Good PR, but
this was already in the works.
Target
Making $100 Million Push Toward Chip-Enabled Smart Cards
In his testimony before
the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in Washington, D.C., Target
Corp. Chief Financial Officer John Mulligan, said on Tuesday that the
company would accelerate its implementation of smart card technology
in an effort to reduce credit and debit card fraud stemming from
customers shopping in its stores.
… During his
testimony, Mulligan said Target will equip its own "REDcards"
and all of its store card readers in the U.S. with chip-enabled
smart-card technology by the first quarter of 2015, more than six
months ahead of previous plans.
A tiny hack,
but one that caught my attention. Poor system design, but if my
“e-check” was stolen while I was teaching an Ethical Hacking
class, can imagine my response?
Darlene Storm reports:
No
matter how much you love your job, very few people work for free.
About 80% of Americans receive their paychecks via direct deposit,
but if a hacker manages to reroute your paycheck to his or her
account, is that just tough luck and you don’t get paid? That’s
basically what a faculty member at Western Michigan University (WMU)
was told.
Read more on
Computerworld.
[From
the article:
On Dec. 20,
WMU issued him a paycheck advance, Cool said, which he is paying back
in four installments. However, he said he believes the university
should reimburse him for his loss, since it was its system that was
hacked. Cool said he filed a grievance last week with the Michigan
Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.
… Last fall after
"two separate incidents of WMU employees having their paychecks
stolen electronically," the university "instituted a
process so that, whenever someone goes into their account and changes
financial information, such as a routing number, they immediately get
an email asking if that is a legitimate change." According to
Cheryl Roland, executive director of university relations, "We
know that happened in this case [theft of Cool’s paycheck]."
Yet Cool said he was
teaching a class and “never saw the email warning him his routing
number had changed. The hackers remained in Cool's account for
approximately 40 minutes, Cool said detectives told him. WMU's
information technology department later retrieved the email from his
trash.” Cool added, "If the hackers are this smart that they
can go in there, wait and delete the email, you would have to be
watching your computer almost continuously."
One of the pictures
released was Nadella in a hoodie. Does that suggest Microsoft will
become more Facebook-like?
Microsoft
names Nadella as CEO; Gates out as chairman
Microsoft announced
Tuesday that Satya
Nadella will become the third chief executive
in the company’s history as it moves into the mobile era.
The company also
announced that co-founder Bill Gates will step down as chairman of
the board to take on a role as “technology adviser” once his
term expires. Longtime Microsoft board member John Thompson, who led
the CEO search, will assume the role as chairman.
(Related) Not very
useful, since he uses every current buzzword.
Satya
Nadella drops some hints about Microsoft’s future
… "I believe
over the next decade computing will become even more ubiquitous and
intelligence will become ambient," Nadella wrote. "This
will be made possible by an ever-growing network of connected
devices, incredible computing capacity from the cloud, insights from
big data, and intelligence from machine learning."
Should they have said,
“Probably, but we don't know until we look for him specifically?”
US
Official Won't Say Whether Obama Phone Data is Collected
How was medical leave
authorized? The employer had to know something from some “official”
source. Can the Human Resource department tell the employees manager
nothing? Looks like this one told the manager way too much.
Meghan Cowan reports:
A
recent decision dealing with the collection, use and disclosure of
employees’ personal information provides a noteworthy lesson for
employers when managing sensitive employee medical information.
In
a December 2013 decision of the Alberta Information and Privacy
Commissioner, an employee made a complaint under Alberta’s privacy
legislation, the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA),
alleging that her personal employee information had been improperly
collected, used and disclosed by her employer.
Read more on Canadian
Employment Law Today.
[From
the article:
A foreman called the
employee to inquire about her absence from work and her possible date
of return. In the discussion, the foreman indicated he had read the
employee’s personnel file, which contained a letter from her
insurance provider denying her disability claim. The foreman also
discussed the employee’s condition with a co-worker who was a
friend of the employee. In that discussion, he disclosed that the
employee’s disability claim had been denied.
Inevitable, when the
party in power believes that government should do everything (people
don't know what's good for them) and they also believe people should
be made to pay for government.
IRS
Criminal Prosecutions Rise 23% Under Obama
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on February 4, 2014
Transactional Records
Access Clearinghouse: ”During the Obama administration, the number
of criminal prosecutions referred each year by the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) has risen by nearly a quarter — 23.4 percent — over
the Bush years. Prosecutions in fiscal year 2013 alone are up 30.6
percent from the previous year. Convictions are also drawing
slightly longer average prison terms — 27 months under Obama versus
25 months under Bush, according to case-by-case information obtained
by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act from the Executive
Office for United States Attorneys. Among U.S. federal judicial
districts, Alaska registered the highest per capita rate of IRS
prosecutions, with 53 per million people as compared with 6.4
prosecutions per million nationally. Second was the Middle District
of Alabama (Montgomery) with 30 per million, followed by the District
of Columbia with 27 per million. For more details, including a
timeline of prosecutions, top lead charges and top ten district
rankings, see
the report.”
Free is good, and
increasingly possible.
European
Law via WorldLII
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on February 4, 2014
EuroLII
– “Securing widespread free access to legal
information (legislation, cases, legal literature) has
become important globally. Europe is an example of coexistence of
different legal systems where a vast amount of legal information
content is provided at Community and national level. Free access
facilities for comparative law research is a crucial issue, both in
relation to the law of European institutions, and national law. Free
access to European law transposed into national law could
significantly contribute to a better establishment of the rule of law
and to an overall consolidation of national legal institutions around
Europe.”
(Related) Also free,
but a bit harder to search if you aren't sure who paid for the
research.
Clearinghouse
for the Open Research of the United States
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on February 4, 2014
“The Clearinghouse
for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS)
is a not-for-profit public-private partnership to increase public
access to peer-reviewed publications that report on federally funded
research. Conceived by publishers, CHORUS:
(Related) Even more
free stuff!
– is currently making
1.67TB of research data available. Sharing data is hard. Emails
have size limits, and setting up servers is too much work. We’ve
designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets – for
researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and
fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download
speeds.
Just what Congress
needs!
District
of Columbia city council votes to decriminalize pot
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