A Little Bit Of Everything: September 2007

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Digital Cameras Record Baby's Every Move

Sep 16, 3:03 PM (ET)

By ANICK JESDANUN

NEW YORK (AP) - For her 30th birthday, while she was still pregnant, Lindsay Nie received from Mom an album filled with her baby and childhood photos.

She enjoyed the trip down memory lane - recalling, for instance, the wooden slide she had in her room and the way she used to play on it. But she also noticed many gaps in the collection, in some cases months or even a year in length.

So after Nie gave birth to Amber last December, she was determined to leave a better record, a daily diary through imagery. She slips her Canon PowerShot SD450 digital camera into a diaper bag anywhere she goes and has snapped more than 6,500 photos in nine months.

"I grab it all the time, if she's just doing something really cute, maybe playing with a toy or grabbing a shoe in a shoe store," Nie said. "I don't really delete any. Years from now, I want to remember the bad face she made" - not just the smiles.

Thanks to cheap and easy-to-use recording devices - digital cameras, camcorders, camera phones - today's kids are forming the most documented generation ever, as parents, relatives and friends capture forever the first, second and hundredth smile.

The challenge will come in managing all the data and making sure they get migrated and cared for along the way.

"There's going to be little escaping the embarrassment that comes with having that many baby photos and videos," said Steve Jones, a communications professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "On the other hand, what a great thing for this generation to have."

The research company InfoTrends estimates that 67 percent of U.S. households had digital cameras last year, up from 42 percent in 2004.

Today's children will get a glimpse tomorrow of what everyday life was like - how their parents dressed, what furniture and paintings were in their homes - not just during birthdays and special occasions when past generations were more apt to pull out their film cameras and pose in their best outfits.

"With digital you can just keep on taking to get the one you want," said Amy Short, a nurse in East Alton, Ill. "I definitely take a lot more of my son of just everyday, laying around or sleeping or just little things."

Virginia Merritt of Newnan, Ga., laments that she has few records from her life past 8 months, including when she started walking.

"I just have what my mom remembers," she said.

So for Evan, who turns 1 on Sept. 25, Merritt made sure to keep a list of firsts on the Web site TotSites, including first use of a sippy cup (Aug. 8), first fever (April 8) and first passing of a toy from one hand to the other (Feb. 12) - categories generally not found in traditional, printed baby books.

She also posted sonograms from her pregnancy at Baby Crowd, a Web site for expecting parents.

But all this documentation may carry a price if parents, in spending so much energy creating and preserving a digital archive, fail to enjoy living the moment.

And will future generations even have time to look through stacks of CDs containing tens or hundreds of thousands of photos, and even if they do will individual memories become less precious because there are so many?

What if disk drives fail or software formats change, rendering photos unreadable by tomorrow's computers? Will CDs even work? Think of those reels of 8 mm home movies with no projectors for viewing them.

"If you look at your parents' or grandparents' belongings, you can find old negatives, ... and negatives are still reproducible," said Greg Miele, a Bethesda, Md., father of two, ages 9 and 17. "Yet if you have a hard drive fail on your computer, it's all over. It's a huge risk to maintain your photographs in a digital medium."

After two years of shooting digital, Heidi Grunwald has started returning to film, overwhelmed by the prospect of cataloging all the photos too easily snapped.

"It's taking a lot of enjoyment out of photography," said the mother of a 9-year-old. "I find myself not even using the camera, thinking that if I take photographs of this school event, I'm now going to have to spend a whole week processing them. Why do you need all those pictures? Who's going to look at them all at the end of the day?"

Many parents acknowledge their kids may never want all the photos, but they say they'd like to have them available just in case they want them - particularly as they become parents themselves.

"Now that I have children of my own, I would love to see baby pictures of me to see if my daughter looks like I did, what characteristics I share," said Thea Jankowski of Saint Charles, Ill.

Until that day comes, many of the photos are being distributed to family and friends via e-mail and photo-sharing Web sites - in some cases exposing their child's most private moments to the entire world.

Some parents buy additional disk drives to archive photos, burn them on CDs or keep copies online - not always mindful that photo sites often make it difficult to retrieve the original, high-resolution versions necessary for quality prints.

Brian Gilbreth of Louisa, Va., simply buys new memory cards for his camera. He has four already, each holding 2,000 shots of newborn Ava, including "every outfit she's in, every facial expression, every hairdo she comes out with."

Nie, who lives in New York, has been taking monthly shots of her child in the same armchair, each with a birthday cake. It's today's equivalent of the formal portraits past generations took at J.C. Penney or Sears.

Alexa Schmid, mother of twins in Plymouth, N.H., snaps shots of her daughters "recognizing each other, playing with each other."

She stores the images on the computer with separate subfolders for each month, and she renames some files - as in "Isabella Playing" with the date - in hopes of remembering the context years from now.

Jennifer Lucas, of Frankfort, Ill., makes prints of the best photos and keeps them in a traditional album. She keeps the rest by month on CDs.

"Looking back at what my parents have of me, there might be 20 to 30 pictures from my entire first year," Lucas said. With Jack, born four months ago, "we already have hundreds documenting everything he's already done. Chances are those discs are never going to be looked at again when he gets older, but they will be there in case."

Saturday, September 15, 2007

TD Ameritrade Says Contact Info Stolen

Sep 15, 5:48 AM (ET)

By JOSH FUNK

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) - Online brokerage TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. (AMTD) (AMTD) said Friday one of its databases was hacked and contact information for its more than 6.3 million customers was stolen. A spokeswoman for the Omaha-based company said more sensitive information in the same database, including Social Security numbers and account numbers, does not appear to have been taken.

The company would not share many details of its investigation, including when the hack took place, because it is still looking into the theft and cooperating with investigators from the FBI, Securities and Exchange Commission, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and local authorities.

But Ameritrade has known about the problem at least since late May when two of its customers sued the brokerage in federal court because they were receiving unwanted e-mail ads on accounts used only for Ameritrade.

The data on Ameritrade's servers may have been vulnerable for an extended period of time dating back at least to last October, according to the lawsuit filed by lawyer Scott A. Kamber. The company said Friday the problem had recently been fixed.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit had wanted the court to order Ameritrade to tell its customers about the data problem, but Ameritrade issued its release before a hearing could be held. The plaintiffs are also seeking damages and are trying to qualify as a class-action lawsuit.

"They preferred putting out a press release with their own language in it rather than have the court order them to put out a release with our language," Kamber said.

Ameritrade officials did not immediately respond to a message left Friday afternoon with questions about the lawsuit.

Earlier in the day, Ameritrade spokeswoman Kim Hillyer said the company discovered the breach in its system during a routine review of complaints about e-mail ads.

"As soon as we found the issue and were able to stop it, we made plans to notify clients," Hillyer said.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say all the unwanted e-mail ads they received appeared to be designed to manipulate the value of thinly traded stocks.

This breach is smaller than the biggest known data breach at a company, which was the theft of at least 45 million credit card numbers of TJX Cos. (TJX) retail customers that was reported earlier this year. But the Ameritrade problem is still significantly larger than many data breaches that involve hundreds or thousands but not millions of records.

Ameritrade spokeswoman Katrina Becker said there is no evidence that any customer suffered financial losses or had been a victim of identity theft.

Becker would not say why the company was confident Social Security numbers had not been taken even though they were kept in the same database as customer contact information, trading data and demographic information.

Other Ameritrade databases where information such as passwords, user IDs and personal identification numbers are kept were not violated, the company said.

Ameritrade hired ID Analytics Inc., which has expertise in identity theft, to help with the investigation, and it plans to continue using the company to monitor its servers for potential identity theft.

ID Analytics will continue checking Ameritrade customer data against other databases to watch for identity theft because it could emerge later, said Mike Cook, chief operating officer for the San Diego company.

"Just because a breached file is not misused today, it doesn't mean that it won't be misused in the future," Cook said.

If all the thieves obtained was basic contact information, Cook said that might not be enough to steal an identity and apply for credit in another person's name. But he said the thieves might try to obtain additional information from a victim by posing as a legitimate business in an e-mail.

Ameritrade started notifying its customers about the data theft Friday, and the brokerage posted information about it on its Web site.

"While the financial assets our clients hold with us were never touched, and there is no evidence that our clients' Social Security Numbers were taken, we understand that this issue has increased unwanted SPAM, which is annoying and inconvenient for them," Chief Executive Joe Moglia said in a statement. "We sincerely apologize for that and any added concern this may have caused."

Ameritrade is telling customers they don't need to do anything with their accounts except "remain alert in guarding their personal information." The company's asset-protection guarantee would cover any losses in Ameritrade accounts because of identity theft or fraud.

Ameritrade said it is confident that it identified how the information was stolen and has changed its computer code enough to prevent the theft from recurring. It said any new client who opened an account after July 18 was not affected.

Hillyer said the company's investigation was able to determine that the database had not been hacked after July 18.

Ameritrade's 6.34 million accounts as of July make it one of the nation's biggest discount brokers after leader Charles Schwab Corp. (SCHW), which has 6.9 million brokerage accounts.

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On the Net:

TD Ameritrade Holding Corp.: http://www.amtd.com

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse: http://privacyrights.org

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

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