A new public service announcement from Honda perfectly captures the way text messaging has become integral to our most intimate relationships.
The ad shows a close-up of a cell phone text-messaging conversation between two lovers who exchange the sort of flirty banter that will resonate with anyone who has ever waited anxiously for someone they love to come home and fall into their arms.
In this case, one of the parties is returning home after receiving a gift from his or her squeeze.
Alas, the mood is destroyed when one of the texters gets into a car accident.
The ad, made by the agency RPA, concludes with a simple message from Honda: Don't text and drive.
According to the Virginia Teach Transportation Institute, texting while driving makes people nearly three times more likely to get in a car crash than those who don't. Despite this danger, recent research suggests that four out of five college students have done so anyway.
Honda is just one of several parties who have tried to convince young people that their sense of invincibility is no match for the very real risks of distracted driving.
Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sponsored an ad that followed a group of teenagers whose good time ended abruptly with a jarring car crash.
And in March, a Bay Area graphic designer bought billboards in San Francisco that sought to shame people caught on camera texting behind the wheel.
SEE ALSO: 15 Jarring Ads That Will Keep You From Texting And Driving
In what's sure to be the first of many to come, a 19-year-old Canadian man was arrested for exploiting the Heartbleed bug to lift taxpayer data from a government website, making this the first official Heartbleed-related arrest.
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BANKS REASSURE ON HEARTBLEED, BUT QUESTIONS REMAIN: The American Banking Association says that most Internet banking websites and apps are not affected by the Heartbleed security flaw, and most major banks have issued statements to similar effect. “To date, we are not aware of any U.S. banks that have been exploited using this vulnerability,” FDIC spokesman Greg Hernandez tells us. But such assurances are “meaningless,” says Richard Kenner, vice president of AdaCore, the software firm that works primarily with the highly security-sensitive aerospace and defense industries. Any bank using the affected encryption software, one of two programs widely available for securing information stored on Linux servers, would have no way of knowing if it had been attacked, Kenner tells us. “Banks historically have been good at making safes, but they have not been good at securing their software,” he adds. (Keith Griffith for BI Intelligence)
Meanwhile, the first confirmed reports of Heartbleed attacks have landed, from the Canada Revenue Agency, and a UK parenting website. “Based on our analysis to date, Social Insurance Numbers (SIN) of approximately 900 taxpayers were removed from CRA systems by someone exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability,” the Canadian tax agency said in a statement. Site administrators of Britain's Mumsnet were advised by hackers that their user accounts had been compromised. (CRA, BBC)
QUOTE OF THE DAY — “It was a simple programming error in a new feature, which unfortunately occurred in a security-relevant area.” Dr. Robin Seggelmann, the software programmer who wrote the code containing the Heartbleed encryption flaw. (Sydney Morning Herald)
PEER-TO-PEER PAYMENT APPS WILL SPUR MOBILE PAYMENT ADOPTION: Retailers and payments providers alike would like to see consumers use smartphones to make payments instead of cash or credit cards. For retailers the data gleaned from these services can be used to up-sell or cross-sell products to their customers. For payments companies smartphones offer an opportunity to carve out market share of an industry in flux. The problem? Consumers aren't adopting mobile payments because they don't offer compelling advantages to cash and credit cards. As we explain in a new report, an emerging category of peer-to-peer payments services that allows consumers to transfer money to one and other is going to take off across the globe, and once it does — consumers will inevitably move to other forms of mobile payments. (BI Intelligence)
MORE ON FACEBOOK'S PAYMENTS PLAY: BI Intelligence reached out to London-based online money transfer firm Azimo, which according to the Financial Times was approached with a $10 million deal from Facebook for an online payment service partnership. A company spokesman neither confirmed nor denied the Financial Times reports, except to say that Azimo preferred to keep partnership offers to itself. -- For more information read the original article here.
-- For more information read the original article here.