Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

By Zack Whittaker | January 25, 2012, 5:13am PST Summary: With the draft European data protection regulation announced, it won't just affect the 700 million Europeans. U.S. companies with European users should also take heed. If you thought that because you were a U.S. company that European rules would not affect you, think again. Europe has a population of over 500 million people, which is nearly twice that of the United States. The new Regulation signals that the tide has turned. The 1995 Directive focused on building the online economy, and favouring businesses large and small to expand and grow, while the 2012 Regulation will reverse the fortunes for businesses and focus on European end users. Internet companies will have to seek explicit consent from its users to use data about them, including when it is being collected, told for how long it will be stored, and for what purpose it is being used for. A European Commission spokesperson confirmed to ZDNet that the propose...

(USA) 1/12 - GLOBAL INTERNET VOTING FIRM BUYS U.S. ELECTION RESULTS REPORTING FIRM - By Bev Harris Permission to reprint granted, with link to http://www.blackboxvoting.org In a major step towards global centralization of election processes, the world's dominant Internet voting company has purchased the USA's dominant election results reporting company. When you view your local or state election results on the Internet, on portals which often appear to be owned by the county elections division, in over 525 US jurisdictions you are actually redirected to a private corporate site controlled by SOE software, which operates under the name ClarityElections.com. The good news is that this firm promptly reports precinct-level detail in downloadable spreadsheet format. As reported by BlackBoxVoting.org in 2008, the bad news is that this centralizes one middleman access point for over 525 jurisdictions in AL, AZ, CA, CO, DC, FL, KY, MI, KS, IL, IN, NC, NM, MN, NY, SC, TX, UT, WA...

I am going to power off and unplug all of our computers & TV's tonight.... SPACE.com StaffDate: 23 January 2012 Time: 11:47 AM ET SHARE    This story was updated at 2:03 p.m. EST. A powerful solar eruption is expected to blast a stream of charged particles toward Earth tomorrow (Jan. 24), as the strongest radiation storm since 2005 rages on the sun. Early this morning (0359 GMT Jan. 23, which corresponds to late Sunday, Jan. 22 at 10:59 p.m. EST), NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught an extreme ultraviolet flash from a huge eruption on the sun , according to the skywatching website Spaceweather.com. The solar flare spewed from sunspot 1402, a region of the sun that has become increasingly active lately. Several NASA satellites, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), and the Stereo spacecraft observed the massive sun storm. A barrage of charged particles triggered by this morning's solar flare is expected to hi...

By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY Updated 1d 17h ago The government takedown of Megaupload, a popular file-sharing site, has stoked simmering fears that hard-line enforcement of copyright infringements could profoundly disrupt Internet commerce. File sharing has become a major way corporations collaborate with employees and partners and interact with customers. It fuels the sharing of rich content across Internet-connected devices in the home and office and distributed to mobile devices and has emerged as a major component of cloud computing, the delivery of content and services across the Web. "If legitimate content is housed on the same service that might have infringing content, it gets sucked into this vortex and it's gone," says Dennis Fisher, security blogger at Threatpost.com. "I don't know how much the government or these companies (advocating strict anti-piracy enforcement) have thought this through. I would guess not a lot." Federal authorities sh...