Tag archive: state

It’s a sign of the new digital age. Hackers claim to have stolen 8.3 million patient records, that track patient abuse of prescription drugs, from a Virginia state government site, and are holding them to ransom – for a figure of $10 million. In a note posted on Wikileaks, the hackers said they had the records: "In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I… Read More

In Texas, apparently, the state government doesn’t like Windows Vista. In fact they dislike it so much that a State Senator has added a rider to the state budget that would require any state body, with the exception of schools, to have written authorization before buying Vista. The rider, proposed by Juan Hinojosa, was adopted without objection, and the budget is expected to be passed this week. Senator Hinojosa told the San… Read More

It might sound a little bizarre, but it’s true. A Kentucky court has said that the state is within its rights to grab the domain names of 141 different gambling sites in order to protect its citizens, since the state forbids gambling. Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear said: “Unlicensed, unregulated, illegal Internet gambling poses a tremendous threat to the citizens of the Commonwealth because of its ease, availability… Read More

When New York State finally passed its budget last week with a hotly contested law referred to as the “Amazon Tax,”  spectators expected trouble. Not surprisingly, a week later, Amazon is rolling out the legal cannons to fight the law, which forces it to collect sales tax in the state despite having no physical presence there. According to the New York Times, the state government managed to twist Amazon into its tax… Read More

CNN has reported that Connecticut will begin offering virtual high school classes this month.   State governor M. Jodi Rell announced the start of the CTVirtual Learning Center, which will take a double-pronged approach to learning.   One focus will be to help those with failing grades, enabling them to make up their grades and void summerschool.   The other will be to make more widespread the offer of elective courses which might… Read More

The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has been forced to stop a text messaging service that gave the contact details of vehicle drivers. The reason? People has been using it to discover the identities of women drivers and pester them. According to the BBC, the service had run for a year, and anyone was free to send a text, in return receiving the vehicle owner’s name, address and phone number.   However, young men soon found out they… Read More

After blanketing 25 American universities with pre-litigation letters in February, the Recording Industry Association of America announced late last week that it was launching a second round of letters. A total of 408 notices will be sent to a new batch of 23 separate schools, including: State University of New York at Morrisville (34) Georgia Institute of Technology (31) Pennsylvania State University (31) University of… Read More

Sony has taken another step into the solid state drive market, announcing plans to offer a flash-based drive option in its Vaio Type-G (Japanese) lightweight business notebooks. However, for now the SSD drives will only be available via Sony Japan's built-to-order service, and the company doesn't have any plans to offer the drives to overseas customers. The SSD option will also be expensive, with customers forking over a nearly… Read More

The market for flash-based solid state disk drives which act as drop-in replacements for traditional hard drives used in mobile and portable devices is heating up: Samsung announced today that it plans to ship a 64 GB solid state drive in the second quarter of this year. The announcement comes on the heels of SanDisk announcing a 32 GB flash drive only a couple weeks ago, and Fujitsu announcing solid state drives as an option in selected… Read More

Solid-state hard drives have been a long-wished for dream in many technology circles: the basic idea is to stop storing data on the fast-spinning, metal-spattered platters that comprise today's hard drives and start storing data in non-volatile, cool-running, quiet, no-moving-parts memory. After all, the failure rate for hard drives is 100 percent (wait long enough, they'll all fail) so we're all playing pretty fast and… Read More

SouthPeak Interactive and video game developer DC Studios today said they'd shipped State of Emergency 2 (SOE2) for the PlayStation 2. This title, a sequel to State of Emergency, is priced at $29.99. SOE2, said the two video game companies, takes place four years after the original SOE game and features the same in-game characters. Features of SOE2 include a single player mode with 12 missions and a cinematic story, large numbers of… Read More

Late last week U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly ruled that Illinois' newly passed restrictions barring the sales and rental of violent and sexually explicit video gamed to minor were unconstitutional, and barred the state from enforcing the laws. Judge Kennelly commented in his ruling that the laws were an undue restriction on free speech-”the public itself as an interest in ensuring that the plaintiffs' First… Read More

The Entertainment Software Association announced today that it will seek legal action against the state of Illinois to prevent bill HB 4023 from taking effect.  The ESA claims that the proposed measure has a chilling effect on free speech. The bill has been called the "Violent Video Games Law" and would prohibit the sale of state defined 'adult' games to minors.  The ESA claims such a law is not only unconstitutional,… Read More

“The state Public Utilities Commission voted 3 to 1 behind closed doors late last week to pull out of its appeal of a Federal Communications Commission rule designating so-called voice over Internet protocol as an interstate service beyond state control. California's was the first of several state utility commissions to appeal the FCC order, leading to the combining of the cases in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San… Read More

SimpleTech will demonstrate its new Zeus SATA Solid State Drives at the Sea-Air-Space Exposition in Washington, D.C. at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, March 22-24 in booth 4005. Zeus SSDs, available in capacities up to 128 GBs, have sustained read/write rates of 20, 30, 40 or 60 MBytes/sec and utilize the company's patented stacking technology to measure just 9.5 mm in height — making Zeus SSDs the world's thinnest,… Read More