Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Friday, November 30th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, the Monster Starwood Hotel's Data Breach. Apple Music comes to Amazon Echo Devices,

Instagram rolls out close friends lists. AirB&B wants to build your house, not just

rent it, and the weekend long read suggestions.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Another day, another unfortunate major data breach, Marriott International says

500 million records from its guest reservation database for Starwood

hotels were stolen. The breach was detected on September 10th, but it's

possible that the vulnerability might have existed as far back as 2014.

Details remain sketchy at this point, but various outlets are reporting that the database included at least 327 million records of details including guest name, postal address, phone number, date of birth,

gender, email address, Starwoods rewards information, arrival and

departure information, reservation dates, even passport numbers.

What about credit card numbers?

Starwood says an unknown number of the compromise records did contain encrypted credit

card data, but it has, quote, not been able to rule out, end quote,

the possibility that those encrypted credit card numbers could have been compromised as well.

Marriott reported this incident to law enforcement and continues to support their

investigation the company said in a statement.

So this is pretty bad just in terms of the potential number of people affected.

This is probably the second biggest data breach ever behind that Yahoo breach that affected

3 billion accounts. But also, even without credit card numbers being compromised,

even if that doesn't shake out,

...