Bizhack.net

As Gordon Brown faces the daunting task of telling his electorate that yet another data breach has occurred, The Times reveals that a whopping 8,500 laptops are left in UK airports every year and Londoners alone sloppily left 5,000 laptops in taxis over a six-month period.

“Norwich Union was fined a record £1.26m yesterday for exposing seven million people to fraud, from which fraudsters made £3.3m from policy holders. Nationwide Building Society was fined £980,000 this year after one of its laptops was lost with 11 million customers’ data contained on the desktop, and M&S is another high-profile offender.”

So while your fellow workers happily skip off on their lunch break with Blackberries or laptops brimming with company secrets, here’s some other tit bits from around the world.

A new species of rat, weighing in at over 5 times that of your “normal” sewer rat was discovered in Indonesia and it is apparently completely fearless of humans. And its not just in Indonesia. Scientists seem to be overjoyed by the prospect of life on Mars after their robot (currently onsite) found silica deposits that may contain bacteria entombed from long ago.

This news will, no doubt, be troubling for two senior scientists who have resigned from an elite international study group in protest over a lack of public discussion about the possible consequences of attracting the attention of aliens, potentially vastly more advanced then us, by sending signals deep into space. It might be a good idea to keep a low profile in grand scheme of things but they may be years too late.