How to you avoid (not evade) taxes in
France? Apparently, Googling that question isn't the best way to
find out...
Google
France Faces Fine Of $1.3 Billion For Tax Noncompliance. Google
Denies The Accusation.
Google France could be ordered to pay
$1.3 billion to France’s equivalent of the IRS (Direction générale
des finances) due to tax noncompliance in 2011. The agency has been
investigating Google’s revenue in France for months. With only 138
million euros of revenue in France in 2011, the company has used
tax-optimization strategies, but has always stated that they comply
with the law. It denies the accusation.
A new record? Perhaps because there
was actual evidence?
A federal court in Illinois has handed
down the largest fine ever levied against a file sharer in a
BitTorrent piracy case. The judgment was placed against defendant
Kywan Fisher and orders the man to pay $1.5 million to an adult film
company called Flava Works. The man was found guilty of sharing 10
of the company’s films via BitTorrent.
The massive fine was reached through a
penalty of $150,000 per movie, which is the maximum amount of damages
possible under current US copyright law. Movie studios are expected
to use this case as the stick to coax other alleged file sharers to
settle out-of-court. Fisher and several other defendants were sued
by Flava Works for sharing the company’s films.
All defendants in the case had paid
accounts with the Flava Works website. The movie company was able to
prove that the people shared movies from their accounts because each
film the defendants viewed and shared was tagged with a specific
piece of code linking the movie to their account. Flava
Works was able to prove that movies directly downloaded and shared by
Fisher were shared thousands of times.
“We don't need no stinking Privacy
Lawyers!”
… TermsFeed is extremely simple to
you. All you have to do is enter your site’s name, your company’s
name, and your email address. You are then shown an HTML template of
the policy you chose. This template has self-explanatory fields that
you can easily modify to fit your website. When you are done
editing, you can copy the HTML and embed it on your site to share the
policies with your site visitors.
- Also read related article: How To Create Privacy Policy & Disclaimer For Your Blog.
If you gave (money or time) once,
you'll probably do it again and we will spend a billion dollars this
year alone...
"Stanford privacy researcher
Jonathan Mayer has published new research showing that websites of
both the Obama and Romney presidential campaigns, which are used to
communicate with and coordinate their volunteers, leak
large amounts of private information to third-party online tracking
firms. The Obama campaign site leaked names, usernames, zip
codes and street addresses to up to ten companies. The Romney
campaign site leaked names, zip codes and partial email addresses to
up to thirteen firms."
In your face, privacy lovers!
"People
seem to be okay with constant corporate or government video
surveillance in public. Let a lone individual point a video camera
their way, however, and tempers flare. GeekWire takes
a look at the antics and videos of Seattle's mysterious Surveillance
Camera Man, who walks up to people and records them for no
apparent reason other than to make a point: How is what he's doing
different than those stationary surveillance cameras tucked away in
buildings and public places?"
At least with Surveillance Camera Man,
you specifically know that he's watching you — not
always the case. (Not even when there's no
warrant, on private property in the U.S.)
For my Disaster Recovery students...
If your generators are on the 18th floor, and the
elevators aren't working...
"Who knew
that the most critical element of operating a data center in New York
City was ensuring
a steady supply of diesel fuel? In the wake of Hurricane Sandy,
the challenges facing data center operators in the affected zones
include pumping water from basements, waiting for utility power to be
restored, and managing fuel-truck deliveries. And it's become
increasingly clear which companies had the resources and foresight to
plan for a disaster like Sandy, and which are simply reacting.
Here's the latest on providers around the New York area."
And remember, having fuel for machines
sometimes only means it's time
to start the manual labor.
Entirely too logical.
"Voting machine designs and
data formats are a free-for-all. The result is poor validation and
hence opportunity for fraud. An IEEE standards group wants all
election computer systems to speak
the same language. From the article:'IEEE Standards Project 1622
is working on electronic data interchange for voting systems. The
plan is to create a common format, based on the Election Markup
Language (EML) already recommended for use in Europe. This is a
subset of the popular XML (eXtensible Markup Language) that specifies
particular fields and data structures for use in voting.'"
Perspective? Are there similar rules
for Privacy?
Why
We Freak Out About Some Technologies but Not Others
As anyone who reads the news knows,
there’s often a side effect to new technologies: moral panic.
Facebook causes narcissism! Texting is making us illiterate! But
the funny thing is, other technologies don’t provoke such alarm.
Take Square, a tool that lets everyday folks accept credit card
payments. It’s tipping into mainstream usage, changing how small
businesses operate and how friends split a bar bill, but it hasn’t
provoked any doomsaying.
What’s the difference? Why do we
freak out at some technologies and shrug at others?
Genevieve Bell believes she’s cracked
this puzzle. Bell, director of interaction and experience research
at Intel, has long studied how everyday people incorporate new tech
into their lives. In a 2011 interview with The Wall Street
Journal‘s Tech Europe blog, she outlined an interesting
argument: To provoke moral panic, a technology must
satisfy three rules.
First, it has to change our
relationship to time. Then it has to change our relationship to
space. And, crucially, it has to change our relationship to one
another. Individually, each of these transformations can be
unsettling, but if you hit all three? Panic!
… This cycle is very old. Indeed,
it probably began almost 2,500 years ago, when the written word was
on its way to unmooring knowledge from space and time and letting new
combinations of people “speak” to one another. This satisfied
all three rules—and it panicked Socrates, who warned that writing
would destroy human memory and destroy the art of argument.
Or you could wait for me to do it...
PlagTracker is a web tool designed to
help people run plagiarism checks on their academic papers and other
types of texts. While it may not be the first such web service,
PlagTracker is convenient to use with its quick and simple checking
process
We need to get the word out...
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Treehouse
is a service that offers online service that offers web design and
coding lessons on a subscription basis. Right now
they're accepting applications from college students for free
lessons. Treehouse plans to give away subscriptions to
5,000 randomly selected college students. To enter to win a
subscription students do need to complete the short form at the end
of Treehouse's announcement. Entries are being
accepted through November 9, 2012.
I wonder if the vets in my Computer
Security program know about this?
"Just three weeks after Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta told an audience at the Sea, Air and Space
Museum that the U.S. is on the brink of a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,' the
government has decided it needs to beef up the ranks of its digital
defenses. It's assembling a league of extraordinary computer geeks
for what will be known
as the 'Cyber Reserve.'" [...and every
member gets a secret decoder ring! Bob]
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