Paul E. Ester's Flogger

Every Virgin Mobile phone call is tracked to within a few hundred metres. Virgin plans to keep the data ‘indefinitely’, and privacy advocates are not happy

Virgin Mobile admitted late last week that has been storing information that records its customers’ movements around the UK since November 1999, and has no plans to delete the data.

According to a report in The Guardian on Saturday, Virgin Mobile has been saving user location records since it launched nearly two years ago. This information tells a mobile operator the location of a customer each time they made a call, and is accurate to a few hundred metres.

As a virtual mobile phone operator, Virgin Mobile buys network capacity from One2One. A spokeswoman has explained that the customer location records are stored by One2One, and that there are no plans to delete them. … Rest of Article

Columbus – The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. – who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush – prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O’Dell’s company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election. … Rest of Article

No one minded that the Iraqi women and U.S. soldiers flirted with each other. But as the friendships deepened into romance, U.S. officers decided the relationships posed a security problem and prohibited the men from “fraternization” during “combat.”

In spite of the prohibition, the soldiers — National Guardsmen from the Florida Panhandle — converted to Islam in an Iraqi court a couple of weeks before the ceremony. The double wedding, including the exchange of rings and recitation of vows, was carried out with an American reporter watching. … Rest of Article

Powell had hoped that outrage over the devastating bombing of the U.N. compound in Iraq last Tuesday would make the council amenable to a resolution explicitly welcoming such a step. … Rest of Article

“I hope and pray I don’t have to go back. I have eight months left. I want to go back home and go to school.” … Rest of Article

“We just do not have enough rifles to equip all of our soldiers. So in certain circumstances we allow soldiers to have an AK-47. They have to demonstrate some proficiency with the weapon … demonstrate an ability to use it,” said Lt. Col. Mark Young, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. … Rest of Article

Call him Mr. Lucky.

Nobody’s looking better after the massive Aug. 14 power failure than George W. Bush … Rest of Article

Microsoft has made a big deal out of asserting that Linux ( news -web sites ) is not fit for the enterprise ( news -web sites ). But Microsoft itself is using Linux to help protect its servers against denial-of-service ( news -web sites ) attacks. According to a post on the Netcraft Web site, Microsoft changed its DNS settings on Friday so that requests for www.microsoft.com no longer resolve to machines on Microsoft’s own network, but instead are handled by the Akamai caching system, which runs Linux. … Rest of Article

Corporate insiders have been unloading shares at a fast clip this summer, raising concerns among some analysts about the outlook for the stock market and the economy. Last month, officers, directors and big individual shareholders at U.S. companies sold more than $32 of company stock for every $1 they bought on the open market — making July the heaviest selling month in more than two years, data tracker Thomson Financial said Tuesday.

Heavy selling by insiders is seen by some investors as bearish, and for them the early trend for August is negative as well, with insider sales outstripping purchases by about 22 to 1 so far this month. … Rest of Article

The U.S. Navy confirmed Tuesday that its multibillion-dollar Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (N/MCI) has been taken off-line by what could be a combined onslaught of the Blaster worm variant and Sobig.F Internet worms, which are spreading fast.

A U.S. Navy spokesman said the details of the network’s problems are still coming in and that it is unclear whether one or both worms were responsible for the failure. Navy officials are holding an emergency meeting to study the problem.

N/MCI is a US$6.9 billion IT outsourcing contract, often referred to as seat management, that will give the Navy and Marine Corps secure, universal access to integrated voice, video and data communications. Electronic Data Systems won the contract in October 2000. However, technical difficulties, deployment delays and user complaints have hampered the program since its inception. … Rest of Article