Care in the Community

The Guardian Jobs website has come under attack from a 'sophisticated and deliberate hack' that has exposed sensitive data, according to an email sent to affected users on Saturday.

The breach is related to data submitted by people who have applied for a job via the Guardian Jobs site. The intruders may have got access to the personal information in those applications, according to the email.

"We have been assured by our provider that the system is now secure and we have identified and contacted everyone who may have been affected," Guardian News and Media said in a web page about the breach.

The system supplier has identified the hack, and the e-crime unit at Scotland Yard is investigating, the Guardian said. The publisher said it found out about the break-in on Friday evening.

The Guardian, which said it is "treating this situation with the utmost seriousness," has not indicated what, if any, steps it will take to help affected users recover from the breach and protect them from the misuse of their personal data.

However, it has provided a list of police-endorsed steps that people can take as a precaution. These include consulting a credit reference agency such as Equifax to "resolve the situation and prevent it happening again," paying CIFAS to place a fraud alert on your credit file and visiting the banksafeonline.org.uk for information.

The Guardian has not provided a dedicated email address for users to contact them about the breach. Instead, it is urging people to visit its page about the breach.

"The fact that they allowed this to happen is one thing, and while I applaud thair openness in swiftly notifying those of us who might have been affected, the attitude that the problem is now entirely ours is outrageous," one affected user, who wished to remain anonymous, told ZDNet UK on Saturday.

I've seen a few remarks recently wondering what has happened to comments posted to the site, so here's a bit of explanation of where your posts might be held up.

One possibility is that the post has been sent to moderation by our spam filter. This scans posts for words matching a blacklist of terms frequently used by spammers. An editor will then review quarantined posts and if your post has been filtered in error, it will be pushed live. This can sometimes take a few hours, but we believe the delay is worth it to keep spam off the site.

We'll send you an email to let you know that this has happened, but if you want to follow up, send us an email at community.manager@zdnet.co.uk.

Alternatively, your post may have been removed from the site as it contravenes our Terms and Conditions or our Code of Conduct. Our goal with the community is to make it a place where you can share and read useful opinions and experiences, so we try to keep out marketing blurbs (including promotion of corporate events), PR pitches and advertising, for example.

We also ask our members to make sure their posts will appeal to IT pros (so not just about business technology, but also stuff that tech-savvy people will like, such as scientific breakthroughs or nifty gadgets). They should also be valuable -- so a post with just a URL may be removed -- and security is also a factor in this.

Basically, we're urging people to make comments that will further the discussion. If you post a one-word reaction, for example, we may remove this so that the thread doesn't get cluttered up. There are alternatives: If you're reading a story, you can always express your liking by choosing one of the 'Did you find this article useful?' icons. And if you're looking at a blog, why not drop the author a note via our internal messaging system?

Overall, we try to balance the interests of the community against those of the individual, and to correct the balance where needed. Of course, we're open to feedback on this: What do you think? Should we hide comments like 'Great!'? Or do members want to us to allow them and let the readers ignore them as they will?

Let me know what you think.

Swedish hobbyist Hans Andersson has build a robot that can complete a Sudoko grid all by itself, a report in The Escapist has noted.

On his Tilted Twister website, Andersson said that the robot, put together using a Lego Mindstorms kit, first uses an optical scanner to map the empty boxes and grab images of the numbers already entered. The blurry number images are then sharpened and classified using character recognition software, so they can be identified. Finally, the Mindstorms computer calculates the missing digits and writes them in using a pen.

Andersson has posted a video on YouTube of the robot in action..

On Friday, Microsoft backtracked on its plan to ship a browser-free version of its upcoming operating system, Windows 7, in Europe.

Deputy general counsel Dave Heiner revealed the change in plan, saying "we will ship the same version of Windows 7 in Europe in October that we will ship in the rest of the world."

Back in June, Microsoft that it would launch the new OS in Europe without Internet Explorer, in a bid to appease EU antitrust regulators, who were looking at the bundling of the browser in Windows.

But European commissioners were lukewarm on that idea, saying they thought "consumers should be offered a choice of browser, not that Windows should be supplied without a browser at all."

Last week, Microsoft pitched a new idea to the EU, saying it would offer a "ballot screen" in Windows 7 that would let people choose any browser they like. In dropping Windows 7 E, Microsoft is betting that the regulators will go for this plan.

"One reason we decided not to ship Windows 7 E is concerns raised by computer manufacturers and partners. Several worried about the complexity of changing the version of Windows that we ship in Europe if our ballot screen proposal is ultimately accepted by the Commission and we stop selling Windows 7 E," Heiner wrote.

After Microsoft announced it would lay off another 3,000 people as part of expected job cuts, CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to the rank and file. Here is that email, courtesy of Ina Fried at ZDNet UK's sister site CNET News.com:

From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009
To: Microsoft - All Employees
Subject: Update: Realigning Resources and Reducing Costs

In January, in response to the global economic downturn, I announced our plan to adjust the company's cost structure through spending reductions and job eliminations. Today, we are implementing the second phase of this plan.

This is difficult news to share. Because our success at Microsoft has always been the direct result of the talent, hard work, and commitment of our people, eliminating positions is hard.

Today's action includes positions in the United States and in a number of countries around the world. In the U.S., affected employees will be notified directly by their managers today. In other countries, local leadership teams will provide more specific information about the impact to their organizations.

With this announcement, we are mostly but not all done with the planned 5,000 job eliminations by June 2010. We are moving quickly to reach this target in response to consistent feedback from our people and business groups that it's important to make decisions and reduce uncertainty for employees as quickly as possible, and so that organizations can concentrate their efforts and resources on strategic objectives.

As we move forward, we will continue to closely monitor the impact of the economic downturn on the company and if necessary, take further actions on our cost structure including additional job eliminations.

For those of you directly affected by today's announcement, I want to thank you for your contribution to Microsoft and assure you that we will continue to provide support as we did during the previous job eliminations.

And for everyone across the company, I want to reemphasize how much I appreciate the way you have pulled together to help the company respond to this difficult economic environment. There's no doubt that these are very challenging times. But together, we are making the right choices to ensure that we will continue to deliver great products and position ourselves for strong future growth and profitability.

Thank you for your continued hard work, commitment, and focus.

Steve