Lisa Vaas

MasterCard International on Wednesday put incentives, tools and education into merchants hands to help them protect consumer data. The new program follows an ongoing parade of consumer data theft, with Reuters reporting the latest heist being the theft of more than 50,000 customer records from the database of Atlantis, a major Bahamas resort. The personal […]

Security and law enforcement professionals are appalled that their personal information was leaked by Guidance Software, a security software and training company they say should have known better than to leave an unencrypted database exposed on the Internet. “I was shocked that a company like Guidance would be this sloppy,” said Peter Garza, CEO of […]

Open source scored its latest government takeover, with MySQL AB nabbing a five-year contract with the General Services Administration that will put its open-source database at the fingertips of government customers. As it is, MySQL already hums under thousands of federal, state and local government entities, including Los Alamos National Labs, the U.S. Census Bureau, […]

DataSynapse Inc. is gluing its GridServer grid software into Informatica Corp.s PowerCenter data integration platform, the two companies announced Monday. The partnership will result in a seamless interface that lets PowerCenter users scale their data integration processing across pooled resources with GridServer, the companies said in a statement. “A seamless interface with DataSynapse helps Informatica […]

Massachusetts has appointed an acting CIO to fill in for Peter Quinn, who is walking away from the job after bringing OpenDocument and a concomitant fire of controversy to the Commonwealth. The acting CIO, Bethann Pepoli, was formerly the chief operating officer of the states IT division. Pepoli is a candidate to take the position […]

Its so simple. If only Id remembered. Instead of dissing Oracle and trying to wrap my head around SQL injections, all I have to do to get readers attention is this: Write an article comparing the “lite” versions of proprietary databases to MySQL. Without mentioning Firebird or PostgreSQL. Thats exactly what I did recently, and […]

A Trojan horse program is churning out bogus Google ads promoting products Google eschews—gambling, cheap Viagra, girlie photos and adult dating. The ads, being targeted at small publishers, are identical to Google AdSense ads except that referral graphic buttons are being converted to text, apparently due to a bug in the Trojan, according to the […]

Not to pick on MySQL—Im glad to see they were picked to be editors choice in Builder AUs recent road test of databases, which compared MySQL, SQL Server Express, DB2 Express and Oracle 10g Standard Edition. “Release 5.0 of MySQL is really taking it to…Oracle and DB2 with advanced features such as cluster support and […]

Database security breaches have been coming fast and furious as the year draws to a close. Last week, role-playing game company White Wolf Publishing Inc. reported that it was the victim of attempted extortion after international hackers exploited a software flaw and threatened to post stolen user data including user names, e-mail addresses and encrypted […]

Marriott Vacation Club International is missing backup tapes with personal information for 206,000 customers, owners and associates, the company disclosed on Wednesday. A spokesman for the timeshare division of Marriott International Inc. told eWEEK that the tapes—which went missing from the companys Orlando, Fla., corporate office—may have contained addresses, credit card numbers and, in some […]