Yet Another Data Breach at a Transaction Processor
A data breach last year at Princeton, N.J., payment processor Heartland Payment Systems may have compromised tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions, the company said today.
If accurate, such figures may make the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported.
Robert Baldwin, Heartland's president and chief financial officer, said the company, which processes payments for more than 250,000 businesses, began receiving fraudulent activity reports late last year from MasterCard and Visa on cards that had all been used at merchants which rely on Heartland to process payments.
Baldwin said 40 percent of transactions the company processes are from small to mid-sized restaurants across the country. He declined to name any well-known establishments or retail clients that may have been affected by the breach.
Source: Washington Post
How many more times will this happen before we start seeing significant improvements in the security at transaction processing companies? The fact that this is such a matter-of-fact, response that shows no sign of caring about the people affected is disturbing. As consumers we can no longer afford to simply stand by and watch our personal financial information be stolen and not do anything about it. I think it is time we demand these corporations prove they protect clients data as best they can or otherwise they should not be allowed to operate.
Working in the financial industry myself and in the IT field to boot, it stirkes me as incredibly incompetent that a company would not employ enough safeguards on their networks to deter these types of attacks. It would also make sense that they would force their clients to adhere to the same standards so that they do not have any one weak point in their wider network of operations. Take processing credit cards with Visa for example, where you must go through a rigorus certification program before they will even let you touch their network or data. If you do not do this then you simply don't get to use their service plain and simple.
Not only is the company not really taking any responsibility but they also are announcing this on a day where it will get no news coverage which I don't think is a coincidence at all. They are knowingly trying to avoid telling the public about the potential for their information to have been stolen. A plainly sleazy move that should be investigated by government regulators if you ask me as it is reckless and irresponsible of them to take this type of action. Keep your eyes on your credit card statements folks, you never know where this will go next.
2008 Mummers Parade – A Family Event?
I saw this in Mail Call today:
“I was calling to just let everybody know that I thought the Mummers Parade was one of the best that I’ve seen in probably the last 10 years.”
— Hagerstown
No Offense to anyone who really liked this parade this year, but the crowd that turned out for it was not something I would let my kids come out to. Constant swearing and vulgar comments. Hearing grown men and fathers talk about how they would have loved to knock someone out on their front porch while their kids are around?
Sorry Hagerstown, but you still have a lot of cleaning up to do before I consider these events worthwhile going to.
Washington County Teaches Kids that Division by Zero Produces Meaningful Result
So for dividing by zero — what if there are 10 apples to be distributed, but no one comes to the table? How many apples does each "person" at the table receive? The question itself is meaningless — each "person" can't receive zero, or 10, or an infinite number of apples for that matter, because there are simply no people to receive anything in the first place. So
, at least in elementary arithmetic, is said to be meaningless, or undefined.
So rumor has it that the Washington County Board of Education is looking to teach our children how to divide by zero. Interesting when you consider that the result is undefined in real number mathematics. As a matter of fact if my sources are correct, they are teaching your kids that if you divide by 10 by 0 then the answer is 10. If you are confused, angry and think the genius who came up with this ought to be fired then I would suggest you begin talking to your childrens' teachers to make sure this is not being taught to your them.
It is important for parents to demand that their kids get a quality education and teaching this kind of false information and plainly absurd notion is going to confuse students when they actually get a teacher that knows better. Start looking at your elementary age childrens' home work and ensure that this is not being taught, if it is find out why and how to stop it.
If you concerned that this is the case please contact the WCBOE at http://www.wcboe.k12.md.us/content/pi_contact.cfm
Anti-abortion group says Palin ‘walks her talk’ – CNN.com
"She's made some tough and courageous decisions and has not shied away from following her beliefs," she told CNN in a phone interview. "It's plausible a politician in a similar situation could have hidden the pregnancy."
Anti-abortion group says Palin 'walks her talk' - CNN.com.
OK, so once again we have a right-wing conservative group that thinks that Palin did the right thing by coming forward about her daughter's pregnancy. But no one is stating the obvious, that it would have been political suicide to not do so. She had two options, cover it up and let the rumors swirl around that the 3-moth old was actually her daughter's baby or announce the truth that while it wasn't her daughter's baby she was going to have one.
Even after she takes this step to just stop the rumor mill, it is not like her so called "pro-life" stance on this issue is a big shocker. What is she going to do, tell her daughter to get an abortion and really flush her chances of becoming VP down the toilet? I don't think so. She is going to flip-flop on the issue just like McCain has on just about every moderate stance he has ever held and claim that she is encouraging her daughter to have the baby because of her pro-life stance and that she is proud to be a grandparent. The funny thing here is that these conservatives behave no differently than anyone else that has to cover their butts in these situations. They take a fundamental stance that they have on birth control, abstinence and sex education and then marginalize it so they can emphasize the pro-life aspects of what really can be chalked up to a complete lack of common sense and likely bad parenting. I hate to tell everyone, but there are not many people that would be happy to see their 17 year old pregnant and unmarried. There is no doubt in my mind that the Palins are not happy either and are just trying to do damage control as the McCain campaign begins to wonder why they picked this woman.
This incident is just one of a series that proves the complete absurdity of the stance conservatives take on sex education and birth control. If they could come out from the fog that clearly seems to be clouding their thinking, they would clearly see that if they just educated their children a bit about basic human reproduction, then this would not be a big issue. So I leave it up to you to decide which it is, an inability to just see through to a clear solution to a simple problem or Sarah Palin's daughter really just doesn't have any common sense and she severly screwed up in an age where every teen should understand what sex actually is for biologically.
John McCain Sure Knows How to Pick a Vice President
So John McCain needed to pick someone that offset his age to ensure people felt like there was continuity plan for the presidency. Unfortunately, he picked a corrup governor from Alaska with daughters that appear to be trying to match Jamie Lynn Spears for teen pregnancies.
Both Bloomberg and the AP are already running stories about how Sarah Palin's own supporters are saying she in unqiuallified for the job. I especially love the CNN story about her daughter's pregnancy and how they are so happy she is going to have the baby and become grandparents. Whatever. No one goes to their 17 year old daughter and says "I'm so proud of you for having a baby even though you are unmarried, clearly have no common sense and we are going to be grandparents at 45!" The fact is that now she has put McCain in a tight spot already since apparently the uber-conservative right doesn't teach the abstinence only method very well at all and now his vice president's daughter has gone and gotten herself pregnant at 17. Yep, things are starting off well for the GOP in this race already.
Now I am just waiting for the connections between her and Ted Stevens to be reported on and she really will become the dead weight that she clearly appears to be. Honestly, what the heck was John McCain thinking when he did this? I don't think this is quite as brilliant as some conservative pundits were saying if you ask me.
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