There are now two different classes of events, both of which can cause huge amounts of damage, but which occur so regularly that it’s barely even a news story.

The first one, of course, is “New Crippling Security Hole Found in Windows.”

The second one is “New Theft of Personal Information of Thousands from Clueless Data Aggreggator”, or its close cousin, “Whoops! That last one was worse than we thought.”

Which raises the question, when the friendlier, smaller numbers are bandied about at first, is that due to incompetence on the part of the companies? Or just outright CYA? One or two mistakes I can accept, but this is a regular part of the meme.