Cell Phones Watch Your Every Move

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Malte Spitz, German Green party
politician, found out that we
are always being tracked even
if we don't volunteer to be.

Cell phone companies don't
usually tell how much
information they collect,
so Spitz went to court to
find out exactly what his
cell phone company,
Deutsche Telekom, knew
about his location.

Aug 31, 2009, to Feb. 28,
2010, Deutsche Telekom
recorded and saved his
longitude and latitude
coordinates more than
35,000 times. It traced
him from a train to
Erlangen from the start
until his last night,
at home in Berlin.

Spitz gave a look at of
what is being collected
as we walk around with
our phones, per privacy
experts. Unlike many online
services and web sites that
must send "cookies" to a
user's computer to link its
traffic to a specific person,
cell phone companies just
sit back and hit "record."

"We are all walking around
with little tags, and our
tag has a phone number
associated with it, who we
called and what we do with
the phone," Sarah E. Williams,
expert on graphic information
at Columbia University's
architecture school. "We don't
even know we are giving up
that data."

"At any given instant, a cell
phone company has to know where
you are. It's constantly
registering with the tower,
strongest signal," Matthew Blaze,
a professor of computer and
information science at the
University of Pennsylvania who
has testified before Congress
on the issue.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20110330120057writ.nb/topstory.html

Wal-Mart's Cheaper Medicare Drug Plan

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Humana Inc. is combining forces with
Wal-Mart Stores to offer a low cost
Medicare prescription drug plan,
nationwide.

Humana, based in Louisville, Ky., is one
of the largest U.S. health insurers and
second largest provider of privately run
Medicare health plans. It has the highest
exposure to Medicare among the major
national managed care businesses.

A typical Medicare prescription drug
beneficiary could save about $450 a year on
the lower premium, co-payments/cost- shares,
compared with average total costs for
Medicare drug benefit plans, the companies
pointed out. They referred to the U.S.
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
figures.

The plan will go into effect next year at a
monthly premium of $14.80, which is the
lowest premium for stand-alone Medicare
prescription drug plans being offered
nationally for 2011 per Humana.

Facebook Refused To Admit It's Making A Smart-Phone

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

Yesterday, TechCrunch, technology
site, ran a story pointing-out that
Facebook was developing, through a
third party, mobile phone software.
TechCrunch was going on information
from a "source with knowledge of
the project."

"Specifically, Facebook wants to
integrate deeply into the contacts list
and other core functions of the phone.
It can only do that if it controls the
operating system," explained Michael
Arrington, TechCrunch's editor. Facebook
refused to admit it's making a smart-phone,
but Facebook did receive input from hardware
manufacturers and carriers this summer.

Facebook issued a long denial. According to
reports, the idea is in the early stages and
Facebook has not determined if they want to
proceed.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20100920074756writ.nb/topstory.html

Beware of "Here You Have" E-mail Virus

Be fair, attentive, and customers
will return.

The virus, called "Here You Have,"
is a simple Trojan Horse that
security companies are calling by
different names.

An e-mail arrives in your in-box with
the subject line "Here You Have." The
body reads: "This is The Document I told
you about, you can find it Here." Or,
"This is The Free Download Sex Movies,
you can find it Here."

It pounded corporate America Thursday,
took down servers at ABC, NASA, Comcast
and Google. It was in Google's top five
searches Friday.

The Internet Storm Center, a free
analysis and warning service that tracks
malicious Internet activity reported that
the application responsible for the spam
choking the servers had been taken down,
but the Web wasn't out of danger.

"New variants may well follow," the Storm
Center warned.

Click on the link and the download will
launch a program that spams the same Trojan
Horse to everyone in your address book.

"It looks like multiple variants may be
spreading and it may take some time to work
through them all to paint a clearer picture,"
Craig Schmugar on McAfee's Threat Response page.

The "Here You Have" worm doesn't attack Norton/
Symantec products, according to Norton. Norton
recommends their Norton Internet Security 2011.

Source: http://newsblaze.com/story/20100913052452writ.nb/topstory.html