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Tokyo's Geek Ghetto
anaesthetica writes "The Washington Post is running a story on Tokyo's "Geek Ghetto" which has arisen in the city's electronics retail district, "Electric Town." From the article: "We have been discriminated against for being different, but now we have come together and turned this neighborhood into a place of our own.... In Akihabara, we don't need to be ashamed of who we are and what we like.... We can feel comfortable because here, we outnumber everyone else." There are concerns, however, that the total immersion in escapist culture may be causing social problems, including a growing number of shut-ins." I've gone to Tokyo 3x and visited Akihabara all three times. Highly recommended for anime fans and techies.
...Post!
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http://www.allometry.com
The great thing about being a eunuch is enjoying things like a kid. I don't get as distracted by the more lascivious aspects of it. I wonder if some of the people in this district have done this life-changing and wonderful operation.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it's usually something unusual.
What are you doing on Slashdot then ?
I'm saying that people tend to make the best of a bad situation. Geeks, generally, have the power to make their own situations a little better than one might otherwise expect, though.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Hundreds of USD more for high-end electronics than you can get online and if you buy something in Japan your warranty is VOID in the US.
There is no reason why this data needs to be shipped together. Citigroup should keep social security numbers serparate from names, separate from account history, separate from address, etc. All this can be assembled when needed and it would make it much harder to steal useful data or for a criminal to make use of any lost tapes.
These are the people that would pay through the nose for armoured car to truck their cash around, but would send huge amount of customer information through UPS.
The only way to solve this is to attach a cost to personal data. As soon as you do this, companies will instead of trying to collect as much data as they can, treat it (rightly) as something they should collect as little as possible. Lost data should have a cost to it which sends shudders down the spine of Chief Financial Officers.
I expect this will take a big class action lawsuit, but if I were a company of any size which handled confidential client data, I would be scrambling for a way to reduce my liability.
seems the brown has hit the fan
Customer: Hi sir, I have my paper statement here which claims I had $1,000,234.01 in my account a month ago. Please bring my account back.
Employee: Ummm, let me verify that with my datab... I mean.... let me get my manager.
Customer: No problem. Take your time. Would you like some free coffee. It's on me.
You have to be kidding me. UPS? To transfer secure information? Where I work, we receive a backup tape from a production system that we load that contains sensitive data. That tape is sent back to my group via Iron Mountain (and we send the old tape back the same way). And this isn't even stuff as high profile as like what's Citigroup apparently lost. When services exist like this to facilitate occasional, VERY important shipments, there's just no excuse using UPS or Fedex. I fear for the free market if this is "business as usual" for it.
I used to work for UPS customer service. I'd say at least .1% of all packages either get damaged or lost during shipping. Shipping packages of low value is no big deal, your losses over time will be minimal. Shipping packages of high value, however, will result in considerably larger losses over time.
DO NOT SHIP YOUR HIGH VALUE GOODS VIA UPS/FEDEX/DHL/ETC. I cannot stress that enough. Hire a private courier. Hire someone in your company. Drive it yourself. Find someone with better than a 99.9% success rate if your package is worth millions.
When their customers actually start caring and making them realize how much of a mistake losing our data is? This will affect nearly nothing (because most people won't hear about it and many who do won't care), and business will go on as usual. If the customers actually took a stand, maybe we'd see some improvement.
What can Brown do for You?
UPS: What can BROWN lose for you?
I never really understood why they called it identity theft. Much like I can't understand why they call it "stealing" music. Nothing's actually gone -- it's really more of an identity infringement./p
A week hasn't gone by this year that some major data warehouse hasn't been "broken into". When are these people going to start taking our privacy and their security a little more seriously...
There is definitely something wrong with this system! I'm all for doing without consumer credit, but it's simply not feasible.
Perhaps we need a public-key style scheme where we generate a unique private key that we use to encrypt things like credit card applications, and then the public key is on file with the government and credit card companies and the like. That way only we have access to important private information, but the credit reporting agencies and the government can still keep track of us the way they do currently.
This would beat the hell out of biometrics and nonsense like that (you can't bloody send someone a retina scan over the internet or through the mail!), and it would do something to improve our privacy by preventing people from faking your identity.
I guess not, otherwise this would be a nonissue. It is unbelievable that in this day and age a company the size of Citigroup would ship unencrypted tapes. Geez, it is trivial to do and a no-brainer. Really, whoever is in charge of IT security policy there is an idiot and should be fired immediately and any security credentials (like CISSP) stripped so he/she can't pull another fast one on some other company. This is the height of absurdity and irresponsibility.
will be taking their business elsewhere
i am moving from BofA after their mishap.
Somewhere smaller, hopefully more secure.
Hit them where it hurts!!!!
Having myself been lectured (and inappropriately, by the way) by Citibank employees about how it's my own fault my credit card interest rates went up (it wasn't, by the way), I hope at minimum that someone sits down the entire senior staff of this company and lectures them like they were children for many hours, making them feel as embarrassed and disrespected as they routinely do to their customers.
And then, just to make the point, they should have to pay not just whatever court-assessed penalties, but that amount plus 24.99% retroactively applied to the entire amount backdated from the time they finally pay all the way back to the time of the incident, just like they're always raising people's interest rates to unreasonable amounts like that even retroactively on purchases already made, and to ensure that they pay in a timely way.
And it goes without saying that reparations should be paid personally by the people who run the company, not passed along to customers.
Which company do you hold responsible here? Citigroup Financial? Or UPS? While UPS is guilty of losing the package in transit, perhaps CF should have used a more secure transport method. I dunno, what is more secure than UPS, Fed Ex, DHL, etc...? Armored car driving to and fro between cities?
So what is your solution? (Hint: YMFL, (Yet More Federal Legislation), will not prevent accidental loss of freight packages).
BTW - I write this as someone who has a mortgage with Citigroup so my data could be at risk here. However, my knee is not jerking violently, (yet).
Isn't this the second time (or more, most likely) that a set of shipped customer has been "lost?"
It's quite possible that the scum of the universe that feeds on harvested identities has gotten sophisticated enough that they are now able to identify such in-transit packages and have them go missing.
Bottom line -- companies should not be shipping this type of information via common carriers.
If we create legistlation that makes losing customer's personal information a criminal offense, then maybe these giant megalomerates will stop collecting (and abusing) it.
CitiGroup no doubt spends millions each year on network encryption for data transmitted across WANs. I wonder if the data on these tapes was encrypted? Since they're "backups", I doubt it. Sure, UPS screwed up the sensitive task entrusted to their expert professionals. But CitiGroup took an unacceptable, unnecessary risk by allowing the task to be so sensitive. They should all have to indemnify every exposed CitiGroup customer from identity crimes in perpetuity, including the time the customers spend managing this exposure.
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You are so full of crap you damn UPS apologist.
.1% of all packages either get damaged or lost during shipping
>
You obviously have zero experience in the shipping field despite your claim to have worked for UPS. It isn't uncommon at times to have 100 times that percentage of packages lost or damanged by us. We are a union shop so the lazy thugs we have can get away with anything. For example at the terminal where I work, a local jewelry store went out of business and shipped-out about four dozen nice watches to a broker. Now almost every employee at this terminal has a nice brand-new watch. Another example, Kel-Tec CNC released a new pistol a couple of years ago. One of the drivers here picked-up the first few batches of pistols from them. Not a one of them made it to the FFL's who ordered them. The BATF couldn't even get UPS to take action against the union.
In both cases UPS couldn't fire a single person. Our union allows us to damage or steal as much as we want to. Your 0.1% number is complete crap. If you're shipping something worthless, broken, or bulky that's not worth the time for a union member to steal, you might only have that small of a loss. Otherwise, my coworkers can and will steal. And good luck colleting from UPS. We pay-out on less than 2% of the packages that are damaged and on less than 5% of the packages lost.
Skinner
How can you make an accident illegal ?
You can't, but you can make the things that tend to lead to accidents illegal. You'll notice there's no law against getting into a car crash, but there are lots of laws about driving too fast, running red lights, driving drunk, unsafe lane changes, etc etcet c.
Same idea here. If I can be fined for driving 100mph because it might cause an accident, Citibank should be able to be fined for sending unencrypted data via UPS because it might cause an accident.
As yuo no, we are comited to protectng your prievecy adn as such we need u 2 veerify yuor account by going 2 this site CITIGROUP.COM adn entreing lots of peersonil info.
Tahnk you 4 ur help in tihs imprtnt matter
Signed, CITIGROUP
As much as I'd hate to give yet even more power to the federal gov't, it's just about the only way to make these people do what should be both common sense and courtesy for their customers.
These companies are treating this information far too trivially. Laws need to be passed that will make this type of carelessness illegal and/or compensate these customers for losing their info. I think the lack of trust from customers would be incentive enough, but obviously it isn't, so more needs to be done to prevent these fiascos. And on another note, why aren't more consumers, in this day of rampant identity theft, completely outraged by these events. What is this the fourth incident in the past few months (and I'm probably lowballing the number)? This is simply unacceptable.
There seems to be a bug in slashdot submitting AC posts to distinct topics. Please fix this! :(
Don't ANY of the CEO/CIO's, auditors or even PR people at these places read the news.
Doesn't even one of them think for a moment - "Huh? I wonder what we are doing to make sure that this doesn't happen to us?"
I'm not one for endorsing additional legislation - but perhaps if we held officers liable (SarbOx style maybe) for these breaches, then maybe someone will start to care.
Hah. You are funny. Did you know that the entire US economy is meticulously managed by our government? Of course, they cannot stop broad sweeping trends, but they are always fanagling in the back trying to keep us spending lots of money, creating more debt, throwing money at multi-national corporations, and giving out tax breaks to be sure our own companies are 'competitive'.
Whatever dude, I think it's time to take off your blinderes.
You see, if we passed laws that made corporations have to beef up security and protocols and pay fines - Corporations would have to pay.
But if you pass laws for national ID's then taxpayers pay, with the added benefit that Governement and Corporations get more control over their citizens.
These last several years "identity theft" has become more prevalent. Why? Because the legislators and corporations have allowed it to become that way. Why? To create a major inconvenience for the citizens. Why? To create a fear of "identity theft" so citizens demand a solution to the problem.
We have also seen a huge upsurge in corporations "accidently" losing or "hackers" stealing citizens' vital data. Why? To further create fear and outrage in citizens so they will demand a "solution" to the problem.
They have a solution. It's coming in steps. The first step is the REAL ID card law they passed last month. It will have biometric information eventually tied in with it. They are selling it now as a measure to fight terrorism. But the next step (universal purchase card) will be used to as a solution to protect against "identity theft".
I could go on, but you get the point?
No, no, no. That would be to much thought.
More than likely they paid a consultant $3.5 million dollars to setup a secure backup system which would work flawlessly. Bought it. Installed it...
And then new IT director-minion-worked-at-walmart-last-week went in to "optimize" the server and kill any "useless" processes that were making it run slow, and killed the encryption process.
And then of course they backup for two years without encryption until they hire a $8 an hour "casual" to "catalog" and "clean up" the archives -- and he discovers that they aren't encrypted. Notifies his boss who really doesn't understand -- and nothing happens.
And then they have a security breach and are "caught off guard". Heads roll, new consultants are hired, and the process begins again.
Well, at least that's what seems to happen where I work.
Citibank should be able to be fined for sending unencrypted data via UPS because it might cause an accident.
They can be. GLBA, as it's known in the financial services circles, requires any financial institution to design, implement, and maintain controls to protect customer confidential data, which it appears is what was lost. Whether it's an audit trail for a system running on the network, or encryption when travelling on an unprotected network, GLBA dictates that the highest level of care be used when handling customer data. It is something that we in the banking world take very, VERY seriously.
If they so chose, the FTC, the OCC, the SEC, the CFTC, or state insurance regulators could fine Citigroup for violations of GLBA.
Well, that is because credit card companies don't care about you on a cosmic level. Damn right they never cared about your data. Hell, they sold it to every company on the planet already!
Why would they? What are you going to do? "Cancel your card? YOU HAVE A BALANCE! MUAAHHAHAHHHAHA! Fraud you say? Yeah, right! I don't care if you have Cancer, get back to work you deadbeat."
Most of America is in a you're-screwed-bonus-round with these jackasses. They give a crap about your data. These are the same generous, kind, and loving souls that sold you out to begin with. Everybody at light-my-fart.com got your name and address from them, why shouldn't they just get the freakin' credit card numbers, too?
Credit card companies are the big banking's little thugs.
Q: What's the difference between a credit card company and a loan shark?
A: Loan sharks tell you up front what they're going to do if you don't pay up.
Look, they never cared. They might feel bad, but I guess they feel bad about it in the same way that Satan would feel bad about killing children in a freeway pileup. "Whoops! *Chuckle*!"
Nothing punitive is ever going to come of this. If you have any doubts, recognize this:
Didn't our wonderful President just sign a bill for you to never be able to declare bankruptcy, even if you get freakin' terminally ill? I wonder who wrote that gem of a law for the people? Hmmmm. The President could give you a NO THANK YOU option on Social Security for the generations that will get nothing. That didn't happen. He wants to FORCE you to put your social security money in a special PRIVATELY OWNED BANK right now, in a way that you can never touch it. Wow. Who put that racket together?!? He's spending every waking moment touring the country supporting that agenda! Golly Gee whiz, I wonder who helped him see the light on that? I for one, trust our corporate masters. They would never screw us over. Never.
Trust me. Nothing will ever come of this. You have been warned.
They are unaccountable. Try complaining to your states AG about your bank or CC company. You'll be told that the OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) has jurisdiction. Want to complain to them? Well, they'd probably listen if they weren't staffed by governmental appointees and ex-industry insiders.
Want to sue? Sorry, but you've probably already given up that right under an "arbitration" clause. One could try a class-action suit, I suppose, though that avenue's been largely gutted by the "Class Action Fairness Act".
So what if the industry looses a few more dollars to identity theft? They'll just raise interest rates, late fees, and overlimit charges to make up for it.
No problem.
What, you think there's something special about C-bank? No, they're the rule, not the exception. Every financial institutions cares just about the same amount about your data, and your life - in fact, the only money they really watch out for is the huge sums the company gets to keep for itself - THAT money (and the company's data) gets MUCH more carefully guarded!
My rule these days is, giving away information that you don't have to is like giving whiskey and car keys to a teenager. So apply for the credit card, but just write "disconnected" in the phone number box. Use several free email addresses and make sure they're evenly distributed as contact drops. Make a "mistake" in estimating your exact gross annual income, when reporting it to anybody but the IRS.
The point is not to be subversive, but just to be realistic. The information age has spawned a paper-happy beuracracy driven by bean-counters who want you life history at every other step. Check it yourself - 90% of the data that you go though life writing in little boxes is simply dropped into a filing cabinet unread, unneeded, and ignored. I've gotten driver's licences with no address (just a PO box!), paycheck stubs with no SS number on them (you can ask to get it removed), and once got Household Credit to approve "Barney the Purple Dinosaur" for a credit line of $250. (To the best of my knowledge, the address I did this at *still* gets offers for him...)
Most of the people who key the data from your form to the computer do not even speak English! In fact, the most likely method for your data to be read is for the processing center to OCR-scan (or flat picture scan) it into a computer, where the images can then be beamed to the lowest-bidding Malaysian crack monkey (anywhere in the world) who "reads" the picture of your data and keys it in. And they're feeling the pressure from machine-AI reading programs, which are able to translate more and more of your hand-writing with a higher percent-chance of confidence every day.
Bottom line, if you throw a "Jr" onto your name half the time and half not, or only use your middle initial as the fancy strikes you, you're lying to no-one but an SQL database app, and you're only doing what little is in your power to confuse would-be identity thieves; necessary in a world that will always refuse to protect you!
Miss the point? Lawmakers sucessfully placated voters upset over the likes of Enron. That was the entire point - any real world consequences of the law are just collateral damage.
Then when that gets cracked there'll be 500+ messages on /. about how stupid they were for doing something so simple and how they should be protecting our data better than that.
- stolen from saic
- illegaly sold by bank of america
- lost by citibank
awesome! thanks a lot guysNah, not really. You see it's cheaper for Citibank not having to bother with such inconvenient struggles as encryption and confidentiality or even [ghasp] an in-house courrier service for confidential material and as long they don't even get a slap on the wrist why should they care in the first place? Such unbelievable negligent behavior seems to make good business sense nowadays.
It's about time that such criminally negligent entities, such as Citibanks senior management - the fish stinks from the head, as we German speakers say - get slapped really, really hard; possibly even looking at actual jail time. But that's unlikely since they probably bribed enough politicos for such a thing never to happen.
Maybe an EU comission (Citibank is doing business in Europe) should start to ask a few really, really hard questions under threat of suspension of their banking license. Not that shit doesn't happen here, but privacy of the population seems to have a significant higher value here, then a few bucks saved by business./p
I think that companies will start caring when there is an actual dollar amount attached to the loss. Be that from customers leaving to another bank or having to replace any funds that are stolen from the customer's accounts due to identity theft. But, you are right, the customers in general have no idea how serious this is. And I seriously doubt any reprecussions will take place.
The first thought I had when I heard about this story is how much would that disk be worth if you sold it to the right people? And that gets my little tin foil hat on. Was it stolen?
Not at all. But with regards to the recent bankruptcy bill, I see it as two wrongs, compounded by a third and bigger wrong.
* Wrong #1: People who use credit cards unwisely. Nothing good about this, and I won't defend it.
* Wrong #2: Credit card companies that push credit on people with relentless advertising. Then they advance credit to just about anyone, and are happy, even eager, to up your credit line. IMHO, they are knowingly making bad loans. This used to be known as "bad banking" and was punished by bad profits.
* Wrong #3: After years of making bad loans, and starting to see personal bankruptcies rise as a result, the credit card companies buy legislation to "close the loophole." They have been taught nothing about prudence in loaning, at all. Neither side is right in this. But the bad part is what happens to that original background of bankruptcies, before this credit abuse bubble. This bill is catching some of those legitimate bankruptcies and turning them into lifetime debtors.
Just exactly how am I supposed to 'take a stand'? Believe me I'd love to, but I feel there's nothing I can do. I'd like to get a loan through another company, however I don't know of any credit union or smaller banks that do anything like that.
What has impressed me about Linux is not so much that it has enabled some sort of "software revolution", but rather in how it has given chip/platform makers a specific, generic target OS that they can use freely to get something useful running on their hardware quickly.
It used to be the case that platform makers would have to either develop their own minimal operating system for testing purposes or work very closely with an OS maker to port their software to the new hardware platform. With Linux, this has been pushed into the anals of history. Now the Linux OS porting goes hand in hand with platform building, as evidenced by the almost immediate support for Linux at the time of hardware release.
I'm not so much interested in how the Cell board is going to revolutionize anything (it won't), but in how we have, in just the past few years, seen a dramatic increase in the number of hardware platforms being released. And not just in numbers, but also in variety. The number of different types of hardware platforms has risen dramatically. It's only limitation is the number of chip instruction sets supported by gcc and the imaginations of hardware manufacturers.
If you want to see how Microsoft's monopoly has hurt the computer industry, look no further than the current industry. Whereas hardware platforms were pretty standardized and boring, now, with Linux (and real competition to Microsoft's hegemony) the numbers of innovative platforms has increased dramatically. We need a Microsoft out there developing consumer-level applications and quality, user-friendly operating systems. However, we also need a real competitor like Linux to push the giant into innovating.
Which credit card company didn't take a fraud
complaint seriously?
All of them don't. If you get your number stolen, they just issue you a new one. Unless there's a mass compromise, they ignore the thieves, as (to them) it's not worth the time and effort to go after them, even if you give them lots of leads. After all, they aren't out the money, and neither are the banks involved (there's an issuing bank - your bank, and the merchant bank - the bank that processes the payment) - the people who get screwed are the merchants.
But don't let me get in the way of your seething hatred for Bush (who didn't pass the law, congress did.)
He signed it. So he passed it. Take a class, genius. I work in news. You want DVD or VHS?
Besides, what is the point? You think that I am shocked that members of congress are on the payrolls of Chase and Citigroup?
I have a complete ton of my Republican friends that hated this bill. Most financial counselors hate this bill. And they know more about it than both of us combined.
And what good would that do? Unless you're buying your Congresscritters 30 second spots or shuttling them around in your private jet with the very accommodating flight attendant, then you're barking at the breeze, buddy.
In this age of government by the highest bidder, the people losing your data are the highest bidders. Too bad. You can get as mad as you want but it doesn't change anything./p
Alright then, what about my other points?
You seemed to lock in on the bankruptcy law, that you seem to know so much about. Did you know that over 80% of all bankruptcies occur because of major medical problems? That's right! Most bankruptcies cannot be avoided! Now, now you have lifetime debtors because of a major illness. Someone who can never afford children again, can never drive a new car again, or anything like that, and most of them got seriously ill, and there was nothing they could do about it. Don't you feel like an ass now?
"Oh, but medical bills are excluded from the legislation!"
Medical bills are explicitly excluded from this, you say?
Well goody for us. YOU CAN'T WORK WHEN YOU HAVE A DEBILITATING ILLNESS. SO ALL THE OTHER THINGS THAT GO FALLOW WHILE YOU DEAL WITH THIS, LIKE YOUR JOB YOU CAN'T GO TO ARE THE BILLS THAT GET YOU.
Do you have two years living expenses laying around? Do you? NO ONE DOES.
It's the idiots like you that drive me insane. Bankruptcy is a vehicle to avoid lifetime indebtedness. A kind of external debtors prison. If you get catastrophically ill, you cannot work. This pulls the rug out from under people.
What about the other things I said?
The loan sharking? The 150 credit card offers I get a year?
No punitive damages to these data losers?
The new Social Security owned by corporations?
Nah, don't refute me on those. Go after the bankruptcy thing. You're right, there is no such thing as a free lunch. But some people lose money in the real world because of nothing they ever did, and it should not haunt them for the rest of their lives.
The cell is amazing it will-
- optimize seamless communities
- generate vertical e-services
- everage synergistic convergence
and best of all
- engage e-business content
Perfect solution/tt
"Unlike existing SMP systems or multi-core chips, only the general purpose PowerPC core, is able to run a generic operating system, while the SPUs are specialized on running computational tasks. Porting Linux to run on Cells PowerPC core is a relatively easy task because of the similarities to existing platforms like IBM pSeries or Apple Power Macintosh, but does not give access to the enormous computing power of the SPUs.
Only the kernel is able to directly communicate with an SPU and therefore needs to abstract the hardware interface into system calls or device drivers. The most important functions of the user interface including loading a program binary into an SPU, transferring memory between an SPU program and a Linux user space application and synchronizing the execution. Other challenges are the integration of SPU program execution into existing tools like gdb or oprofile."
ddd
Here in mexico there are suspicions of dirty operations by Citigroup. i.e. millionary tax fraud when buying mexican bank "banamex". Mexican News Reporter Lily Tellez has received death threats because she spoke about it.
And you thought losing some customers' information was serious. Ha hah.
ghjhg