Monthly Archive for January, 2005

Sometimes the answer is just staring you in the face

In a rather astoundingly useless poll by CNN/USA Today/Gallup 49 percent of the US people say Bush is a divider, another 49 percent say he’s a uniter and the remaining 2 percent don’t care one way or another.

It must have taken superhuman restraint from the CNN editor to keep the obvious conclusion off the writeup.

Meanwhile CNN is working on a poll to study if people think water is wet.

-TPP

Bury that one alive

The latest in a long series of reality tv series gets cancelled after only one episode.

Hurray! Good riddance to bad rubbish.

-TPP

Financial supporters of spyware

Looks like some VC firms really like aiding and abetting spyware companies. Here’s a list:

Spectrum Equity Investors
U.S. Venture Partners
Greylock
Crosslink Capital
Garage Technology Ventures
Rosewood Stone Group
Investor AB
Technology Crossover Ventures
Insight Venture Partners
Technology Investment Capital Corp

-TPP

T-Mobile does not inform customers their customer database cracked

Apparently a cracker gained full access to the entire T-Mobile customer database sometime in 2003. The feds got a wind of the breach by March 2004, because the crackpot was selling confidential Secret Service documents online. T-Mobile was made aware of it by the feds in July 2004, although it is possible they also knew of the breach earlier.

What did T-Mobile do to protect the identity and confidential information of its customers? Nothing. Not a single warning was sent to customers, they did not force customers to change their passwords, they simply wished customers didn’t notice. This, btw, is illegal (civil) in California provided a law enforcement agency did not ask the company to postpone notifying the customers.

As a T-Mobile customer I’m amazed by the irresponsibility of T-Mobile. Thankfully my one-year contract with them is already expired and I’m free to switch to any provider I choose.

1/13/05 Edit: T-Mobile claims cracker only had access to 400 customers and all those customers were notified as soon as T-Mobile found out about the breach. I wonder, if T-Mobile knew at 2003, why the cracker still had access to a Secret Service agent’s account in March 2004.

-TPP