Visa USA is cutting ties with the payment-processing company that left 40 million credit- and debit-card accounts vulnerable to hackers in one of the biggest breaches of consumer data security.
CardSystems Solutions "has not corrected, and cannot at this point correct, the failure to provide proper data security for Visa accounts," said Rosetta Jones, a Visa vice president, in a statement.
Representatives for Atlanta-based CardSystems did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Visa's statement said that while CardSystems has taken some remedial action since the breach was disclosed, it could not overcome the fact that CardSystems had inappropriately held on to data purportedly for "research purposes" in violation of Visa's security rules.
While information relating to 40 million accounts was laid bare in the CardSystems computer break-in, credit card companies have said a much smaller number of accounts -- but at least 200,000, primarily MasterCard and Visa accounts -- was compromised.
MasterCard, American Express and Discover did not immediately say whether they would take similar steps to ban CardSystems.
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Get the picture?: Eastman Kodak said Wednesday it is cutting as many as 10,000 more jobs as the company that turned picture-taking into a hobby for the masses navigates a tough transition from film to digital photography.
Kodak, which earlier targeted 12,000 to 15,000 job cuts by 2007, made its surprising announcement of more job cuts as it swung to a disappointing loss for the second quarter in a row. It missed Wall Street forecasts by a wide margin, largely because of a steady slide in revenues from film and other chemical-based businesses.
The company lost $146 million, or 51 cents per share, in the April-June quarter, compared with a profit of $136 million, or 46 cents per share, in last year's second quarter.
Sales grew 6 percent to $3.69 billion from $3.46 billion a year ago.
Kodak now plans to cut 22,500 to 25,000 jobs, and to reduce its traditional manufacturing infrastructure to about $1 billion, down from $2.9 billion in January 2004. The restructuring is expected to be largely completed by the middle of 2007, and will shrink its work force to fewer than 50,000.
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Simply everywhere: Mobile phone sales will exceed 1 billion handsets a year by 2009 as the gadgets become the most common consumer electronics device, with 2.6 billion people using one by then, according to a survey published Wednesday.
Around 1.04 billion cell phones will be sold in 2009, up from an upwardly revised estimate of 779 million this year and 674 million handsets in 2004, the Gartner research group said.
"The mobile phone is the most prolific consumer device on the planet," said Gartner analyst Ben Wood. By comparison, every year around 200 million PCs and 200 million TVs are being sold.
The Asia-Pacific region is expected to see the most growth, with one out of every three mobile phones sales coming from that area by 2009.
"China and India alone will account for nearly 200 million units in 2007, with the Indian market surpassing China in 2009 to reach 139 million units," said analyst Ann Liang.
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Faster, faster: Broadband internet access via TV cables can reach 100 megabits per second as early as next year, 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes, a Finnish firm said Wednesday.
Similar data-transmission speeds are possible over fiber networks, but these cost much more for the operators to build.
"This is a cost-efficient technology as we use the cable TV networks which are already in place," said Jukka Rinnevaara, chief executive of Teleste, a small-cap Finnish broadband equipment maker.
Teleste, whose rivals include big U.S. firms Scientific Atlanta (SFA) and Cisco Systems (CSCO), plans to begin selling its Ethernet to the Home product early next year. It will give consumers access to 100-megabit speed, the company said.
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AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
