lots of good info on credit at http://www.credit-facts.org/sitemap.aspx 4

I don’t know the answer to your question, but I bet if you go to the newest thread someone can answer it for you

Regarding C&L’s down time this morning: What’s the difference between “routine maintenance” of a web site and being hacked? I ask this in all sincerity. And if the site was “hacked,” as some are claiming, what does that mean?

I’ve been a sys-admin a few years, the reflex to expect the worst has become ingrained. Only a couple of times this sort of thing has happened has it actually ‘been’ a hack, in my experience, yet I still, and a few other sys admins I’ve worked with, still do the ‘we’ve been hacked’ thing.

It became an ‘in joke’ at one hosting company I’ve worked for, since it tends to be people’s first reaction when a site does something funny, even those of us who should know better. Whenever something ‘bad’ happened, the various staff would poke their heads up, prairie dogging, giggling in false hysteria, “We’ve been hacked.”

In spite of this experience, I still have that same reaction. But then, its kind of my job to ‘find out what happened’, so you have to consider the worst, and start there.

The live blogging investigation leads to false alarm editorializing though, my bad.

I beleive the answer is yes, shareholders can sue for the company’s failing to disclose the material risk that they were taking actions that exposed the company to potentially billions of dollars of liability by violating privacy laws. Whether they win?

There is an interesting article on CNET (you can link to it from Rawstory) claiming a potential out for ATT:

Some legal experts say that AT&T may be off the hook if former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was in office at the time the NSA program began, provided a letter of certification. (Other officials, including the deputy attorney general and state attorneys general, also are authorized to write these letters.)

“If the certification exists, AT&T is in pretty good shape,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and co-author of a book on information privacy law.

What is really interesting about it is that if the Qwest version of events are true – that they asked for something, really anything, in writing, and the gov’t wouldn’t provide them with one – then why did ATT get a letter and not Qwest? And as much, if the gov’t provided ATT a letter, then the gov’t knew that any authority it had for the info dumps was through complying with existing laws.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a shareholder suit – maybe Milberg Weiss (one of the largest shareholder class action firms), who are presently under investigation by the DoJ for its alleged behavior in past suits, wouldn’t mind taking this up as “revenge”