Voice of Shaun Ellerton

Reported fraud in the UK during 2011 increased by 50% to stand at more than £2bn. Both the number and average value of reported cases also rose.

These are the findings of accountancy firm BDO’s annual FraudTrack report. It highlights the five primary types of fraud that account for more than 85% of the total: tax fraud (rising to 36%), supplier/customer fraud (rising to 30%), employee fraud (down to 10%), corruption (rising to 4%), and management fraud (down to 5.5%).

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Theresa Stevens, a resident of Beaumont, Texas, filed a class-action compliant in federal court in Louisville, Ky., against Amazon.com for failing to protect the personal information of Zappos’s customers.

“Defendant failed to adopt and maintain adequate procedures to protect [personal] information and limit its dissemination only for permissible purposes set forth in the FCRA [Fair Credit Reporting Act]. Defendant’s wrongful actions and/or inaction also constitute common law invasion of privacy by the public disclosure of private facts and common law negligence”, the complaint alleged.

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As SOPA’s aftershocks continue to ripple across the US, a slightly different brand of techno-political drama is unfolding over here in Europe, where the European Commission today announced a new set of online privacy regulations. The new legislation, unveiled this morning, was crafted with the intent of giving consumers more control over their online data, and places more pressure upon private companies to protect user information.

According to Reuters, offending firms could be fined at rates of up to two percent of their yearly turnover. The laws, designed to overhaul the 1995 Data Protection Directive, will also make it easier for users to access their data, giving them the power to demand that their personal information be deleted, as long as there are no “legitimate reasons” for a company to store it. Companies, meanwhile, will be required to inform authorities of a data breach as soon as possible, “if feasible, within 24 hours.”

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There’s an alarming rumor circulating that suggests that UK network O2 forwards your phone number to any website visited on a smartphone. Lewis Peckover built a site that displays the header data sent to sites you visit, finding a network-specific field called “x-up-calling-line-id” which displayed his number. Angry users who tested the site have flooded the company’s official Twitter, which is currently responding with:

“Security is our top most priority, we’re investigating this at the moment & will come back with more info as soon as we can.”

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The MegaUpload take-down is one of the hottest stories on the net, involving the FBI, illegal file-sharing, hackers’ revenge, the specter of SOPA and more. But don’t be too curious…

It’s only natural, given the relevance of the MegaUpload takedown, for people to be interested. What does the FBI message pasted on the MegaUpload front page look like? Is the site still down, or has it found some way to survive? But beware, because curiosity can infect the cat.

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Recently I was asked by a fellow coder about displaying the most recent members on his website that have joined. You see this statistic on many websites especially those such as forums, boards, blogs and other social mediums.

So I thought I would share a little PHP Snippet with my readers as to how you go about actually achieving this. First, you must realise that before you can list by this criteria you must be saving certain data to a field within your already existing database.

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We are into the New Year and many of us are looking at our personal finances. Looking at how we can save money, put our money to better use and savings.

Oddly enough, it seems to be the same for coders alike. I have been hanging around the coding forums over the holiday period and reading what fellow coders are struggling with. I have come accross the term ‘Calculating Compound Interest in PHP’ quite allot lately. Many mistakes are being made and in my opinion these mistakes can be avoided if we actually understand first what compound interest is and how the math works.

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In my time I have seen so many webpages developed by a very diverse crowd. Within these crowds I still keep coming across sites which use form select options but manually enter their data such as the last 100 years.

You might say whats wrong with that? Well, lets take a look at the coding involved in say making a birth year dropdown option in your form going back 100 years. Read on to see what is still commonly coded today yet such little attention is given to the use of PHP functions that save so much time and energy when programing code.

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Recently, I have been hanging around certain forums and I have come accross many fellow programmers wanting to know how to create a random string value. There are many reasons why you might need to generate a random string value in PHP.

For example, lets say you have a user wanting to register with your site; how would you confirm that they have used an official email account to register with? By generating such a random string value you could then save this value into your database and email them a link with this value in. When the link is clicked your coding would accept that the email address used is infact a valid one.

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Google is inviting users to take a trip down Memory Lane, with a new web archive on one of its most celebrated traditions — the Google doodle. Last week, the search giant unveiled a revamped doodle website, complete with an interactive gallery of over 1,000 homepage designs from around the world.

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