to 2,000 account details a month.

The information received included account holders’ addresses, secret passwords, credit card details, passports and driving licence information.

In some cases there were also the issue and expiry dates of bank cards, as well as the three digit security number from the back of the card.

Source: The Sun Online

Tired of having your mailbox crammed with unsolicited mail, including pre-approved credit card applications? Fed up with getting telemarketing calls just as you’re sitting down to dinner? Fuming that your email inbox is chock-full of unsolicited advertising? The good news is that you can cut down on the number of unsolicited mailings, calls and emails you receive by learning where to go to “just say no.�?

The TFC published a page which lists what to do and where to register in order to cut down on unsolicited advertising.

The New York Times published a very interesting article of how credit card black market operates on the internet.

“Want drive fast cars?” asks an advertisement, in broken English, atop the Web site iaaca.com. “Want live in premium hotels? Want own beautiful girls? It’s possible with dumps from Zo0mer.” A “dump,” in the blunt vernacular of a relentlessly flourishing online black market, is a credit card number. And what Zo0mer is peddling is stolen account information - name, billing address, phone - for Gold Visa cards and MasterCards at $100 apiece.

Source: NYTimes

According to the Japanese press, approximately 40MB of confidential reports, related to nuclear power plant inspections over several years, was leaked from a virus-infected computer belonging to an employee of the Mitsubishi Electric Plant Engineering (MPE). The data is said to have been distributed to users of the Winny peer-to-peer file-sharing system. Winny is the most popular file-sharing network in Japan, with over a quarter of a million users.

According to officials, the leak occured when a 30-year-old engineer used his personal computer for company business. The PC was infected with an unnamed computer virus which is said to have enabled Winny users across Japan to access the sensitive information. The exposed data included photographs of the insides of the nuclear power plants, and the names and addresses of inspecting engineers.

Source: SophosLabs

Microsoft Corp. announced several steps to strengthen the intellectual property (IP) protection it provides to PC manufacturers, including its larger original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and smaller OEM System Builder partners, OEM distributors, and independent software vendor (ISV) Royalty partners. Collectively, these partners account for more than $18 billion of Microsoft’s annual software revenue. The IP protection provided by Microsoft, commonly referred to as indemnification, helps shield partner companies from exposure to legal costs and damage claims related to patent or other intellectual property disputes.

“This is a part of our ongoing efforts to respond to the requests of customers and partners. Our partners are telling us that IP issues are becoming increasingly complex, and they appreciate that Microsoft stands behind them and our products,” said Brad Smith, senior vice president and general counsel at Microsoft. “We’re proud of our strong IP indemnification, and we encourage our partners and end users to ask their IT vendors about the
level of protection they provide for their products.”

High-profile cases have brought greater industry awareness to the importance of IP management. When IP disputes do arise, it is all too common for a technology company’s channel partners to be pursued for the alleged IP violations. Microsoft’s willingness to help protect Gateway Inc. when Lucent Technologies filed a patent suit against its use of Microsoft(R) software is one such example of the complex and real nature of IP issues in the industry today. Channel partners are looking for vendors that are willing to stand behind their products and help protect them from these kinds of risks.

With today’s announcement, Microsoft is signaling that its OEM partners, OEM System Builders, OEM distributors and ISV Royalty partners will receive enhanced coverage with Microsoft’s industry-leading indemnification offering. The enhanced indemnification includes protection for the four forms of disputes commonly associated with software: patent, copyright, trade secret and trademark. The coverage extends to current and future versions of software, such as the Windows Server System(TM) (including Microsoft SQL Server(TM) and Microsoft Exchange Server), Microsoft Office System, and Windows(R) client software.

Additional information on Microsoft’s expanded IP protection offering can be found on Microsoft’s Get the Facts Web site.