Houblog

The Attorney General ruled some weeks ago that your social security number was confidential and could not be disclosed under a Texas Public Information Act. “Well, hell,” you say, “That only makes sense.”
Of course, it made too much sense to last for long. Only a few weeks after putting […]

“The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.”

In what has to be the lamest excuse for a “penalty” ever, Sony BMG has been fined all of a whopping $1.5 million dollars for massively FUBARing at least hundreds of thousands of computer systems, and making them vulnerable to hackers.
Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $1.5 million and kick in thousands more in customer […]

Forget about your personal information being retrieved from a stolen laptop. The real danger? Your discarded cell phone.
A popular practice among sellers, resetting the phone, often means sensitive information appears to have been erased. But it can be resurrected using specialized yet inexpensive software found on the Internet.
A company, Trust Digital of […]

Now the laptop thieves have hit D.C.’s municipal employees.
A laptop containing the Social Security numbers and other personal data of 13,000 District of Columbia employees and retirees has been stolen, officials said.
The computer was stolen Monday from the Washington home of an employee of ING U.S. Financial Services, said officials with the […]

Some folks just do not learn. Unsurprisingly, they’re with the federal government.
But speaking of government, what has the city been doing to keep our records safe lately? From what I’ve heard, the Health Department’s recordkeeping is fairly lax (almost as bad as HPD’s storage rooms)–but I don’t know how much of that is […]

You had to know it was coming after all that.
On June 6, the Department of Veterans Affairs was hit with two class action lawsuits related to the theft of an employee’s laptop computer. The theft, reported in late May, held the information of 26.5 million current and former servicemen. The veterans behind the suit are […]

I think, at this point, any company that allows employee data to be loaded onto a laptop should be held liable for damages if that information is compromised due to the the theft of the laptop. As some of the above companies did have such a policy, and their employees or auditors violated […]