Cody Taylor

California State Senator Joe Simitian has introduced new legislation designed to tighten data breach notification requirements, forcing businesses to provide more information about any data that has been leaked in addition to notifying state authorities. What was not included in the legislation was imposed compensation requirements for data breach victims, and according to Simitian are not likely to be for quite some time. “Instead, the next focus of legislation, he said, would likely be on who should bear the cost of sending out notifications to consumers. For example, should a credit card processing company that experiences a breach be responsible for the cost of notifying bank customers? When retailer TJX discovered in 2006 that hackers had accessed credit and debit card numbers passing through its network, banks were left notifying the customers, then had to sue TJX to get compensation for those costs. Heartland Payment Systems, which experienced a breach of credit and debit card numbers in January, has recently been sued by banks to recover their breach notification costs.”

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narramissic writes “On Friday, Judge William Chandler III of the Delaware Court of Chancery approved a settlement that will roll back a Yahoo employee severance that was implemented by Yahoo’s former leaders. Some investors, including the vocal Carl Icahn, described the plan as a poison pill, arguing that the severance payouts would be so expensive that no company would want to acquire Yahoo. The settlement narrows the reasons why employees can quit and receive the severance, removing some of the incentives for them to leave the company in the event of a Yahoo acquisition, whether by Microsoft or some other suitor.”

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TechDirt is reporting that in response to the frustrations with Apple’s app store dictatorship, a few developers are looking to set up their own alternative app stores. Alternate app stores would only work on jailbroken phones, making their adoption scope limited, so the question is whether Apple will go after these start ups on the legal battlefield. “Apple, which collects a 30% commission from sellers on its store, doesn’t break out the site’s revenue. Brokerage firm Piper Jaffray estimates the site generated about 0 million in sales last year and projects total sales will grow to 0 million this year. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. But it has said in the past that with the iPhone it was trying to strike a balance between a closed device like the iPod and an open device like the PC.”

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Matt_dk writes “Move over, Morning Star. Once Canadarm2 helps install the fourth and final set of solar array wings to the International Space Station later this month, the Station will surpass Venus as the brightest object in the night sky, second only to the Moon. The Space Shuttle Discovery is set to deliver the power-generating solar panels and Starboard 6 (S6) truss segment to the ISS on the 125th mission in the Shuttle program, known as STS-119/15A (slated for launch on March 11).”

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The ongoing guess work and dead reckoning over whether the search giant Google will soon buy micro-blogging site Twitter was ended by Google CEO Eric Schmidt on Saturday. On PBS’s Charlie Rose show, Schmidt made it clear that they are “unlikely to buy anything in the short term”.

Muziic, is an application that harnesses the power of YouTube to offer music lovers access to the world’s largest searchable database of songs. Muziic lets you stream music from YouTube without ever again having to visit the site. Could this legal application be seen as not so legal by Google?

An anonymous reader writes “Campbell Smith, CEO of the RIAA equivalent in New Zealand, has written an opinion piece for one of New Zealand’s largest daily papers, in which he tries to justify the new ‘presumed guilty’ copyright law. This law allows recording industry members to watch file-sharing activity and notify ISPs of users who are downloading material. The copyright holder can then demand that an ISP disconnect that user — without the user ever having a chance to demonstrate their evidence.”

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Vigile writes “To many observers, the success of the GPGPU landscape has really been pushed by NVIDIA and its line of Tesla and Quadro GPUs. While ATI was the first to offer support for consumer applications like Folding@Home, NVIDIA has since taken command of the market with its CUDA architecture and programs like Badaboom and others for the HPC world. PC Perspective has speculation that points to ATI addressing the shortcomings of its lineup with a revised GPU known as RV790 that would both dramatically increase gaming performance as well as more than triple the compute power on double precision floating point operations — one of the keys to HPC acceptance.”

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In a recent blog post, CNet’s Jon Oitsik has called for a policy shift with respect to data encryption. A new standard by the Trusted Computing Group promises the availability of self-encrypting hard drives soon, leading some to call for immediate adoption. Will this create even more security problems due to lazy custodians, or should someone responsible for keeping your information safe be required to move to the new hardware? Hopefully the new hardware comes with a warning to continue to use other data protection measures as well.

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brothke writes “The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America is the third of James Bamford’s trilogy. Bamford started this with The Puzzle Palace in 1982 and Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency in 2001. The Shadow Factory is likely the last book Bamford will find the NSA cooperative to, given his often harsh treatment of the agency and its directors. It is also doubtful that former NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden will grant Bamford additional dinner invitations, given his portrayal of Hayden as a weakling who could not stand up to Dick Cheney and other in the Bush administration.” Read below for the rest of Ben’s review.

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