Dont shoot me, I am 'just' the messenger..maybe not

John M Perry, the head of the payment processing firm that was hacked to expose 40 million credit card numbers, told congress that his company is facing imminent extinction because of its disclosure of the breach and the industry’s reaction to it. ‘As a result of coming forward, we are being driven out of business’, he also added that if his firm was forced to shut down, other companies will think twice before disclosing such attacks. First, if a company does not disclose an attack, not only will it be driven out of business but also face charges for not disclosing the attack. After this attack, a lot of processing companies will be monitored regularly so I don’t think any company could get away by just keeping silent about the fact that they have been hacked. Second, after an investigation was carried out by Visa, it was clear that CardSystems knowingly violated contractual requirements for how long credit card data were supposed to be stored and how they were secured. So what is John Perry trying to tell us? Is he trying to tell us that his company should be forgiven for their faults which exposed millions of consumers to possible fraud just because they told us about it?
Would you forgive them?

How to make a German bird sing the Ghetto Gospel

According to German ornithologists, birds have learnt to imitate the ring tones they hear. Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation centre near the university city of Tuebingen stated "The birds have an uncanny ability to mimic these ring tones. This has picked up in tandem with the boom in mobile phone ownership”. The best mimics are jackdaws, starlings and jays. The ornithologists also claim that the birds are merely adapting to the environment which includes these annoying ring tones. So if you hear a bird mimicking Turn me on (by Kevin Lytle), don’t panic, it’s just their new mating call.

Click here to see the story on the inquirer

Happy Birthday Dumas!!!

I would like to wish Dumas a very very happy birthday. Hope you have an awesome day Dumas. :)

China’s pursuit to create better pigs

China will be sending ‘pig sperm’ on board the Shenzhou VI spacecraft in October. Some of the sperm will be kept outside the biological capsule and some inside and the experiment is being carried out to study the effect of cosmic rays on pig sperm. China became the third country behind U.S and Russia to launch a human into space two years back but it will be the first to do this (the things people do to be the first in anything). During the mission in October, two astronauts will orbit the planet five or six times. These two Chinese astronauts were last seen in Hollywood looking for Porky Pig. I wonder why Porky Pig is pointing up in the picture. Maybe they did find him.

Beer goes open source!!!!!

Move over Linux, here comes ‘Vores Øl’. ‘Vores Øl’ is the world’s first open source beer and Version 1.0 is a medium strong beer (6% vol) which is deep golden red in color. Here is the good thing about open source, people are free to use the recipe to make beer and sell it in stores but they will have to publish the recipe under the Creative Commons License and give credit to the group of students from IT University of Copenhagen. That’s not asking much, is it? The reason for the creation of this open source beer is not to get the world drunk but to see what happens to the open source structure for a universal product like beer.

Click here to get the recipe and start making your own beer. You know what you will be getting at my parties :)

Just give them the finger

Those of you who interpreted the headline in a way it was not meant to be interpreted, shame on you. An ‘Edeka’ store in the German town of Ruelzheim has introduced a paying system by which a customer needs to place his/her finger on a scanner in order to pay for their merchandise. All the customers need to register at first by sampling their finger print and giving their bank or credit card details. The shopping chain is confident that the system will be successful as the chance of two people having the same fingerprint is about one in 220 million. Looks like the whole world is going biometric.