Category: Blog News

This morning my Grandfather died peacefully at the age of 103, while sitting in his chair, probably while napping.

O-pa (au)Gust Boschmans, my grandfather from my fathers side, was an auto-didact graphical artist, who created numerous pieces of art, was a gifted amateur-archeologist and had a keen interest in nature and all its creations. He published several art books and archeology books as well as hundreds of drawings, collages, sketches and pop-art puppets.

More info on him can be found on the site my nephew Beert made here for his 100th birthday.

Oh, and the title is no typing error. When Tom saw his great-grandfather for the very first time, he called him Opa Guts. He made quite a remembrance for our son, who to this day still calls him that way.

In my opinion, a nice way to go, O-pa. I hope you meet up with me dad and all the others up there…

I am now the oldest male person who has the ‘boschmans’ name. Funny feeling, that.

This is really a case of hearing it straight from the guy on site. Blogging live from New Orleans, the Interdictor is the manager of an internet firm located there.

Worth reading, as he describes with verve the situation there : the obstacles they have to face up to, the ugliness of the looting mob, the scared policemen whose HQ is 6 meters under water…

Reading it made me realize two things :
1. The strenght that some people have. The interdictor chose to stay to keep things up and running, even when urged to evacuate.
2. The thin veneer of civilization wears of easely when the clockwork organisation of our society runs amok.

A term comes to mind that I gleaned from reading ‘Iron Sunrise‘ by Charles Stross : warblogger. Yup.

The last week or so my site was missing it’s background, and not all of my text came through. Plus my sidebar was all the way down the page instead of top right.

Strange, cos the only things I changed were to add some posts.

Today I found the error : I had copy/pasted a link into my blog but the link itself was quoted as well – this caused all sorts of havoc.

After removing the quotes around the link, everything worked a-ok allright again ! I tried to make a codebox here to show you dear reader how it looked, but I was unable to not have WP interprete it.

Tomorrow Tom is going back to school. He’s not particularly happy about this, but that’s the way it is.

Hopefully this year he’ll be able to cope better with all the other children around him – he’s very playful when he knows you, but he is very shy and withdrawn with persons and children he doesn’t know, especially if they are older…

From an article in the NY Times, it seems that Visa is dropping CardSystems Solutions as a credit card processor.

Quote :

Visa USA says that it will stop allowing payment processor CardSystems Solutions to handle its transactions, months after procesor left records of millions of cardholders at risk for fraud; Visa official says that CardSystems has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, failure to provide proper data security for those accounts; cardholders and merchants should not be affected by change; Visa notes that independent investigation found that payment processor had improperly stored cardholder data and did not have proper controls in place.

Mastercard is still evaluating what it will do and is following closely what CSS is doing to improve its processes.

Quote from the CRYPTO-GRAM newsletter from August 15, by Bruce Schneier :

“MasterCard International Inc. is taking a different tack with
CardSystems. The credit card company expects CardSystems to develop a
plan for improving its security by Aug. 31, ‘and as of today, we are
not aware of any deficiencies in its systems that are incapable of
being remediated,’ spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin said.

Scheiers view on CardSystems

So it seems that at least something is happening. No news on the law front though.

I am still playing Guild Wars, I am even in a Guild – Team Uppercut. However, with the birth or our son Sam it’s been slow going – I can only play an hour or so most every days.
This is exactly the reason why I did not pick a MMORPG game that you have to pay monthly. I’ve only payed the one fee for all this fun.

When I joined my guild (as second member and officer !) me and the ‘master’ were ahead of most of our team mates. Now I’m the one waaaaayy back at level 14, while all the others have already ascended (for the non-GW players, this means that they have gone past level 20 after some very hard tests).

Still, can’t complain, when I’m in a spot of trouble they come over and help me out, and that very hard mission that I had trouble doing with henchies (henchman, non-player characters that you can hire) or with a PU group (a pick-up group is a group of people who don’t know each other who usually don’t fit in very well together) suddenly flies past!

So yes, Guild Wars still kicks serious backside for me !

In a Cnet/Reuters News item, CardSystems is quoted as ‘facing imminent extinction’.

Credit card giant Visa USA said this week it was cutting off CardSystems as a Visa network participant due to the data breach, apparently the largest ever of its kind.

“With that staring us in the face, it certainly means we would go out of business because, if you can’t process with a major brand such as Visa, you can’t process at all,” CardSystems Chief Executive John Perry told Reuters.

I feel only sad about the fact that if CardSystems goes bankrupt, all those people who were affected by the errors made by the people in CardSystems will probably have nobody to file complaint against.

After writing the previous post on the EU voting ‘no’ to software patents, I realised that, while important for me, it’s not worth much for those people who’ve been killed and injured in the London terrorist attacks.

The survivors and their family have other things on their mind than political discussions. It certainly puts things in perspective.

My heart and support goes out to them.

In what can be said to be a very important decision, the EU parlement has voted ‘No’ to american-style software patents, maintaining the current existing legislation for each country.

On the one hand you have the big European companies saying it is a missed opportunity, as they feel they cannot hold their own against the patent-might of some big US companies without their own patents.

“There is important innovation coming out of the software industry,” Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, said in Paris today before the parliament vote. “We think that innovation needs to be protected.”

On the other hand are the small developers and companies that feel they should not have to deal with embroilment in patentwars with big corporations, anywhere.

Advocates of so-called open-source software, such as the Linux operating system, had lobbied the parliament to restrict software patents because of concerns the EU would follow the U.S. approach, which gives patent protection to software and ideas such as Internet pop-up advertising. Patents can leave open-source developers and users vulnerable to infringement claims for inadvertently distributing patented methods.

I don’t believe that it will stifle innovation, as the big companies say. Rather the reverse, in fact. As what will happen to the American patent system, I wonder how long it can continue to exist in its current form ?

The news.com site has the story: a lawsuit has been filed against CardSystems (and Visa among others) seeking full disclosure of the names of the people affected. Credit Card companies have decided not to notify customers unless the accounts are actually abused.

Some 40 million cards were accessible, and some 200.000 cards are believed to have been actually ‘stolen’ (the information for the card transferred out of the company).

Seems like finally people have realised this smells a bit fishy, all this not notifying unless people are affected. Heck, smart thieves could wait a few years before charging your card – my credit card has a 5-year expiry date, so would I still check in a few years for strange purchases ?

A lawsuit has started in America, I wonder if people affected in Europe will follow (if they can, I am not up to date on law) ?