The latest laptop to grow legs and walk off belongs to, or at least used to belong to Horizon Blue Cross/Blue Shield of New Jersey. The company is notifying more than 300,000 of its members that their names, Social Security numbers and other personal information were on a laptop computer that was stolen in Newark earlier this month. The company has also had to inform informed the state and federal authorities because some of the data included Medicare or Medicaid recipients.

The company is offering one year of credit monitoring for free to those affected.

A spokesman for the company said the laptop was stolen on Jan. 5 when an employee who regularly works with member data was robbed. Well, it is Newark... Horizon said the laptop contained no medical records, and that the computer was programmed to self-destruct on January 23. Horizon added that it is adding data encryption to all of its laptops.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday held the Java Mobile & Embedded Developer Days conference at its Santa Clara, Calif. offices, where it announced plans to release some mobile Java code as open source and clarified the status of Java ME.

Java ME (Micro Edition), primarily used in cell phones, will go into even smaller devices, like embedded controllers, while Java SE (Standard Edition) will go into cell phones with the memory and capacity. JavaFX, the big update to Java client technology, may also find its way into very high-end handsets.

Sun also announced it will release the Squawk virtual machine, a Java ME-compliant virtual machine used in the Sun SPOT platform, as an open source project under the GPL license. Sun hopes that developers will port the Squawk code to other mobile and embedded devices besides mobile phones.

It also said the JXTA Java ME MIDP2.0 Proxyless Implementation will be released as open source. JXTA is used to create networks for devices, like cell phones, and allows for discovery of other devices.

Also, Sun and Vodafone announced plans to collaborate on Betavine, an open community and resource Website created and managed by Vodafone. The two companies will collaborate on mobile applications. Among the first projects will be the WebAPISample MIDlet suite, which can receive Short Message Service (SMS) messages from a Web API.

A full stream of the event can be found on Ustream.

There's a lot of smart people working at Intel, and in addition to making the next generation of chips for our computers and gadgets, they are trying to encourage the next generation of very smart people by supporting them through the Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS).

 

The STS first began in 1942 with sponsorship by Westinghouse. Intel took over the sponsorship in 1998. Dubbed "the junior Nobel Prize," Intel STS is the oldest and most prestigious science competition, with up to $1.25 million in scholarships.

 

This year there were 1,602 entrants from 45 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands in areas like biochemistry, chemistry, physics, mathematics, engineering, behavioral science and medicine and health. The field has been scaled down to 300 semifinalists, who will  receive $1,000 with an additional $1,000 to their respective school.

 

On Jan. 30, the field will be cut to 40 finalists, who will be brought to Washington, D.C. for a week-long, all-expenses-paid event in March. Each finalist will receive at least $5,000 and a new laptop run, while the top ten finalists will get $100,000 scholarships. They will be announced at a black-tie banquet on March 11.

 

Black tie? They don't even wear neckties at IDF…

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the consortium that helped develop the SATA interface,has announced its Power Over eSATA initiative, which will allow external SATA (eSATA) devices to draw on power from their attached device.

This will eliminate the pesky power cable, usually with a fat power adapter at the plug end. This will finally make eSATA devices comparable to FireWire, which draw their power from the attached device. Since the USB 2.0 spec will support the 3Gbits/sec. sustained throughput, those external drives will be pretty quick, too.

Power Over eSATA products are expected to be available on the market as soon as the second half of 2008.

 

Trend Micro has uncovered the first phishing attack associated with the Storm worm. Storm is a highly-resilient botnet that up to now has just been used for sending out spam. Now it seems to be trying to lure in people to a fake Web page for the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Usually, when a company identifies a security problem, it has a solution to sell. Such is the case here. Trend's security software has identified the domains behind these phishing sites and will block access to them should a person try to reach these sites.