Friday, December 03, 2021

AmEx Pitched Business Customers a Tax Break That Doesn’t Add Up

 Bleeping Computer: “US federal bank regulatory agencies have approved a new rule ordering banks to notify their primary federal regulators of significant computer-security incidents within 36 hours. Banks are only required to report major cyberattacks if they have or will likely impact their operations, the ability to deliver banking products and services, or the US financial sector’s stability. Bank service providers will also have to notify customers “as soon as possible” if a cyberattack has materially affected or will likely affect the customers for four or more hours…

Computer-security incidents can result from destructive malware or malicious software (cyberattacks), as well as non-malicious failure of hardware and software, personnel errors, and other causes,” the Computer-Security Incident Notification Final Rule explains (PDF)…”


 Wall Street Journal, AmEx Pitched Business Customers a Tax Break That Doesn’t Add Up:

AmExBusinesses were told they could deduct transaction fees while earning tax-free cash rewards.

The pitch went out to eye doctors, McDonald’s franchisees and payroll companies: “Reduce your taxable income burden to Uncle Sam.”


A plot of digital land was just sold in the metaverse for $2.43 million — more than most homes in NYC and San Francisco cost Business Insider 


Mr Goxx, the cryptocurrency-trading hamster, dies BBC 


WATCH French Fishing Boats Attempting to Block Eurotunnel, Calais Port Amid Row With UK Sputnik


Washington Post – How to make your iPhone and iPad as private as possible: “Privacy is a central part of Apple’s marketing campaigns and it sounds great in the company’s ads and product announcements. But actually making things as private as possible on Apple devices does require a bit of effort and time. We’ve assembled all the settings you can change on your iPhone and iPad to make the devices as private as possible. These instructions are all based on iOS 15, the newest version of the operating system…”


ROGER SIMON: Now More Than Ever Conservatives Must Get Off Twitter.

Now, however, Jack Dorsey has resigned and a new CEO installed, the company’s former CTO, Parag Agrawal.

After only one day of the new regime—what breitibart.com aptly calls “Gulag Parag”—Twitter has actually made a turn to the worse, taking it further toward the fascistic.

The platform has issued new rulesbanning the sharing of images or videos without, in most cases, the explicit consent of those being photographed.

In other words, good-bye the victims of Waukesha because there was no time to ask people questions, let alone get the consent of the mass murderer.

Good-bye, Antifa burning buildings. (Can you imagine getting theirpermission? You’d probably get bashed over the head with a skateboard, if you were lucky.).

Good-bye, virtually anything that reflects poorly on the left or their ideologies. BLM riots and similar are unlikely to appear again.

What was most interesting about Twitter was its immediacy. No more. We are now in the era of “selective immediacy.”

Twitter will only show what the new regime wants it to. How neo-Stalinist. No wonder Dorsey wanted to beat it and turn over the reins before the inevitable pushback.

Speaking of which, who is Parag Agrawal? He has been accused of racism for, you guessed it, an ancient Tweet.

I’ll give him a pass on that, largely because Twitter itself, through its telegraphic form that rewards the clever put-down over the substantive, consistently brings out the worst in people. Social media, as I implied above, is misnomered. It should be called anti-social media.

I won’t, however, give Agrawal a pass on his new regulations. He comes from the tech world and it seems increasing numbers of techs are skeptical of free speech, perhaps because they study technology, not history. Technology has the illusion of being definitive when it’s not. (Remember “garbage in, garbage out.”)

This is a moment of change toward the further totalitarian at Twitter and, as is written in the I-Ching, “Change… Opportunity.”

The opportunity here is for conservatives to finally get off. Agrawal and company have provided an excuse for those who need it. To remain on a platform that has ramped up its already significant censorship capabilities to such a degree would be a new level of hypocrisy.

And toward what end? Is anybody really listening, anybody who might be convinced of something? Will the gang at CNN finally admit their constant prevarications? Hardly.

Abandoning the decentralized Blogosphere for the walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was a huge mistake, particularly for conservatives. Somebody should write a book about the reasons why.


Kyle Rittenhouse Can’t Sue The Kenosha District Attorney’s Office, But He Should Be Able To.

Prosecutorial immunity — along with judicial immunity and qualified immunity for other government officials — should exist, if at all, only via legislation. And that legislation should limit whatever immunity it exists much more strictly than the current judge-made immunities are limited.

Personally, I think immunizing government employees from accountability for their actions is a due process violation, and possibly a violation of the Titles of Nobility clauses, too


China’s disappearing ships: The latest headache for the global supply chain.

Analysts think they’ve found the culprit: China’s Personal Information Protection Law, which took effect November 1. It requires companies that process data to receive approval from the Chinese government before they can let personal information leave Chinese soil — a rule that reflects the fear in Beijing that such data could end up in the hands of foreign governments.

The law doesn’t mention shipping data. But Chinese data providers might be withholding information as a precaution, according to Anastassis Touros, AIS network team leader at Marine Traffic, a major ship-tracking information provider.

“Whenever you have a new law, we have a time period where everyone needs to check out if things are okay, ” Touros said.

Other industry experts have more clues of the law’s influence. Cook said that colleagues in China told her that some AIS transponders were removed from stations based along Chinese coastlines at the start of the month, at the instruction of national security authorities. The only systems allowed to remain needed to be installed by “qualified parties.”

Unintended consequence of Beijing’s new privacy law, or another power play by Xi?