Moderate levels of alcohol delivered an increase in longevity among test subjects in a recent study that Steven Clarke, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and senior author on a study published yesterday in the journal PLoS One, described as “shocking”.

After the conference I was at last weekend, I think I’m going to live forever.

NASA has switched off a heater on a part of the Voyager 1 probe, plunging the temperature of its one functioning instrument to below minus 110° Fahrenheit (minus 79°C) – well below the minimum temps of minus 31° Fahrenheit (minus 35° C) at which it was designed to operate.

And now the countdown until the events of “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” come to pass. Be on the look out for V’Ger.

A care provider with offices in the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland has committed to improving its data protection standards after losing a memory stick containing unencrypted patient data.

The charity, Praxis Care, lost the memory stick in August 2011.

The device held personal information relating to 107 Isle of Man residents and 53 individuals from Northern Ireland, which in some cases related to their mental health and care. It has not been recovered, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

It’s amazing that this kind of thing continues to happen. Encryption guys – it’s not difficult or expensive (especially compared to the cost of losing it!).

More interestingly, why was this data walking around on a USB stick in the first place? As well as encrypting data, people need to start looking at containing it. Why is someone trying to copy patient data? Are they authorised to do so? Is the device an authorised destination? DLP doesn’t have to be difficult or onerous to implement.

Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust told Out-Law.com that hard drives containing patient data had been sold on the auction website by a contractor it employed to destroy them. A spokesperson for the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the watchdog had proposed fining the Trust £375,000 over the incident. The Trust has challenged the suggested penalty. “We were the victims of a crime,” Duncan Selbie, chief executive of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust said in a statement. “We subcontracted the destruction of these hard drives to a registered contractor who subsequently sold them on eBay.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Sure, securely erasing hard drives can be time consuming… but it’s a lot better than a 375k fine and the loss of reputation and good will.

With Google Sync for iOS, the default setting when you delete email in your iOS Mail app is that Gmail will archive the message and not delete it.

A new option “Delete Email As Trash” is now available. When you Enable “Delete Email As Trash” for this device, pressing Delete in your iOS Mail app will delete that email from your device and send it to your Gmail Trash.

Finally!

My biggest complaint with using Gmail with an external client (eg Mail on an iPhone) is that delete doesn’t really delete – it archives. I don’t want it to archive, I want it to delete!

Sure, using the Gmail app or the browser view works around this, but that really doesn’t solve the problem.

Now, finally, you can configure the action from the Google Sync settings page on your mobile device.

The attack on JAXA follows a run of similar cyber-assaults against the Japanese government and industrial giants. Last September Mitsubishi Heavy Industries acknowledged that it had become the victim of the most high-profile of these cyber-attacks. The Japanese parliament confirmed it had been hit by another assault in October. Both attacks were blamed on Chinese hackers.

Any essential part of any threat mitigation strategy is detection and containment: If a system is compromised, how do you detect it? How do you stop internal data from being taken?

Being able to detect – and stop – malicious agents from communicating with C&C servers is an essential part of the security posture.

Oppose these bills. Please.

CHRISTINE MILNE: This long awaited energy paper it’s really a blast from the past. I mean Einstein once said that you can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them.

She’s right, of course. The mistake of the past was not using nuclear power. That mistake should be rectified.