THUD

No, I'm not channelling Terry Pratchett.  This Thud had an Ouch after it.  I was up unable to sleep last night, and on my way to the kitchen for a glass of milk I ran my left¹ foot into the Dyson vacuum cleaner in the dark, stumbled, and proceeded to smack my face hard on the top of the handle, ripping the inside of my upper lip open on my teeth.

[1]  Naturally.

YACCB

That's "Yet Another Credit Card Breach".  Princeton, NJ payment processor Heartland Payment Services suspected three months ago that they'd been compromised, and called in outside forensic investigators in December after internal auditors failed to find a smoking gun, but didn't see fit to tell anyone until now.  Heartland says "tens of millions" of Visa and Mastercard credit and debit cards may have been compromised.  Other sources say the number may be over 100 million; Heartland claims to process a hundred million credit card transactions per month.

[Heartland President and CFO Robert] Baldwin said 40 percent of transactions the company processes are from small to mid-sized restaurants across the country.  He declined to name any well-known establishments or retail clients that may have been affected by the breach.  Baldwin said it would be unfair to mention any one of his company's customers.

Baldwin may decline to identify them, but if 40% come from "small to midsize restaurants" and "no single customer accounts for more than a tenth of a percent" of their transactions, I'll bet you most or all of the other 60% come from small retail merchants and other small businesses.

Like the Hannafords breach, this one involves a sniffer "of a previously undiscovered variety" planted on Heartland's payment processing network.  Heartland doesn't know how it got there or how long it's been there.  The Secret Service is investigating, and reportedly believes the breach to be associated with a cybercrime gang under ongoing investigation and believed to be responsible for "a significant number of breaches of financial institutions".

Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc., questioned the timing of Heartland's disclosure -- a day in which many Americans and news outlets are glued to coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration as the nation's 44th president.

"This looks like the biggest breach ever disclosed, and they're doing it on inauguration day?" Litan said.  "I can't believe they waited until today to disclose.  That seems very deceptive."

But Baldwin says they got the information out on "the first possible day that they could" once they actually confirmed the breach.

(Pointer credit to mazianni)

Calling all geeks

We have a 500-gallon outside propane tank. It's maybe 30 feet from the house.  It has a gauge on top, under an armored cover, but the tank is frequently on the far side of (and frequently covered in) significant amounts of snow.

Does anyone happen to know of, or have any suggestions for, a way I can remotely monitor the level of propane in the tank?  Obviously anything that would involve retrofitting a sensor of some kind inside the tank is pretty much out.

Edited to add:  I need to get data back in a form that can just be logged and charted automatically 24 hours a day, preferably without having to do image recognition on webcam images of the gauge.

Not a proud milestone

It is asserted here, supported by data from Contrary Investor (subscription only, it appears), that since what looks like about 2002 the US has had more people employed in government than in manufacturing and construction combined.  From the provided chart, the current margin is about two million.

This is not a good sign at all.