Month: January 2006

Infinium gets $5 million funding?

In the “How in the world did that happen?” section today, we have news that Infinium, the company claiming to be making the Phantom game console, has secured an additional $5 million in funding to continue developing the system. There have been announcements for years of the soon-to-be released Phantom console. So far, the phantom identifier appears about right. From the article:

However, with a recent financial statement revealing that Infinium Labs still “has recurring losses from inception of $57,570,723, has a working capital deficiency of $10,085,662, a stockholders deficiency of $9,470,271 and has a negative cash flow from operations of $14,888,265 from inception”, and will need to pay significant cash amounts to game licensors and Phantom hardware contractors, the Game Service itself may have to wait a little longer before getting officially under way.

[tags]Phantom, Infinium, Vaporware, Gaming[/tags]

Lost medical records

In what seems to be a not-so-unusual case, the records of approximately 365,000 patients in Oregon and Washington were stolen from the car of a Providence Home Services employee at the employee’s home.  They had been taken there as part of the company’s backup procedure.  Do I really need to tell anyone that backups need to be moved to secure locations, and not just random homes?  Oh, and most of the data was stored unencrypted.  Ooops.

Why the no-fly list is bad

As usual, someone else who writes better than I do explains why something I dislike is actually bad.  The article covers two cases of mistaken identity for the U.S. no-fly list.  In the first case, a Canadian man is basically accused of being a terrorist because his name matches that of a known terrorist.  That’s not inherently bad, but get taken back to Canada while trying to fly to Mexico, without ever landing in the U.S., and then getting thrown in to detention?  Yes, it’s another plan that Mr. Bush imposes on Americans that so far has a 100% failure rate.

The second case is a story about a four year old child who is not allowed to fly because he has the same name as someone who is on the no-fly list.  And in case you didn’t know, Senator Ted Kennedy also was not allowed to fly recently because his name turned up on the no-fly list.  Can anyone see the problem with a list that only uses names to identify people as terrorists?  Has anyone in the administration considered the possibility of more than one person having a given name?  Apparently not.  Bad security is worse than no security.  At least with no security, you know where you stand.  With bad security, you can be fooled into thinking you are safe, lowering your guard, and getting caught by a threat you would have noticed had you known no security was in place.  So all of you that have read this now know you are not made more secure by this bad program, so don’t let your guard down.

[tags]Schneier, Bad Security, No-Fly list, False Positive[/tags]