All over the UK Media - but seemingly of limited general international interest - but IP readers may be a special case! (top story on BBC UK home page, but not on the World version) Apparently the UK tax office has lost two disks (CD/DVD?) of 25 million "Child Benefit" users - names, DOBs and for many families bank account details. In short the works. (Out of a UK population of ~60 million this is pretty impressive.) As Child Benefit is a universal (non means-tested) benefit (in the form of a cash refund for families with children) this means virtually UK family with school age children is at risk. Two password-protected discs CDROMs were apparently lost in the internal "grid" mail (ie what seems to be the reusable internal mail envelopes used by many enterprises) Seems to be yet another combination failure of legacy systems, human error in not following procedure(s) and some bad luck. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7103566.stm http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/20/hmrc_huge_data_loss/ kind regards Paul ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE