ING-Card (Classic) fraude

Last week I bought something on ebay. Much to my surprise I got a warning from Payal (on the web, secure), saying they could not process my payment because the credit-card company had refused the transaction, and that I had to contact my credit-card issuer for more information. So I called ING Card (supplier of my Mastercard compatible credit-card). Turned out they had blocked the use of my card, because of a suspicious transaction of 23000 Euro. Whoops! Luckily ING is insured against such fraudulent use, so I have nothing to worry about. Except of course the fact that it could happen in the first place. Since I'm extremely careful (almost paranoid) with my cc-data, I was quite amazed that even I had fallen victim to theft, so I decided to do some research on my own. The first transaction I know was not mine is: 24-11-2008 TELE2 MOBILE SEVRES FR 20,00 This couldn't possibly be my own doing; I was not in France on that date, did not leave my cc-data behind when I was there last time, nor did I use it online on or around that date, plus I already have other "MOBILE" providers so wouldn't need…

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Intel & Samsung set the new standard..

Economies and financial markets may be crashing, Intel and Samsung have made some amazing leaps forward with their latest Solid State Drives, check out these tests! Sure, these SSDs are still expensive, but the investment returns will be HUGE; Power usage of Intel's new storage media is around 5% of that from mechanical harddisks. Say you are Google and you serve about 100 petabytes of data each day, consider the energy savings (95%!) when you would use SSDs instead of doing it the old way.. I think SSDs will revolutionize computing almost two times faster than 'predicted' by Moore's law! The storage medium is no longer the bottleneck it always was. some smug flash cunts

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Horeca in tien jaar ruim 40 procent duurder

VOORBURG - Horecaprijzen zijn sinds eind 1998 met meer dan 40 procent gestegen. De prijsstijging lag in deze periode bijna altijd hoger dan de inflatie, die in totaal 25 procent bedroeg. Dat maakte het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS) maandag bekend. In oktober van dit jaar stegen de prijzen in kantines het sterkst. Prijsstijgingen van accomodaties zoals hotels, vakantiehuisjes en campings waren het geringst. In het tweede en derde kwartaal van dit jaar gaven Nederlanders aanzienlijk minder geld uit in de horeca. Dat hing samen met economische tegenwind en de forse prijsstijgingen. In bijna de gehele Europese Unie stegen de horecaprijzen de afgelopen jaren flink. Duitsland is een uitzondering. Horecaprijzen stegen daar vrijwel even hard als de gemiddelde consumentenprijs. En dan "het rookverbod" of "de euro" ineens de schuld geven natuurlijk.

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