Tea Break

William Gary Sullivan, a database administrator pleaded guilty to stealing 8.4 million consumer records from a credit checking firm in Florida. A court heard he earned £280,000 ($580,000) by selling the data to direct marketing companies.

Legal documents show that William Gary Sullivan was employed as a senior database administrator at a consumer reporting agency called Certegy, which provides a service to help retailers decide whether or not to accept cheques as payment for goods and services.

Scientists have cloned monkey embryos for the first time, bringing human cloning a step closer. They created dozens of embryos from a 10-year-old rhesus macaque monkey and planted them into surrogate primates.

A recent poll has found that 75 percent of users think the web is becoming too vast to be useful.

After some self-confessed “nerds” queued in the cold for up to 36 hours to be at the head of the line. They were snapped up at a rate of 4.2 per second at the height of the frenzy at 1,300 outlets.

The future of grocery shopping has changed in the Palatinate region of Germany. The Edeka supermarket chain offered in one of its Rülzheim stores fingerprint identification as method of payment. Customers can have their fingerprint put on file and begin using the system as an alternative to cash or card. Customers then place their finger on the scanner to complete a purchase.

A gag has been placed on eBaY today for two unusual CDs. After it was revealed yesterday that Revenue & Customs lost two CDs in the post, containing 25 million citizens’ sensitive data.

As crazy as it would seem in today’s security mad countries, Two computer discs holding the personal details of half the families in the UK have gone missing. Lost in the post, sent via standard delivery.