Jul 19
Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven’t read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.
County officials in at least three states say they have received thousands of mortgage documents with questionable signatures since last fall, suggesting that the practices, known collectively as “robo-signing,” remain widespread in the industry.
The documents have come from several companies that process mortgage paperwork, and have been filed on behalf of several major banks. Read more…
Jul 18
Over 20 people have been arrested in the US, UK and the Netherlands in what appears to be a coordinated crackdown on suspected members of hacking group, Anonymous.
Most of the arrests were in the the US, where the authorities took 16 people into custody. Fourteen of these where charged with carrying out distributed denial of service (DoS) attacks against payments website, PayPal.
Read more…
Jul 16
Men and women feel that the gender gap still has not been closed, research suggests.
According to a study carried to by IFF Research, one in five UK workers believe that men and women are treated differently in the workplace.
12% deem that male employees are treated better than female employees whereas a mere 5% believe women are treated better than men.
While 15% of females believe men are treated better in the workplace, only 1% believes the reverse to be true.
Conversely, 10% of men admittedly consider they are treated better than women although 9% of men believe that women come out better.
Jan Shury, joint managing director at IFF Research said:
“We are seeing a stark gender divide among those who think discrimination exists. W
Read more…
Jul 16
SAN FRANCISCO — To his many enemies, Rupert Murdoch is getting his comeuppance.
Murdoch’s tabloid newspapers long have reveled in the misdeeds of others with salacious photos and pun-packed headlines. Now, one of the world’s most powerful media executives is learning what it’s like to be enveloped in his own scandal.
“There is a feeling that Murdoch has been king of the world for too long and it’s about time that somebody brought him back to earth,” says Mungo MacCallum, a political journalist and commentator who once worked for a Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Australian.
But no one is calling news conferences to gloat about Murdoch’s troubles. Even his bitter Read more…
Jul 15
More than 900 police officers and staff from across the UK breached the Data Protection Act (DPA) over the last three years, according to a report released today by privacy watchdog, Big Brother Watch.
The campaign group obtain the figures through freedom of information requests to all of the police forces in England and Wales. This revealed that 243 people received criminal convictions and 98 were dismissed as a result of their actions.
Daniel Hamilton, the director of Big Brother Watch said it was astonishing that over 900 officers and staff had been disciplined for breaches of the DPA over just three years.
Read more…
Jul 14
NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News Channel has discussed the British phone hacking scandal involving its parent News Corp. dozens of times over the past few weeks, but far less than the story has been reported on rivals CNN and MSNBC.
Fox faces an awkward question that hounds news organizations in these days of large corporate ownership: How do you deal with stories embarrassing to your bosses while keeping the appearance of journalistic independence?
The liberal media watchdog Media Matters for America said that through Thursday, Fox had talked about the story 37 times. F Read more…