This is the only poem
I can read
I am the only one
can write it
I didn’t kill myself
when things went wrong
I didn’t turn
to drugs or teaching
I tried to sleep
but when I couldn’t sleep
I learned to write
I learned to write
what might be read
on nights like this
by one like me
— Leonard Cohen
Middle Eastern Gang in Sydney kept captive in garage and forced to make counterfeit-currency
Service denied! The new cybercriminal attack that can take down the ...
INTHEBLACK
The ATO would ignore the incoming data – but a big enough torrent of traffic ... computers into massive “botnets” that all do the same thing at once, hackers ... The 40-hour outage – blamed on poor communication and DDoS ...
Rosco McGlashan Tax man puts brakes on Australia's bid for land speed glory
At a speed of light Mercedes Benz buys bitcoin company Pay with Money from Crime
Might facial recognition systems replace passports in Australian airports by 2020?
> Paul Shetler discusses why he got out of government and ponders his next move. He's not keen to give up the Sydney lifestyle straight away. He told the AFR: "One of the lessons I'll certainly be taking with me wherever else I go is that it's not enough to own part of the service. You frankly have to own the service. I really wouldn't be interested in a role where they said, 'Hey, you be the digital guy, and you've got to do the lipstick, and we're going to have all this stuff back here which you can't touch.' Because it's not going to work." Shetler also rejects speculation about his footwear collection. "I have four pairs of black Oxfords and very few sneakers,” he protests.
Answers to lingering questions over how the Australian Taxation Office’s (ATO) systems went down for days following the failure of storage infrastructure upgraded in 2015 by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are set to be revealed in March. To help it get to the bottom of the “unprecedented” hardware failure, the government has appointed professional services industry heavyweight, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), to conduct an independent review of the incident. “The review will help us to fully understand what happened and why, and what needs to be done to ensure we are not exposed to this type of incident in future. The PwC review is due to be finalised in March,” the ATO said in a statement on January 24. Answers over unprecedented ATO outage their way ...
FINRA – “This paper Report on Distributed Ledger Technology: Implications of Blockchain for Securities Industry provides an overview of distributed ledger technology, highlights some key applications being explored in the securities industry and potential impact of the technology, and discusses key implementation and regulatory considerations for broker-dealers
Deutsche Bank's $630m Russian fine reflects badly on banking | Nils Pratley
Ex-HBOS manager and five others face jail over £245m scam
“The Federal Trade Commission has released Cross-Device Tracking: An FTC Staff Report that describes the technology used to track consumers across multiple Internet-connected devices, the benefits and challenges associated with it, and industry efforts to address those challenges. The report concludes by making recommendations to industry about how to apply traditional principles like transparency, choice, and security to this relatively new practice. The report draws upon comments and discussions from a November 2015 Cross-Device Tracking Workshop and explains that cross-device tracking associates multiple devices with the same consumer and links a consumer’s activity across her devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and other connected devices). It describes how cross-device tracking facilitates seamless experiences, can help to prevent fraud and more effectively target ads, and can increase competition in advertising
Warning on 'predictable' cyber defences
Kay Bell, New on more W-2 forms this year: a verification code. “The IRS says that when taxpayers take the time to add the code to their returns, it will help the agency validate that they are the real filers and authenticate the income information they are submitting.”
Apple is one of 12 big tech companies targeted in an international collaboration by tax authorities led by Australia, which Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan has said could lead to tax bills totalling more than $1 billion Apple hit by $58m tax bill . . . and the audit pain is just starting | afr.com
Jack Townsend, The Willful Blindness Concept — What Does It Do?
Jim Maule, Tax Advice That Tax Professionals Probably Don’t Want to Share:
At a speed of light Mercedes Benz buys bitcoin company Pay with Money from Crime
Might facial recognition systems replace passports in Australian airports by 2020?
Hitesh N Patel, UK can have variety of IT protections in place to defend yourself, but it’s all for nothing if you are tricked into giving away the keys to the electronic vault.”
View our infographic for an overview of the latest figures from our Fraud Barometer
Revealed: how the Tax Commissioner was leant on to deliver high-end tax cuts
The map that shows the most corrupt countries in the world
Revealed: how the Tax Commissioner was leant on to deliver high-end tax cuts
The map that shows the most corrupt countries in the world
Cybersecurity Risk Reduction – Public Safety & Homeland Security Bureau – Federal Communications Commission – David Simpson, Rear Admiral (retBureau Chief, January 18, 2017.
“The White Paper describes the risk reduction portfolio of the current FCC and suggests actions to affirmatively reduce cyber risk in a manner that incents competition, protects consumers, and reduces significant national security risks.”
> Paul Shetler discusses why he got out of government and ponders his next move. He's not keen to give up the Sydney lifestyle straight away. He told the AFR: "One of the lessons I'll certainly be taking with me wherever else I go is that it's not enough to own part of the service. You frankly have to own the service. I really wouldn't be interested in a role where they said, 'Hey, you be the digital guy, and you've got to do the lipstick, and we're going to have all this stuff back here which you can't touch.' Because it's not going to work." Shetler also rejects speculation about his footwear collection. "I have four pairs of black Oxfords and very few sneakers,” he protests.
Answers to lingering questions over how the Australian Taxation Office’s (ATO) systems went down for days following the failure of storage infrastructure upgraded in 2015 by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are set to be revealed in March. To help it get to the bottom of the “unprecedented” hardware failure, the government has appointed professional services industry heavyweight, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), to conduct an independent review of the incident. “The review will help us to fully understand what happened and why, and what needs to be done to ensure we are not exposed to this type of incident in future. The PwC review is due to be finalised in March,” the ATO said in a statement on January 24. Answers over unprecedented ATO outage their way ...
Fresh tax office website outages prompt calls for 'heads to roll'
FINRA – “This paper Report on Distributed Ledger Technology: Implications of Blockchain for Securities Industry provides an overview of distributed ledger technology, highlights some key applications being explored in the securities industry and potential impact of the technology, and discusses key implementation and regulatory considerations for broker-dealers
Deutsche Bank's $630m Russian fine reflects badly on banking | Nils Pratley
Ex-HBOS manager and five others face jail over £245m scam
Via Infosys: “For the purposes of this research, AI was defined as an area of computer science that emphasizes the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like humans. Some of the activities that computers with AI are designed for include image and speech recognition, learning, planning and problem-solving. Examples of applied AI technologies include (but are not limited to): machine learning, deep learning, predictive/prescriptive analytics, virtual agent and natural language understanding (avatar) technologies (Siri, Alexa, Google Home, Amelia etc.)”
James A. Jacobs – FreeGovInfo: ” Panel on End-of-term crawl and the collection of vulnerable government information – January 23, 2017
“I was honored last week to be part of a panel hosted by OpenTheGovernment and theBauman Foundation to talk about the End of Term project. Other presenters included Jess Kutch at Coworker.org and Micah Altman, Director of Research at MIT Libraries. I talked about what EOT is doing, as well as some of the other great projects, includingClimate Mirror, Data Refuge and the Azimuth backup project, working in concert/parallel to preserve federal climate and environmental data. I thought the Q&A segment was especially interesting because it raised and answered some of the common questions and concerns that EOT receives on a regular basis. I also learned about a cool project called Violation Tracker, a search engine on corporate misconduct. And I was also able to talk a bit about what are the needs going forward, including the idea of “Information Management Plans” for agencies similar to the idea of “Data Management Plans” for all federally funded research. I was heartened to know that there is interest in that as a wider policy advocacy effort! [Note – thanks to James – please read his entire posting]
“The Federal Trade Commission has released Cross-Device Tracking: An FTC Staff Report that describes the technology used to track consumers across multiple Internet-connected devices, the benefits and challenges associated with it, and industry efforts to address those challenges. The report concludes by making recommendations to industry about how to apply traditional principles like transparency, choice, and security to this relatively new practice. The report draws upon comments and discussions from a November 2015 Cross-Device Tracking Workshop and explains that cross-device tracking associates multiple devices with the same consumer and links a consumer’s activity across her devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, personal computers, and other connected devices). It describes how cross-device tracking facilitates seamless experiences, can help to prevent fraud and more effectively target ads, and can increase competition in advertising
Warning on 'predictable' cyber defences
Kay Bell, New on more W-2 forms this year: a verification code. “The IRS says that when taxpayers take the time to add the code to their returns, it will help the agency validate that they are the real filers and authenticate the income information they are submitting.”
Apple is one of 12 big tech companies targeted in an international collaboration by tax authorities led by Australia, which Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan has said could lead to tax bills totalling more than $1 billion Apple hit by $58m tax bill . . . and the audit pain is just starting | afr.com
Jack Townsend, The Willful Blindness Concept — What Does It Do?
Jim Maule, Tax Advice That Tax Professionals Probably Don’t Want to Share:
Taxpayers who, for whatever reason, are unsure of what they should do with their refund ought not despair that their tax return preparer has no advice or doesn’t care to provide any. There is another source. A reader of this blog turned my attention to a web site that provides advice on what to do with tax refunds based on the taxpayer’s astrological sun sign.The Australian Taxation Officer’s chief information officer, Ramez Katf, says that the 12 December storage failure that took down some of the agency’s core systems is unlikely to happen again. ATO CIO sees more cloud in agency’s future after outage