Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Bank of Amerika Biometrics and Cyber Matters


Government cracks down on bitcoin money laundering

The happiest countries in the world also pay a lot in taxes


Public Enemy Harper’s. Trust me. Read this. You’ll be glad you did.  “The public does pay attention.”







Fortune’s 2017 40 Under 40, our annual ranking of the most influential young people in business. Read on to meet these disruptors, innovators, rebels and artists—and prepare to be inspired”


Project Wickenby: Philip Jepson Egglishaw freed from jail as case ...


Luxe life of Hoges' rogue tax accountant - Daily Telegraph






U.S. Has 3.5 Million More Registered Voters Than Live Adults — A Red Flag For Electoral Fraud Investors
  jonaspeterson_alienskinexposure001


WILL ROBOTS STEAL HUMAN JOBS?

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the effects of artificial intelligence and robots on humans. Some people have worried that humans will be marginalized to the point of being put out of work. Why hire a human when a much cheaper robot can do the job without being distracted? Of course, we can never be sure about the future. But a look at technological revolutions in the past should make us more optimistic than pessimistic about the fate of human labor in the age of AI.


China's digital-payments giant keeps bank chiefs up at night



With malicious hacking and other cyber threats on the rise, Taxpayers for Common Sense recently turned our attention to how much the federal government spends to keep us safe from cyber threats and where it spends that money.  Our analysts spent two years reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of federal budget documents in an attempt to answer those questions


Brazen illicit tobacco shops mock laws - Financial Review The nation's top federal and state law enforcers are sitting on a confidential list of nearly 350 illegal tobacco shops which are costing taxpayers ...





Much less press on the fact that Carl Ichan left on Aug 18, on the eve of the publication of this story: Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington New Yorker
After Charlottesville, Donald Trump Reveals His True Face Der Spiegel (resilc). I hate to be a stickler, but I was in NYC when what was then called the “Central Park jogger” case was front page news from weeks on end. No one in the press and punditry, and I mean no one, was on the side of the what turned out to be falsely charged young black men. The media was all ago about the horror of the raped young woman who nearly bled to death and wasn’t particularly attentive to the matter of whether the accused were guilty or not. They were almost universally presumed to be guilty despite the inclusion of the usual “alleged” word. That does not change the fact that this was a racist response and among the racist responses, Trump’s was strident.



A hacker in Ukraine who goes by the online alias “Profexer” is cooperating with the FBI in its investigation of Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election, The New York Times is reporting.
Profexer, whose real identity is unknown, wrote and sold malware on the dark web. The intelligence community publicly identified code he had written as a tool used in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee ahead of last year’s presidential election.
The hacker’s activity on the web came to a halt shortly after the malware was identified.
The Times, citing Ukrainian police, reported Wednesday that the individual turned himself into the FBI earlier this year and became a witness for the bureau in its investigation. FBI investigators are probing Russian interference efforts and whether there was coordination between associates of President Trump’s campaign and Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller is heading the investigation.


Hmm. According to The Nation, there was no hacking, just an insider leak.Apparently the FBI doesn’t think so. Or the NYT is wrong





Over the past year or so, there’s been an explosion of interest in vulnerability disclosure policy — the question of what to do about flaws in software found by security researchers that need patching lest they get used by hackers. Both the Defense Department and the General Services Administration have launched bug bounty programs to reward researchers who responsibly report security flaws they find, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s multistakeholder process published a guide to coordinated vulnerability disclosure, or CVD.
Living with Trump, by John R. MacArthur Harper’s (resilc). Key quote:
Loathing for Trump makes people forget that, among other horrors, a coalition of Republicans and Democrats has already wasted around $3.7 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan, sacrificed the lives of nearly 7,000 American soldiers, and wounded more than 52,000.

Trump’s judge picks snub DemocratsPolitico (J-LS). While the press was busy relitigating the Civil War….

American Banker – “This month, Bank of America will begin piloting technology from Samsung that lets customers log in to mobile banking by taking a picture of their eye. The pilot is part of a broader effort to gauge customers’ affinity for various forms of biometric authentication, says Michelle Moore, head of digital banking at Bank of America. “One thing we know we need to work on with our customers is, even in today’s day and age of digital  natives, there are questions about safety and security ... 



U.S. digital rights group slams tech firms for barring neo-Nazis Reuters (EM). But they haven’t said a peep about them going after alleged evil Rooskie allies and left wing sites.


SILICON VALLEY BILLIONAIRES ARE THE NEW ROBBER BARONS, Victor Davis Hanson writes:

In 2012, for example, Obama won Silicon Valley by more than 40 percentage points. Of the political donations to presidential candidates that year from employees at Google and Apple, over 90 percent went to Obama.
One of the legacies of the Obama era was the triumph of green advocacy and identity politics over class.
No one has grasped that reality better that the new billionaire barons of the West Coast. As long as they appeared cool, as they long as they gave lavishly to left-wing candidates, and as long as they mouthed liberal platitudes on global warming, gay marriage, abortion, and identity politics, they earned exemption from progressive scorn.
The result was that they outsourced, offshored, monopolized, censored, and made billions — without much fear of media muckraking, trust-busting politicians, unionizing activists, or diversity lawsuits.
Hip billionaire corporatism is one of the strangest progressive hypocrisies of our times.

All of which is why Kurt Schlichter proposes that “Conservatives Must Regulate Google And All of Silicon Valley Into Submission.”



'Get rich or die trying' seems to be working out for this fellow
A seemingly state-sponsored cyberattack aimed at more than 4,000 infrastructure companies has been blamed on a lone Nigerian cybercriminal.
The campaign  started in April 2017, and has targeted some of the largest international organisations in the oil, gas, manufacturing, banking and construction industries. The global scale of the campaign and the organisations marked suggest an expert gang or state-sponsored agency is behind it.
APT-style attack against over 4,000 infrastructure firms blamed on lone Nigerian 20-something


A Witness to Terrorism in Charlottesville New Yorker



US prosecutors demand data to unmask every visitorto anti-Trump protest website


DreamHost refuses to hand over 1.3m IP addresses, and more, says warrant too broad


Data, and who has it, is the real concern




Benny Steinmetz in trouble in Romania



Israeli Billionaire Benny Steinmetz has been arrested in Israel on charges relating to fraud and money laundering. And surprisingly, it appears the arrest has nothing to do with any of the billionaire’s controversial deals in Africa!

Instead, according to Haaretz, who quotes Romania’s ‘Rise Project’, the arrest has been made on charges relating to a case in Romania where Steinmetz is accused of financing a criminal gang in an unlawful land deal. The purchase was effected via the British Virgin Islands, using companies set up by Mossack Fonseca, naturally!