Hooker beating: What if you read the Bible AND play GTA5?

Plus: 'I'll try not to play Candy Crush in Parliament in future'

La la la, I can't hear you ...

BT-owned Blighty broadband firm Plusnet has brushed off concerns from users who are worried that their email accounts have been compromised by spammers. Reg reader Simon said:

On 14th November a number of Plusnet customers started receiving marketing emails from a US company on email addresses they have given to Plusnet for billing purposes.

These customers say they have never given these email addresses to anyone else and are not receiving the same marketing messages to any other email address.

The only apparent conclusion is someone has obtained the billing email addresses of Plusnet customers.

However, despite a long list of complaints on the telco’s support forum, Plusnet has yet to take responsibility for the breach.

Simon added:

As an ISP, they have an obligation to report data losses to the Information Commissioner's Office [ICO] and are currently refusing. Not a very responsible attitude on their part, given they are meant to be the cuddly face of internet access.

The ICO told The Reg that organisations were required to notify it if they thought a personal data breach had occurred:

If a person still believes that the company has failed to look after their information then they should raise their concerns with Plusnet in the first instance. If they are not satisfied with the company’s response then they can raise the issue with our office providing any supporting evidence that they have, including details of the company’s response.

However, a Plusnet staffer said on the forum:

The decision to report matters to the ICO lies with our legal and compliance teams. I'm no legal expert (and don't get me wrong, I recognise some of the observations from you guys speak for themselves) but I'm not 100 per cent sure something like this would qualify. Not without explicit and quantifiable evidence that shows one of our systems to have been compromised, something we're almost certain hasn't happened.

And also in Blighty, the Public Accounts Committee has said that just £34m of the £600m IT investment in the Universal Credit system fiasco will ever be re-usable. Committee chair Margaret Hodge said:

The truth is of what we've invested in live, only £34m will go over to digital.

But Robert Devereux, permanent secretary for the Department of Work and Pensions, denied that the project was a write-off, claiming it will still save billions for the taxpayer:

£2bn in savings for the taxpayer, is that a shambles?

The system has once more been flagged as “high risk” by the Major Projects Authority, just six months after the MPA revealed that the entire thing had been reset. Brian Wernham, author of Agile Project Management for Government, said:

The biggest surprise was the Treasury revealed the project has been assessed again and has been rated amber-red. This is after it had been given a clean sheet of paper.

Hodge said that just “a couple of per cent” of people were using the system, around 18,000, instead of the two million it was supposed to be at this point.

And finally, mental healthcare professionals for bloggers at Amberhawk Training apparently have to listen to a lot of tech talk. In a post on Monday about the European Court of Justice’s second landmark judgment on whether the Domestic Purpose exemption of the Data Protection Act should apply to home CCTV, the blogger wrote:

I was just explaining to my psychiatrist that December 11th this week will be a very exciting day for data protection aficionados.

In case you’re not one of those aficionados, the ICO in the UK reckons that domestic exemption does apply to home CCTV, but if the ECJ follows the Advocate General, it wouldn’t apply if the CCTV also covered public spaces like the street outside the home. In the end, the ECJ went with the second option, narrowing the scope of household exemption. ®