Consumers should guard against scam e-mails and phone calls from people purporting to be representatives of Winners and HomeSense, the company’s chairman said Monday.

Ben Cammarata, the chairman of parent company TJX Cos., is urging people to be vigilant and protect their personal information.

“Criminals use situations like this to scam you, the public,” Cammarata said in a video posted on the company website. “Consumers need to be wary of scams, hoax e-mails and calls in which they are contacted by someone claiming to represent TJX. I assure you we would never solicit personal information via phone or e-mail.”

TJXCos. says it learned in mid-December that computer hackers had stolen customer data to make fraudulent debit- and credit-card purchases. The company said it didn’t disclose the security breach for a month in an attempt to thwart further damage.

During that time, the company reinforced its computer network, Cammarata said in a letter posted on the company website and printed in U.S. newspapers.

“We immediately engaged two leading computer security and incident response firms to investigate the problem and enhance our computer security in order to protect our customers’ data,” Cammarata said in the letter addressed to “Our Valued Customers.” ‘Major breach of consumer confidence’

Consumer advocates have criticized the handling of the breach,saying it deeply violated consumer trust.

“What happened at Winners is a major breach of consumer confidence because when people put down their credit card they assume it’s going to be safe,” said Tom Keenan, a professor at the University of Calgary, following the announcement of the security breach.

“Now they find out that transactions as far back as 2003 have been compromised and they don’t know where that information has gone. It could be for sale on a hacker bulletin board somewhere in Russia by now,” Keenan said. Canadian debit cards not compromised

According to the company’s investigation, hackers gained entry to the computer system in May 2006. The company says debit transactions made atWinners and HomeSensein Canada were not compromised in the breach.

“Our computer security experts have now completed their investigation of the portion of our computer network that handles Winners and HomeSense transactions, and they have advised us that they do not believe that debit cards issued by Canadian banks were compromised in the intrusion,” the company said in a statement.

Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said Jan. 19 that it was checking to see if TJX Cos. was in compliance with private sector privacy laws.

Last week, following news of a possible privacy breach at clothing retailer Club Monaco, Stoddart said she planned on recommending legislation making it mandatory for companies to report security breaches.

REVIEW

Life has a funny symmetry, don’t you think? When you’re born, you’re short, toothless and bald. You spend the first part of your life gaining height, teeth and hair and the last part losing them again.

Believe it or not, Microsoft Office is following the same trajectory. (This might sound like the stretched analogy of the year, but bear with me.)

Microsoft spent the first dozen years of Office’s life piling on new features. Over time, the humble word processor called Word became a photo editor, a Web-design program and dessert topping. Not one person in a hundred used those extra features. Still, we kept buying the upgrades, thanks to our innate fondness for unnecessary power (see also: SUVs).

Eventually, however, Microsoft Office developed a reputation for bloat and complexity. It was fully grown: tall, hairy and toothy.

So what did Microsoft do? It began shrinking Microsoft Office. In fact, the chief sales point of Office 2007 (for Windows XP or Vista), which makes its debut on Jan. 30, is that it is simpler, more streamlined and creates much smaller documents.

Thanks to a radical redesign, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are practically totally new programs. There are no more floating toolbars; very few tasks require opening dialog boxes, and even the menu bar itself is gone.

Instead, almost the entire world of formatting options has been dug out of Office’s guts and artfully arranged on a top-mounted strip of controls called the Ribbon.

You no longer have to spend 20 minutes hunting through menus for Page Numbering or whatever. It’s all right there on the Ribbon. What was once buried four layers deep is now arrayed before you in a big software smorgasbord.

Better yet, you can see how each formatting choice will affect your document a font, style or color change, let’s say just by pointing to a control without clicking. No Apply button, no thumbnail preview; your actual document changes temporarily and automatically. (Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with chart styles in Excel.)

The bad news, of course, is that this Office bears very little resemblance to the one you may have spent years learning. Virtually everything has been moved around or renamed. Count on a couple of weeks of frustration as you play a game you could call Find the Feature.

The game is so challenging because the Ribbon changes. Its controls change depending on which of the seven permanent tabs you click at the top of the screen (Home, Insert, View, and so on). Still other Ribbons appear only when needed; a graphics Ribbon appears, for example, when you click a picture in the document.

You’re stuck with the tabs Microsoft gives you. You can’t rearrange them or hide the ones you never use. Even if you never create form letters or write academic dissertations, the Mailings and References tabs will be there on the Ribbon forever, wasting space.

Nor is that the only loss of customizability. Microsoft has also removed the ability to design custom toolbars stocked with the features, fonts or style sheets you use most. In Office 2007, the only thing you can customize is something called the Quick Bar: a tiny row of unlabeled icons, awkwardly jammed in above or below the Ribbon.

The second big disruptive change is the new file format. Microsoft, to its credit, has not touched the standard Word, Excel and PowerPoint file formats for 10 years. You never had to worry that your colleagues’ Macs or PCs would not be able to open your documents.

Now you do. The new file formats (.docx for Word, for example) are much more compact than the old ones, and they’re also easier to recover from data corruption. But older versions of Office for Windows can’t open them without a free converter (available at microsoftoffice.com). Office 2004 for Macintosh can’t open them at all, although shareware and Web conversion utilities are available.

Fortunately, you can easily instruct your copy of Office 2007 to save its documents in the older format. In these turbulent transitional times, that might be a good idea.

The Ribbon reorganization and new document formats are by far the most important changes in Office 2007. There are, of course, some other new features, especially in Word.

Word has always let you define style sheets: memorized sets of formatting characteristics for headings and captions, for example that you can apply with one click. Now, however, there are sets of coordinated styles. One click on Elegant or Formal, for example, impressively reformats all styles in an entire document.

Streams of glittering stellar gems on the outer edges of Andromeda are remnants of an ancient galactic collision that helped shape the spiral galaxy.

Astronomers using the DEIMOS spectrograph on the Keck II Telescope in Hawaii determined this by surveying Andromeda, our galaxy’s nearest large galactic neighbor, and discovered a trail of http://www.space.com/stars/ which they believe were part of a different galaxy that merged with Andromeda some 700 million years ago.

The findings support previous computer simulations of a dwarf galaxy merging with Andromeda and could help astronomers calculate Andromedas total mass, a slippery value that, once arrived at, could help shed light on the elusive http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/dark_matter_sidebar_010105.html that pervades the http://www.space.com/universe/.

Also known as http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagegallery/igviewer.php?imgid=3808&gid=277, Andromeda is located only 2.5 million light-years from Earth. Like other spiral galaxies, Andromeda is made up of a flat disk of stars and gas, a bright central bulge of densely concentrated stars, and at times, a dim, spherical skirt of stars that extends to large distances.

The visible matter is just fluff, however, in terms of mass. The bulk of the mass in a spiral galaxy comes from dark matter, an exotic entity detectible only through its gravitational force. Scientists estimate that http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070108_mm_darkmatter_map.html makes up five-sixths of the matter in the entire universe.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/061012_spiderweb_galaxy.html are believed to be built partly by the http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060123_andromeda_plane.html of smaller galaxies, an event that destroys the smaller galaxy, said Karoline Gilbert, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who presented the Andromeda findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle earlier this month.

The strong gravitational forces of a large galaxy, Gilbert explained, can rip apart a small galaxy, producing loose streams of stars that astronomers call .

‘Measuring the amount of the tidal debris that exists in present-day galaxies allows astronomers to examine the role mergers play in galaxy formation,’ she said.

Several twinkling areasincluding a stream of stars located south of the galaxy, called the “giant southern stream,” and a faint extension of Andromedas disk called the “northeast shelf” in the galaxys outskirts are most likely tidal debris from previous http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060307_galaxy_sonicboom.html.

The discovered tidal debris features are almost an exact match with the features predicted in the computer simulations, Gilbert said. This implies that this new stellar stream and the giant southern stream, as well as the other stellar features reproduced in the simulations, came from the same parent galaxy.

Because they are moving together, astronomers can use the stars in the tidal debris to measure the strength of gravity around the Andromeda galaxy, said Mark Fardal of the University of Massachusetts Amherst who created the computer models.

Gilberts discovery of a new tidal debris feature, combined with velocity measurements of the other related tidal debris, will provide observations necessary to measure how much dark matter is in Andromeda, he said, and how it is distributed. 2007 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. has been found guilty of speeding in a July 4 incident in which he was pulled over on Interstate 75 for driving 103 mph.

The 28-year-old singer appeared in Bartow County court Tuesday to face a speeding citation. He was fined $425 by Probate Court Judge Mitchell Scoggins and told to perform 20 hours of community service.

After the ruling, Usher spent 30 minutes signing autographs for fans inside the courthouse, said a representative for Scoggins.

Usher is a five-time winner. His hits include “Confessions,” “Burn,” “You Make Me Wanna” and “Yeah!” http://www.foxnews.com/foxlife/celebtrouble/index.html

CALABASAS, California: A new energy drink does not promise to give you the juice to play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, but it does hope to give you a “Liquid Experience.”

Beverage Concepts says its non-alcoholic “Liquid Experience” drinks, named for Hendrix’s breakthrough 1967 album, “Are You Experienced?” will debut in April.

The concept is irking some Hendrix fans, many of whom still consider him the greatest guitarist of all time.

“To see his image and the beautiful feelings it has created during my lifetime cheapened by base advertising … is very disappointing to me,” said bassist Michael Balzary, better known as Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The image of Hendrix, who died in 1970 from a drug overdose in London, has been licensed for products including baby clothing, an air freshener, lava lamp and a Christmas ornament. Portions of royalties have gone to several educational causes, including the United Negro College Fund, said Bruce Kuhlman, director of licensing and brand development for Authentic Hendrix, the Seattle-based company that controls use of Hendrix’s name and images.

Beverage Concepts Chief Executive Josh Glass said his company would honor Hendrix’s memory by donating some of the profit from the Liquid Experience to an unidentified music education foundation.

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On the Net:

Authentic Hendrix: http://www.authentichendrix.com

Beverage Concepts: http://www.beverageconcepts.net