Taxpayer to foot bill for HMRC disc search The Metropolitan Police Service aims to recover from HM Revenue & Customs the full £473,544 cost of the search for the missing child-benefit CDs

The Misery Tab is Paid Again by the Big Easy Looks like we're (Houston area) going to miss the worst but the cost is going to be paid by New Orleans. Landfall of the eye is likely to be almost due-south of New Orleans. That means that they...

Hello Dolly! Hurricane Preparations There have been some hurricanes that have hit Houston square-on, Alicia in 1983 and Allison in 2001. Alicia was notable for the damage it did to buildings due to the high winds. All the...

Update: Tech charity says could have saved many lives Just received this update quote, to an earlier blog , from Jean-François Cazenave, president of Telecoms Sans Frontieres, commenting on the fact that the organisation announced today that it has...

Tech charity quits Burma following government blocks I have just received an update that Telecoms Sans Frontieres, a charity that specialises in setting up telecoms equipment in disaster zones has quit Burma in the face of repeated attempts to block...

No cheese in Switzerland It's half past one in the morning, Continental time, and I'm about to go to bed without any supper. I'm over in Zurich courtesy of IBM, which is going to be showing off a lot of its new...

HP adds fault tolerance to blades High availability is the main feature of HP's latest blade server as the company grows its family of c-Class systems

Amazon blames outage on complicated systems The company has blamed its complicated infrastucture for a site outage that left Amazon.com inaccessible to many US visitors on Friday

DWP punishes 20 staff for data-protection breaches The Department for Work and Pensions has admitted disciplining 20 staff in the past financial year over data-protection infringements

Companies told to disclose data breaches The EU's online security body is calling for mandatory reporting on security and data breaches by businesses

ICT emergency planning starts with Gatwick evac I have just arrived in a damp yet picturesque Pisa to observe, and maybe even take part in an ICT Emergency response training day hosted by the World Food Programme, The United Nations Foundation...

MoD encrypts laptops after data losses The Ministry of Defence is to protect 20,000 laptops with BeCrypt's Disk Protect Baseline after a number of recent data losses

Management group warns CEOs of data-breach risks The British-North American Committee and chief executive of ICANN claim business leaders are not taking data breaches seriously enough

Over 600 HMRC staff disciplined for data infractions HM Customs & Revenue has reprimanded over 600 staff since 2005 for data-protection breaches, including 11 'major' incidents

The Russian approach to tackling data breaches Kaspersky Lab co-founder Natalya Kaspersky aims to move beyond the consumer antivirus business by helping companies guard against data breaches

Lords backs amendment to data-loss law The House of Lords has supported a change to the criminal justice and immigration bill which would make it a criminal offence to carelessly release or lose personal data

Bank of Ireland loses four unencrypted laptops The stolen laptops contained sensitive details of around 10,000 customers, including names, addresses, account details and medical records

UK nears 100 data breaches in six months The information commissioner has bemoaned an 'alarming number' of data breaches among private and public bodies over the last six months

US gov't: Treat personal data 'like toxic waste' Computer scientists in the US have advised organisations to be extremely cautious when handling information that can be used to identify individuals

Survey scurvy Everybody knows that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit and that surveys are the lowest form of marketing. But assuming that there?s some whisper of truth in these things I do continue to scan many...

HSBC admits loss of 370,000 customers' details The bank is facing investigation by the FSA after losing a disc containing customer names, dates of birth and insurance-cover levels

Government admits over 850 laptops lost since 2002 Numerous government departments have revealed a litany of losses of laptops, mobile phones and PDAs in the last five years

MoD admits loss of over 11,000 ID cards The Ministry of Defence has said little risk is posed by the missing ID cards, lost or stolen over the last two years

Pakistan lifts YouTube ban amid speculation The video-sharing website is accessible again in Pakistan, while debate rages about the cause of a two-hour YouTube outage on Sunday

Data protection snake oil? In the wake of the HMRC data loss fiasco, it appears that some data protection snake oil could be being hawked. Consumers are being warned by Pinsent Masons solicitors to steer clear of packs...

NHS admits losing thousands of smartcards Over 4,000 NHS smartcards have been lost, including 142 stolen, since they were introduced two and a half years ago

BT: No danger of mass internet outage in UK Resilient infrastructure should prevent the UK from experiencing a disruption to internet connectivity similar to the one that hit the Middle East and India

Watchdog calls for 'reckless data-breach' offence The information commissioner is seeking a change to the law and more inspection and enforcement powers following a wave of high-level data breaches

Marks & Spencer loses 26,000 staff details The retailer may face prosecution by the Information Commissioner's Office after the theft of a laptop containing unencrypted data

Surely not again!! More CDs go missing... I can?t quite believe this but it seems that the sh*t-storm that followed the loss of millions of individuals details by Her Majesty?s Revenue and Customs last year ? didn?t get through to the UK?s...