Senators see the light on broadcast flag

Over at EFF (support this group if you don’t already – they work to protect our digital rights), there is an article about how some Senators are turning against the broadcast flag. The reason for this is they now see that the broadcast flag would make Senator Stevens’ ipod fairly worthless. This matters, because Senator Stevens is one of the original proponents of the bill.

[tags]Broadcast flag, EFF, Digital rights[/tags]

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.