data

A 29-year-old New Zealand man reportedly got more than he bargained for when he bought an MP3 player from an Oklahoma thrift shop. When Chris Ogle hooked up his MP3 player to sync with his computer, he found 60 files containing military information ... including the names and personal details of American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq including: cellphone numbers, information that appeared to be from a mission briefing, details of military equipment deployed to the bases, and social security numbers. (Source: tvnz.co.nz ) Files found were marked with a warning saying the release of ... (view more)

Payment processor Heartland Payment Systems reported that it was the victim of a security breach within its processing system in 2008. For unknown reasons, the breach was reported on January 20, 2009 -- inauguration day for the incoming President ... Obama administration. Tens of millions of credit and debit card transactions may have been breached, making the Heartland incident one of the largest data breaches ever reported. (Source: washingtonpost.com ) Heartland believes the intrusion is now contained and that no merchant information or cardholder Social Security numbers were compromised. ... (view more)

Menu Maid An Excellent Utility! Are you looking for a fast and easy way to clean up your Window Explorer and Internet Explorer right-click (context) menu? Look no further -- MenuMaid makes it simple! Just uncheck the items you don't want to show up. ... Restore them at any time. http://www.sdsoftware.org Data Terminator Data Terminator is specially developed to protect confidential data files from being accessed by a stranger. Data Terminator permanently deletes selected files from your computer. You can actually specify what you want to happen if your laptop or computer is no longer under your ... (view more)

Microsoft has reached a deal with a leading security firm that could give corporate users the ability to tighten up their defenses. The benefits could even extend to Windows home users. The deal has been made with EMC Corporation, a firm which ... produces the data storage system used by many large organisations. Microsoft has signed a deal with EMC's security division to licence the forthcoming DLP suite, a package designed to prevent data loss. The package will be used in Microsoft's server products. It allows users to find and monitor data across one or more networks and control who is able to ... (view more)

According to an online safety group, complete financial identities, including names, addresses, passport numbers and confidential data such as credit card numbers, are being sold online for 80 GB pounds for a bundled package, and as little as 5 GB ... pounds for a single piece of data. The Get Safe Online group, backed by police, government and banks, says ID theft is a serious problem because of an international trade in stolen identities and data. The bundles of data are harvested in concerted attacks against poorly defended computers in wealthier nations and are often sited in countries with ... (view more)

An official report says two IRS computer systems have serious security weaknesses. It also warns information about taxpayers is at risk of falling into the wrong hands. The report, by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, a federal ... agency which monitors IRS performance, details problems with a new billion dollar system which will eventually manage the data for all taxpayers. The Customer Account Data Engine (CADE) already handles 28 million tax returns, around a fifth of the total. The report also covers the Account Management Services (AMS) system, which provides quicker ... (view more)

Last fall, several communications companies reportedly conducted trials, in some cases lasting up to 6 months, of network-based technology designed to track a customer's Internet actions, attempting to amass refined data on web-surfer habits that ... may be sold at premium rates to advertisers. Cable One's 'trial' affected about 700,000 customers. Bresnan Communications conducted a similar 'trial' that was limited to about 6,000 broadband customers in Billings, Montana from April 1 to June 26, 2008. Knology tested it on about 230,000 of their customers from January until July 2008. WideOpenWest ... (view more)

MS Excel 2007 has a new feature called data visualization that will allow you to see when data in a worksheet has attained a certain value. You could use this nifty feature to see which departments in your company have attained above-average sales ... this quarter. Follow the steps below to learn how: Select the data cells you would like to analyze. Click the Home tab. In the Styles group, click Conditional Formatting. Select Top/Bottom Rules. Click Above Average. Click OK. All cells with above-average values will appear in red. If you would like to see the top 10% performers, follow these steps ... (view more)

It can be daunting and more than a bit frustrating when the CEO of your company dumps a ton of data on your desk and expects you to hastily turn it into an MS Excel database. But it doesn't have to be daunting any longer -- it can even be easy using ... the Data Entry Form in MS Excel. This handy feature will allow you to enter an entire row of date all at one time, rather than entering each little bit of data one at a time. Sounds a lot better already doesn't it? So we have now established that data entry forms in MS Excel definitely bear investigating eh? Follow the steps below to learn how. To ... (view more)

A reader asked if there was any formula in Excel that would convert a date shown in the European format of day-month-year to the U.S. version of month-day-year. Technically, it may not be necessary to do this. Excel maintains dates as numeric values ... and displays them using various formats. If the dates are numeric values in your worksheet, then you can simply change the format and the dates will be displayed in the U.S. format. The day you see in a worksheet could instead be a text value rather than a numeric value. To see if the date is truly an Excel date or text value, you can change the ... (view more)