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Tuesday, September 10, 2019

600,000 GPS trackers for people and pets are using 123456 as a password


“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.”
 — Mikhail Baryshnikov


Want to succeed at the mother of all tech incubators, Stanford University? Don’t sleep. Read René Girard (or at least pretend to). And brown-ker-nose relentlessly 


Want to Be a Truly Great Leader? This 1 Key Thing Matters ...



The culture of masculinity and its negative impacts on men
Boris Johnson 'lied to Queen' to get Parliament suspended, MPs claim



No, corporate tax avoidance is not ‘legal’ – an update

 by 

More beneficial ownership loopholes to plug: circular ownership, control with little ownership and companies as parties to the trust






Isle of Man: an awareness-raising swim and reflections on tax havenry

 by  Leave a


The Isle of Man is part of the UK's network of satellite havens and secrecy jurisdictions, ranked number 17 in the 2019 Corporate Tax Haven Index and number 42 in the Financial Secrecy Index in 2018 by the Tax Justice Network. We identify the UK as "bearing the lion’s share of responsibility through … [Read more...]

New York Times op-ed:  Should Work Be Passion, or Duty?, by Firmin DeBrabander (Professor of Philosophy, Maryland Institute College of Art):

Too many of us expect our jobs to give meaning to our lives. There is a better way.

Americans are uniquely obsessed with work. Could any other nation come up with a product like Soylent, a meal substitute, not for the elderly, the poor or the malnourished, but for software engineers, Wall Street brokers, tech entrepreneurs and others who don’t want to be diverted from their work by the time consuming intricacies of a meal? Could you imagine the French conceiving such a thing?

While other wealthy nations have shortened the workweek, given their citizens more free time and schemed to make their lives more pleasant, stress-free and enjoyable, the United States offers a curious paradox: Though the standard of living has risen, and creature comforts are more readily and easily available — and though technological innovations have made it easier to work efficiently — people work more, not less.

Why is this?

One theory is that Americans have come to expect work to be a source of meaning in their lives. Our “conception of work has shifted from jobs to careers, to callings,” explains Derek Thompson, in a recent article in The Atlantic. There is a growing expectation, if not insistence, that work is to be your passion, your obsession — a veritable religion that Thompson dubs “Workism.” This is especially pronounced among the upper classes — precisely those people who do not need to obsess over work, at least for material concerns.

   

Jeff Hoopes (North Carolina), Welcome to Our New Blog, Write-Off: The Tax Blog:

Write-off-tax-blogWelcome to our new blog, Write-Off: The Tax Blog, hosted by the UNC Tax Center. The purpose of this blog is to provide original, useful, compelling and timely tax information to the general public, especially those with an interest in tax policy.



Police called to stop massive game of hide and seek at IKEA


British Prime Minister Boris Johnson leads a bull around a pen as he visits Darnford Farm in Banchory near Aberdeen, Scotland, on Friday.

Houston Attorney Convicted of Klein Conspiracy and Tax Evasion 




 DOJ Tax announced here that Jack Stephen Pursley, also known as Steve Pursley, was convicted of one count of defraud conspiracy, 18 USC § 371 (also called a Klein conspiracy) and three counts of tax evasion, § 7201.  I posted on the original indictment.  See Houston Attorney Charged With Tax Crimes Related to Offshore Accounts (9/21/18), here.

 Key excerpts from the Press Release on the conviction are:
According to the evidence presented at trial, Jack Stephen Pursley, also known as Steve Pursley, conspired with a former client to repatriate more than $18 million in untaxed income that the client had earned through his company, Southeastern Shipping. Knowing that his client had never paid taxes on these funds, Pursley designed and implemented a scheme whereby the untaxed funds were transferred from Southeastern Shipping’s business bank account, located in the Isle of Man, to the United States. Pursley helped to conceal the movement of funds from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by disguising the transfers as stock purchases in United States corporations owned and controlled by Pursley and his client. 

Confusion Regarding the Cheek Willfully Element of Specific Intent to Violate a Known Legal Duty 



In United States v. Severino, 2019 U.S. App. LEXIS 26560 (11th Cir. 2019) (unpublished), here, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed Severino's "convictions and 65-month sentence for aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft."  Severino was a return preparer, and, based on the convictions, an abusive preparer.  On appeal, Severino argued that the Court failed to give a proper willfulness instruction that he had requested for the aiding and assisting counts, § 7206(2).  Severino made other arguments on appeal, but I focus on the willfulness instruction issue which is framed by the Eleventh Circuit's pattern criminal jury instructions.

 The Eleventh Circuit's pattern jury instructions for criminal cases are available, here.  Those pattern instructions (with annotations and comments) cover 747 pages.  In order to focus on the pattern jury instructions in issue here, I used the Eleventh Circuit's Pattern Jury Instruction Builder, here, which I have discussed previously.  I "built" the pattern jury instructions in question with Annotations and Comments here. 

MEdia Dragon's past on the internet is disappearing before we can make it history 

Lapham’s Quarterly – Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick. “Digital history isn’t history at all—until, without warning, it is. In an age in which any internet user is a creator-in-the-making, reaching a handful of virtual friends or entire corners of the web in a moment’s notice, the line between archive-worthy material and the detritus that populates our feeds grows vanishingly thin. Thus, a paradox emerges: whatever measure of historical value our digital traces may or may not leave behind for future researchers, each individual is capable of becoming a digital archivist, holding on to whatever materials that made their online lives consequential, even if such material means nothing to another human soul. On paper, the tools to facilitate easy digital archiving already exist

Tech Paging Big Brother: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite 


The New York Times – As fake and illegitimate texts proliferate online, books are becoming a form of misinformation.The author of “1984” would not be surprised. “I started browsing Orwell on Amazon after writing about the explosion in counterfeit books offered by the retailer. The fake books appeared to help Amazon by, for example, encouraging publishers to advertise their genuine books on the site. The company responded in a blog post that it prohibits counterfeit products and has invested in personnel and technology tools including machine learning to protect customers from fraud and abuse. On Sunday, Amazon said in a statement that “there is no single source of truth” for the copyright status of every book in every country, and so it relied on authors and publishers to police its site. “This is a complex issue for all retailers,” it said. The company added that machine learning and artificial intelligence were ineffective when there is no single source of truth from which the model can learn.

*600,000 GPS trackers for people and pets are using 123456 as a password
Ars Technica
September 5, 2019 
An estimated 600,000 GPS trackers for monitoring the location of kids, seniors, and pets contain vulnerabilities that open users up to a host of creepy attacks, researchers from security firm Avast have found. The $25 to $50 devices are small enough to wear on a necklace or stash in a pocket or car dash compartment. Many also include cameras and microphones. 

 

Quartz – The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest
Matthew Green – Cryptography Engineering Blog: [June 5, 2019] Apple announced a cool new feature called “Find My”. Unlike Apple’s “Find my iPhone“, which uses cellular communication and the lost device’s own GPS to identify the location of a missing phone, “Find My” also lets you find devices that don’t have cellular support or internal GPS — things like laptops, or (and Apple has hinted at this only broadly) even “dumb” location tags that you can attach to your non-electronic physical belongings.
The idea of the new system is to turn Apple’s existing network of iPhones into a massive crowdsourced location tracking system. Every active iPhone will continuously monitor for BLE beacon messages that might be coming from a lost device. When it picks up one of these signals, the participating phone tags the data with its own current GPS location; then it sends the whole package up to Apple’s servers….(It’s worth mentioning that Apple didn’t invent this idea. In fact, companies like Tile have been doing this for quite a while. And yes, they should probably be worried.) If you haven’t already been inspired by the description above, let me phrase the question you ought to be asking: how is this system going to avoid being a massive privacy nightmare? Let me count the concerns…”


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