First the oil leak, now the data dump. British Petroleum disclosed to the press yesterday that one of its employees had lost a laptop containing the personal information on approximately 13,000 people who had filed claims related to last year’s disastrous Deepwater Horizon leak.

According to CNN, the laptop contained “names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and Social Security numbers for those who filed claims related to last year’s Deepwater Horizon spill.” While the laptop was password-protected and capable of being remotely disabled, the data was not encrypted.

BP says that the data was lost by an employee during “routine business travel,” and that “there is no evidence that the laptop or data was targeted, or that anyone’s personal data has in fact been compromised or accessed in any way.” BP has offered to pay for credit-monitoring services for the 13,000 people whose personal data was lost, although according to an AP report, some claimants have not yet received the letters BP sent out notifying them of the data breach.

(via CNN, WSJ, NPR)

We’ve heard a lot from Aquaman in the months since the beginning of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, whether it’s an anonymous internet photoshop, or the artwork of Kate Beaton (but nothing from the Sub-Mariner, hmm).

However, (as I realized in a moment of contextual horror while watching my Justice League Unlimited dvds on the train yesterday morning) he’s known about the dangers of oil rig destruction for six years now. Or, at least, J. M. DeMatteis, writer of the Justice League Unlimited episode Ultimatum has.

Read on...

Until late yesterday, the above picture was posted here on BP’s website. But as you can now see if you click the link, the image of the crisis center is different in a major way: some of the screens are blank. It turns out that the above photo is just Photoshopped (poorly; see below) such that it looks like all the screens are active. Of all the things BP has done this year, this certainly isn’t the most egregious, but it shows that they may be putting some focus on company image that should be put on solving the problem permanently. Also, they really suck at Photoshop.

So far, it sounds like the cap is working. According to BP, their latest attempt to stop the oil gushing from their offshore rig and into the Gulf of Mexico is currently containing the leak, and that for the first time since April, no oil is escaping the well.

This isn’t a permanent fix:

Back in the ’70s, BP teamed up with a company called Printabox to bring us BP Offshore Oil Strike, an “exciting board game for all the family” which concerns drilling the North Atlantic for oil until it’s dry and pitting a BP surrogate called “Hull” against its oil rivals “Bergen,” “Rotterdam,” and “Dieppe,” which stand in for Amoco, Chevron, and Mobil, respectively. First player to $120 million wins!

But “exploring for oil, building platforms, and laying pipelines to bring the offshore oil back to the player’s home company” isn’t all fun and games: There are also risks like storms, which can hurt the productivity of your offshore operations, and, more presciently, catastrophic oil spills, which cost the player a small token amount of money to clean up and thereafter forget about.

More board game pics below:

Way back in April, we posted some then-alarming satellite photos of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, we wrote that it was geting worse, and fast; we had no idea what was in store, though. This latest picture from the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite paints a much grimmer picture of the devastation wrought by the oil in the two months since it started leaking.

Meanwhile, in a week jammed with political posturing, BP has had little to say about actual progress in containing the spill.

(Bad Astronomy via TDW)

Earlier today, Republican Congressman Joe Barton apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for what he called a “$20 billion shakedown” on the government’s part with respect to BP in the wake of the oil disaster in the Gulf Coast; thereafter, Barton ‘apologized’ for his apology, saying his words had been subject to “misconstruction.”

Tech journalist and Internet provocateur Mathew Honan has put together a handy site in which you can read Barton’s ‘apologies’ to such misunderstood figures as King George III, the Confederacy, tobacco companies (“for the off-putting warning labels”), Kim Jong-Il, and (low blow?) AT&T.

http://joebartonwouldliketoapologize.com/

(Boing Boing via TDW)

On BP’s request, Twitter has enforced its policy on parody/impersonation, requiring that satirical @BPGlobalPR clearly mention that it is not the real BP on it’s Twitter page.  The not-even-a-month old parody account, which has twelve times the followers of the official BP_America, has changed its bio from

This page exists to get BP’s message and mission statement out into the Twitterverse.

to

We are not associated with Beyond Petroleum [sic], the company that has been destroying the Gulf of Mexico for 51 days.

Two weeks ago, BP seemed to have a far different attitude toward the upstart feed:

Last night, a person who identified him or herself as “Leroy Stick” took responsibility for the fake @BPGlobalPR Twitter account, whose satirical stabs at BP in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak have earned widespread media attention and more than 100,000 followers. While “Leroy Stick” is still a pseudonym — the writer explains its meaning in a long, folksy anecdote about a stick for beating away a mean mutt named Leroy — the essay provides a revealing, largely serious look at a surprisingly resonant humorous attempt to deal with a global crisis.

The “Top Kill” effort to plug the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has successfully stopped the flow of oil and gas, a U.S. Coast Guard admiral told the LA Times this morning.

It’s not a sure thing yet — BP’s chief operating officer for exploration and production told the New York Times that “it would be a day or more before it was clear whether the top kill had worked,” and neither the government nor BP has made an official declaration — but it sounds encouraging.