Privacy watchdog can fine £500 000

Xhead = Privacy watchdog can fine £500 000

Organisations that lose people's personal data will be liable for fines of up to £500 000 from April, reports Computing.co.uk.

The top fine will only be issued in the most severe cases, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said in a statement yesterday.

Before issuing the fine, the ICO will take into account the seriousness of the data breach, the likelihood of substantial damage and distress to individuals, whether the breach was deliberate or negligent, the size of the organisation and what reasonable steps it has taken to prevent breaches.

The High Court has granted a further judicial review of the home secretary's decision to allow extradition proceeding against Pentagon hacker Gary McKinnon to proceed. The move means the imminent threat of extradition against McKinnon is removed until at least April, says The Register.

The latest in a long line of appeals by McKinnon will consider whether McKinnon's mental state is too frail to withstand a US trial and likely imprisonment over hacking attacks dating from 2001 and 2002.

The unemployed former sys-admin, who was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome last year, was first arrested in 2002 and has been fighting extradition since 2005.

Researchers have demonstrated a simple, cheap way to create self-assembling electronic devices using a property crucial to salad dressings, writes the BBC.

It uses the fact that oil- and water-based liquids do not mix, forming devices from components that align along the boundary between the two.

The idea joins a raft of approaches toward self-assembly, but lends itself particularly well to small components.

A US law firm representing a Web content-filtering company in a piracy lawsuit against the Chinese government said yesterday it received malicious e-mails in a targeted attack from China similar to recent attacks on Google and other US companies, states CNet.

At least 10 employees at Gipson Hoffman & Pancione received the e-mails on Monday and Tuesday, according to Gregory Fayer, a lawyer at the Los Angeles-based firm.

The firm filed a $2.2 billion lawsuit last week on behalf of Solid Oak Software against the Chinese government, two Chinese software developers, and seven PC manufacturers. The suit alleges they illegally copied code from Solid Oak's Cybersitter Web content-filtering program, and distributed the code as part of a Chinese government-sponsored censorship programme involving China-created Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software.