No later than today I've blogged about another example of that: to make a long story short, my bank has "shared" my details with some 3rd party... whether they're 0wned or selling the data is yet to be answered. http://florent.daigniere.com/p...

In the UK there are academic grids that research groups can use like the ngs or gridpp (for free or next to nothing) http://ngs.ac.uk/use-ngs I used to work at the Center for Parallel Computing where I am sure some people would talk to her. http://www.cpc.wmin.ac.uk/cpcsite/index.php/Main_Page