Thursday, June 25, 2020

Wirecard

It looks like EY are failing again with another major audit crisis in the making. The question has to be asked as to when we might have decent audits, and even decent accounts

There have been suspicions about the accounts of German-based Wirecard in ecard, which handles credit card payment processes, for some time. Now the company has admitted, according
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VAT has always been a stealth tax – it's about time we cut it   (22 Jun 2020)

HSBC faces £1.3bn action over film scheme Eclipse  (22 Jun 2020)

 

Pete Recommends Weekly highlights on cyber security issues June 21, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Zoom Finally Caves, Lets Free Users Have End-to-End Encryption; Researchers Create a Tool That Can Perfectly Depixelate Faces; North Korea Kim Jong Un cyber army more effective than nuclear weapons; Outrage over police brutality has finally convinced Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM to rule out selling facial recognition tech to law enforcement.


U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers’ Rights Among Major EconomiesBloomberg



China dog meat festival goes ahead but virus takes a toll Agence France Presse


World tennis number one Novak Djokovic tests positive for COVID-19 Sydney Morning Herald.


Last week my son got a job at Auto Zone, a company that sells auto parts to the entire U.S.  The IRS administers a wickedly complex set of tax laws to same population.  Guess which one employs more people?  Auto Zone.  It has over 87,000 workers to sell you windshield wipers.  The IRS does its job using about 74,000 workers.  Oh, and while both organizations employ computer support, can you guess whose computers are the mother of all outdated legacy systems?  I am sure you can.



Faulty reasoning in BBC purge. Dealing with art and prejudice.

How will the BBC, other media organisations and theatre companies deal with plays that are clearly prejudicial, injurious and intolerant towards a particular group of people in the future?  

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BEVAN RAMSDEN. Campaigning for an independent, self-reliant, and sustainable manufacturing sector

Australia has lost much of its manufacturing industry, including the ability to produce essential strategic materials, and has become far too dependent on imports which are subject to disruption from pandemics, wars and foreign political threats.Continue reading 


The US and China: can “peer competitors” cooperate?

Extensive talks in Hawaii on 18 June between US Secretary of State Pompeo and Chinese Politburo member responsible for international affairs, Yang Jiechi, could have been a significant step in the two powers’ difficult relationship, but security has been tight and what they achieved is not yet clear. Continue reading 


Medium: “Accessing decentralized, uncensorable websites has long been touted as one of the potential uses for Ethereum. In recent years, projects such as ENS and Unstoppable Domains have made large strides in this area. Users are now able to access these sites by simply entering human-readable names instead of long-winded IPFS hashes.

Blockscan: The Search Engine for a Decentralized Web


Can this be true? “The researchers found that several of the foster fathers were high-profile academics.”  It gets worse.


Australia-‘The most oppressive of the Western Democracies’

When there’s a concerted attack on the interests of the Australian mainstream media they will rise in joint defence of journalists’ freedom. But they are slow to support five other Australians who have already lost their freedom.

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Lesson From The Tax Court: How Taxpayers Can Sometimes Benefit From IRS Errors