Life's Great Expectations!

Source: Hello Kitty: The Funny, The Weird, And The Horrifying Thanks to the marketing skills of Japanese company Sanrio, Hello Kitty’s cute-cat character has been going strong for 35 years and has become an internationally-recognized brand. One of the most diverse and unpredictable places in the entire universe, the world of Hello Kitty encompasses a vast collection of strange products that dazzle the mind and serve as material for an extensive list of noteworthy weirdness. Since there are thousands of Hello Kitty products in just about every category imaginable, it’s difficult to find the weirdest of the weird. Furthermore, many Hello Kitty pictures floating around the Internet are actually photoshopped fakes, so it takes some time to figure out what’s real and what’s not. Still, I managed to scrape together this list of examples that appear to be legitimate products. So, hold on to your seats and get ready to be entertained, disturbed, and maybe even sexually abused...

SEC badly bungled probes of Madoff scheme, agency watchdog says -- incompetence, not corruption By Marcy Gordon, AP Business Writer On Wednesday September 2, 2009, 9:34 pm EDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pushing past years of "red flags," investigators at the Securities and Exchange Commission bungled their probes of Bernard Madoff so badly that his multibillion-dollar fraud not only flourished but he used the exams to suck in new investors, an agency watchdog declared Wednesday. The report by the SEC inspector general shows that no smoking gun of corruption was found in the agency's conduct toward the disgraced financier. Instead it painted a grim picture of an agency hobbled by incompetence -- failing to pursue the most obvious leads -- that cleared the wa...

Invasion of the botnets: Cyberattacks on the rise The types of cyberattacks aren't new, but the speed and number of them are on the rise By William Jackson Aug 28, 2009 For the past year, the cyber threat landscape has been dominated not by new vulnerabilities and exploits so much as by the sheer number of attacks against information technology systems and the growing professionalization of the bad guys behind them. In this report: New threats emerge from once-trusted protocols and services “The sexiness of the threat has not increased,” said one industry observer who met with a multiagency task force on intrusion. “But the exposure in terms of the number of exploits is growing exponentially.” The numbers are sobering. “Malware is at the highest point we’ve ever seen it,” said Dave Marcus, director of security research at McAfee Avert Labs. “2008 was the biggest year so far. The first half of 2009 has eclipsed all of 2008,” with 8,0...

New threats emerge from once-trusted protocols and services Vulnerabilities in services such as DNS and SSL open new avenues of attack By William Jackson Aug 28, 2009 The rapid morphing and bundling of exploits for known vulnerabilities could be the biggest concern for security experts, but that doesn’t mean that new threats are not emerging. Two of the most troubling are in the Domain Name System and Secure Sockets Layer, services users have trusted for years. In this report: Invasion of the botnets: Cyberattacks on the rise A zero-day exploit emerged last month for a vulnerability in one of the most commonly used DNS servers, forcing many users to update the software that helps to direct Internet traffic. “Pretty much any BIND 9 server can be brought down with this script,” said Branko Miskov, product manager director at BlueCat Networks. “Our development team was quite surprised at how simple this was.” Also last month, researchers ...

Source: Uncouth Facebook postings closing doors for job candidates More employers than ever are researching job candidates on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter in order to find out more about their activities and character. And, it turns out, many candidates are doing a great job of showing their potential bosses poor communication skills, inappropriate pictures, and even how many workplace secrets they can leak. By Jacqui Cheng | Last updated August 20, 2009 3:02 PM CT Some of us had the luck of doing stupid things online before most employers knew what social networking was. (I'll admit it: in my early working days, I said some not-nice things online about some of the people I worked with.) These days, however, those looking for jobs have had many years to build up an unsavory history across the Internet, and employers now know how to do their homework. In fact, nearly half of the employers in the US now search for job candidates on socia...

MISTAKE What they actually mean If a barber makes a mistake, It's a New Style If a driver makes a mistake, It is a New path If a engineer makes a mistake, It is a New Venture If parents makes a mistake, It is a New Generation If a politician makes a mistake, It is a New Law If a scientist makes a mistake, It is a New Invention If a tailor makes a mistake, It is a New Fashion If a teacher makes a mistake , It is a New Theory If our boss makes a mistake, It is a New idea If an employee makes a mistake, It is a 'Mistake' long piak! (a.k.a. banging against the wall)

10 Commonly Overlooked Auto Safety Issues by Bobbi Dempsey Wednesday, July 1, 2009 provided by As the weather gets nicer, people tend to spend more time in their cars and start to plan road trips or family getaways. You may have already done the routine springtime vehicle maintenance tasks, such as removing the snow tires. Perhaps you've even waxed the car thoroughly, replacing that grimy sludge and salt of winter with a glossy shine. However, you may not necessarily be ready to hit the road just yet: You may be overlooking important safety issues. These issues can be costly -- not to mention dangerous -- if you don't take care of them immediately. Here are our top 10 overlooked auto safety issues: Missing air bags. A new report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, finds that nearly one in five fatal accidents involves cars with missing air bags. This is something that should concern anyone who has bought a previously owned car. Don...

by Kimberly Palmer Wednesday, April 15, 2009 Think married couples have it easy? Or that you should get your pension policy to pay out as much as possible, as soon as possible? Well, think again. Predicting that you'll die too early--or too late--can leave you and your spouse in a financial crunch. New research upends these 7 common myths about marriage and retirement: Single people need less money. It's true that that single people spend less money each year than couples, but at all ages over 65, they spend more of their income than couples do, according to research by Michael Hurd, senior economist at Rand. Then, after age 65, single people's income goes down by three percent a year until it dwindles to 20 percent of its starting value at age 95. (For those at age 65, the probability of surviving to age 95 is around 11 percent.) Couples, meanwhile, maintain their income until the oldest member reaches age 79, when wealth starts to decline at around 3 percent a year...

Blog post gives another perspective on the cancelled ASEAN summit in Thailand. By Sumner Lemon 14 Apr 2009 SINGAPORE, 14 APRIL 2009 - Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs George Yeo described his evacuation from the cancelled ASEAN summit in a blog post on Monday, adding his personal perspective to media coverage of anti-government protests in Thailand. The summit of Southeast Asian leaders, scheduled to be held in Pattaya, Thailand, was cancelled on Saturday after supporters of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, known as Red Shirts, broke through a police cordon and made their way into the Royal Cliff Beach Resort Hotel where the meetings were to be held. The Red Shirt protests later expanded to Bangkok, where they continue to clash with Thai soldiers and police who are trying to restore order. According to Yeo, ministers attending the Pattaya summit saw few indications of serious trouble until early Saturday, when Red Shirt protesters, demanding the...

Business continuity preparation needs to move beyond just IT hardware and data centricity. By Gerald Wee 13 Apr 2009 SINGAPORE, 13 APRIL 2009 – Many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore see the need for business continuity and have taken a number of steps towards mitigating business impact should disaster strike. However, company perceptions of what constitutes adequate business continuity preparations are still not holistic enough, and tend to focus on information systems and electronic data. According to a research group AMI Partners study, of medium-sized businesses in Singapore, 96 per cent of respondents to a survey on business continuity believe that disasters such as fires (44 per cent), utility outages (17 per cent), epidemics (12 per cent), terrorist attacks (8 per cent), and cyber threats (8 per cent) will impact their organisations. “About 71 per cent of the respondents have a trained business continuity management team, and this does make it seem that c...

New card will allow stored value top-ups to be done at most payment terminals By Melissa Chua 13 Apr 2009 SINGAPORE, 13 APRIL 2009 – Singapore’s electronics payment provider Network for Electronic Transfers (better known as NETS), has announced plans to launch a contactless stored value payment card which allows for automatic cash value top-ups. The new card, which can be used to pay for road tolls, public transport fares, retail purchases and bills, is expected to provide greater convenience to consumers in Singapore who hold deposit accounts in DBS Bank, Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), United Overseas Bank (UOB) and Standard Chartered Bank. NETS’s current stored value card offering, the cashcard, is not contactless, does not allow for automatic top-ups, and cannot be used to pay for public transport. Anytime, anywhere According to NETS, the stored value of the new contactless card can be topped up, with money debited from the consumers’ bank account, anytime...

Apr 13, 2009 By Telecom Asia Staff telecomasia.net Malaysian operator Maxis has launched the world’s first commercial mobile payments service for point-of-sale transactions using Visa’s payWave service based on Near Field Communications (NFC) technology. The new service, branded Maxis FastTap and offered in conjunction with Visa and Maybank, is compatible with just one handset, a Nokia 6212 classic with an embedded NFC chipset. Maybank Visa account holders can download their Visa payWave credit account details directly to the handset over the Maxis network. Payments can then be made by waving the handset in front of a payWave contactless reader. Visa says 1,800 merchant outlets currently accept Visa payWave in Malaysia. Customers can also use FastTap to pay for toll, transit, parking and theme park charges at over 3,000 Touch ‘n Go points nationwide. The Nokia 6212 comes preloaded with RM10 ($2.75) worth of Touch ‘n Go credit. Visa has ...

By Kenneth Corbin April 6, 2009 WASHINGTON -- Few tech policy debates are plumped up with more rhetoric than those concerning Net neutrality and privacy restrictions for advertisers. It should be a noisy year at the Federal Communications Commission. Here at the Cable Show, the annual conference hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, advisors to the three current commissioners outlined some of the simmering issues that are likely to boil up at the FCC this year, and those two are on the short list. Rick Chessen, acting chief of staff for interim FCC Chairman Michael Copps, said the agency could move toward adding to its Internet policy statement a fifth principle that would explicitly bar ISPs from discriminating against certain traffic on their networks. "The principle would be one of nondiscrimination, but you would recognize the need for reasonable network management," Chessen said. The FCC's broadband principles comprise...

Sun, Apr 05, 2009 - The Straits Times My parents have a loving relationship, but I knew I could not live my life around a husband By Lee Wei Ling My father became prime minister in 1959, when I was just four years old. Inevitably, most people know me as Lee Kuan Yew’s daughter. My every move, every word, is scrutinised and sometimes subject to criticism. One friend said I lived in a glass house. After my father’s recent comment on my lack of culinary skills, another observed: ‘You live in a house without any walls.’ Fortunately, I am not easily embarrassed. As long as my conscience is clear, what other people say of me does not bother me. Indeed, I am open about my life since the more I try to conceal from the public, the wilder the speculation becomes. My father said of my mother two weeks ago: ‘My wife was…not a traditional wife. She was educated, a professional woman… We had Ah Mahs, reliable, professional, dependable. (My wife) came back every lunchtime to have lunch with the ...