Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Storage units foiling gift snoopersâ’ plans
- Storage keeps gifts from snooping eyes
- Seagate Evolves
- AFX European summary – late
- Banking on minivans: Chrysler stands by hit product from 1980s.
- Cyber Crime Hits the Big Time in 2006

Storage units foiling gift snoopersâ’ plans
Naples Daily News – Naples Daily News – Dec 22, 2006
And Gloria’s attitude about Christmas made me stop in the toy section again this week to buy more gifts to donate. ”According to Gloria, San Carlos Self Storage has rented about 15 Christmas closets. Olde Naples Self Storage, which is managed by the same company, rented about 10, according to Linda Targett, co-manager. Tenants also ship presents to the facility to keep them secret from kids and spouses, Targett said. “I’m Santa’s helper,” said Denise Minacapelli, who works at USA Stor-A-Way in Naples. “My customers will say, ‘If you see my wife coming in, distract her, don’t let her in the unit,’ or ‘If a package comes for me please let me know, but don’t say what you’re calling about to anyone on the phone. ’ “More of the smaller units get rented at Cypress Self Storage in Naples around Christmas, said Bethany Smith, assistant manager.

Storage keeps gifts from snooping eyes
Albuquerque Tribune – Dec 22, 2006
“It’s the only way to keep the kids’ curiosity in check. Koniezka, who has two grown children, says she’s noticed more people grabbing smaller storage lots from her company this season. Some people have told her they’re using them to hide presents from the kids, and others say they’re making room for gifts they anticipate getting on Christmas morning, she said. “Most of it seems to be people expecting TVs and things like that, although there’s also some furniture,” Koniezka said. “I think they’re putting away the old in hopes of getting the new. In Nashville, Tenn.

Seagate Evolves
Motley Fool – Dec 22, 2006
This move continues a trend of purchasing data-storage service providers that the company started in 2005. In the past year, Seagate has also acquired Mirra, a provider of digital-content protection, and Action Front, a company that specializes in data recovery. All of these moves make sense, because online backup and recovery, as well as archiving for small and medium-sized businesses, promises to be big business in the near future. These acquisitions also give Seagate a toehold in this burgeoning industry, which might allow it to compete successfully with the likes of Amazon.

AFX European summary – late
Forbes – Dec 22, 2006
08 pct lower, at 6,503. 13, after moving in a range of 6,493… 3 pct in November for the second consecutive month, in line with expectations, it added. HOUSTON (AFX) – El Paso Corp, which produces and delivers natural gas, said it sold its Michigan storage assets and its 50 percent interest in Great Lakes Gas Transmission to TransCanada Corp. and TC PipeLines LP for about 3. NEW YORK (AFX) – Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp will swap its controlling stake in the satellite TV broadcaster DirecTV Group Inc with Liberty Media Corp in exchange for Liberty’s 16 pct stake in News Corp, the companies said. The deal settles a long-simmering dispute between Murdoch, News Corp’s chairman and CEO and Liberty’s chairman John Malone, who surprised Murdoch two years ago by suddenly building up a large stake in the global media conglomerate that Murdoch built.

Banking on minivans: Chrysler stands by hit product from 1980s.
Free with registration – Detroit Free Press – AccessMyLibrary.com – Dec 22, 2006
(22-DEC-06) Detroit Free Press (Detroit, MI). Even as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. plan to ditch their miniva.

Cyber Crime Hits the Big Time in 2006
Washington Post – Dec 22, 2006
-based e-mail security firm. The volume of spam shot up 60 percent in the past two months alone as spammers began embedding their messages in images to evade junk e-mail filters that search for particular words and phrases. As a result, network administrators are not only having to deal with considerably more junk mail, but the image-laden messages also require roughly three times more storage space and Internet bandwidth for companies to process than text-based e-mail, said Daniel Druker, Postini’s vice president of marketing. "We’re getting an unprecedented amount of calls from people whose e-mail systems are melting down under this onslaught," Druker said. Spam volumes are often viewed as a barometer for the relative security of the Internet community at large, in part because most spam is relayed via "bots," a term used to describe home computers that online criminals have compromised surreptitiously with a computer virus or worm. The more compromised computers that the bad guys control and link together in networks, or "botnets," the greater volume of spam they can blast onto the Intenet. At any given time, there are between three and four million bots active on the Internet, according to Gadi Evron, a botnet expert who managed Internet security for the Israeli government before joining Beyond Security, an Israeli firm that consults with companies on security… And that estimate only counts spam bots. Evron said there are millions of other bots that are typically used to launch "distributed denial-of-service" attacks — online shakedowns wherein attackers overwhelm Web sites with useless data if the targets refuse to pay protection money. "Botnets have become the moving force behind organized crime online, with a low-risk, high-profit calculation," Evron said. He estimated that organized criminals would earn about $2 billion this year through phishing scams, which involve the use of spam and fake Web sites to trick computer users into disclosing financial and other personal data. Criminals also seed bots with programs that can record and steal usernames and passwords from compromised computers. Crime-Dot-9-to-5Another interesting measure of the growth of online crime is data showing that criminal groups have shifted their activities from nights and weekends to weekday attacks, suggesting that online crime is evolving into a full-time profession for many.