Clearly, I don't think
were anywhere near done here.
We'll see your “We
think Putin is a meany” and raise you 40,000 troops. (By the way,
Glendale, Colorado has a large Russian population. Can we have that
too?)
Russia
sets terms for Ukraine deal as 40,000 troops mass on border
Russia
on Sunday night repeated its demand that the US and its European
partners accept its proposal that ethnic Russian regions of eastern
and southern Ukraine
be given extensive autonomous powers independent of Kiev as a
condition for agreeing a diplomatic solution to the crisis over its
annexation of Crimea.
(Related) I don't
think this impacts the EU, yet. Perhaps Russia thinks they could by
the country in a bankruptcy sale?
Russia
hikes gas price for Ukraine
Russia on Tuesday
sharply hiked the price for natural gas to Ukraine and threatened to
reclaim billions previous discounts, raising the heat on its
cash-strapped government, while Ukrainian police moved to disarm
members of a radical nationalist group after a shooting spree in the
capital.
… Russia has used
financial levers to hit Ukraine, which is teetering on the verge of
bankruptcy. Gazprom’s Miller said that the decision to charge a
higher price in the second quarter was made because Ukraine has
failed to pay off its debt for past supplies, which now stands at
$1.7 billion.
On Tuesday the Russian
parliament moved to annul agreements with Ukraine on Russia’s navy
base in Crimea. In 2010, Ukraine extended the lease of Russia’s
Black Sea Fleet’s base until 2042 for an annual rent of $98 million
and discounts for Russian natural gas. The lower house voted to
repeal the deal Monday, and the upper house was to follow suit.
(Related) Not all are
equally likely, but it is food for thought.
Ten
ways the Ukraine crisis may change the world
The simple answer is
that someone offers credit cards used by “Target shoppers” for
sale.
Ellen Messmer reports:
By
all accounts, many of the massive data breaches in the news these
days are first revealed to the victims by law enforcement, the Secret
Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). But how do the
agencies figure it out before the companies know they have been
breached, especially given the millions companies spend on security
and their intense focus on compliance?
Their efforts aren’t
always appreciated, either:
In
the course of all of this monitoring, Henry says, law enforcement
often finds itself in the odd position of having to show companies
evidence they have been victimized. And they aren’t always thanked
for their efforts. Sometimes, Henry says, companies say “’Please
just go away.’” He adds, “It happens all the time.”
Read more on
NetworkWorld.
It’s an interesting article, and I find it especially interesting
to think about situations where law enforcement decides not to come
knocking to let a firm know that they are under attack or their data
is being stolen or otherwise misused. As a case in point, Experian
recently got a lot of very bad press over the Court
Ventures/USInfoSearch situation that allowed an overseas criminal to
access information in USInfoSearch’s database through a client
contract with Court Ventures. Law enforcement was already on to and
investigating Ngo when Experian acquired Court Ventures in March
2012, but reportedly never alerted Experian. And because
Experian never did its due diligence in a timely fashion, the problem
continued for approximately another nine months.
Would law enforcement
make the same decision not to notify today? I wonder, but I wouldn’t
be totally surprised if they did.
I recall a couple of
post here about trades made milliseconds before the
information was released. Trading fast has never been the problem.
(But there is a new book about the evils of computer trading, perhaps
that is why the FBI is talking like they've been working on this for
years.)
FBI
investigating high-speed trading outfits
U.S. federal agents are
investigating whether high-speed trading companies violate U.S. laws
by using fast-moving market information not available to other
traders, a FBI spokesman confirmed on Monday.
Gee, I thought that by
now this database would be “Big.” I guess this is another
example of how slow the government works on computer systems.
Colorado has “contributed” less than 200,000 records. (We're
talking about “database entities” here, so a person, his wife,
and his three kids are all “entities.”)
The
Law Enforcement National Data Exchange (N-DEx) run by the FBI
Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division now contains
approximately 223 million records on nearly two billion entities. An
FBI
CJIS presentation from February 2014 posted on the website of the
Integrated Justice Information Systems Institute includes detailed
information on state and local data contributors including a tally of
the total number of records contributed by state.
Read more on Public
Intelligence. There’s a chart that shows how many records each
state has contributed so far. Texas leads all states with 68,793,268
records, but other states contributing 10 million or more records
each include Arkansas (24M), California (20M), Tennessee (11M), and
Virginia (10M).
Well, we don't want to
actually stop intelligence gathering, but we need to make it look
like we do. (Long, interesting article.)
While details on the
president’s proposal to end NSA bulk collection of telephony
records remain
sparse, we do now have an actual
piece of legislation to look at from the House Permanent Select
Committee on Intelligence—one that tracks the broad outlines of the
White House plan even as it differs in several critical details.
I’ve already done a quick take in broad brushstrokes over
at The Daily Beast; here I want to get into the weeds a
bit.
Your government in
inaction! Or perhaps they were waiting for technology to catch up to
their brilliance?
Backup
cameras to be required in all new vehicles, starting in 2018
After years of delays
and on the eve of a lawsuit against the government, U.S. safety
regulators have announced that backup cameras will be required in all
vehicles built in and after May 2018.
The Department of Transportation and its National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced
Monday that "rear visibility technology" would need to be
standard equipment in all vehicles under 10,000 pounds. The move
aims to reduce the average of 210 deaths and 15,000 injuries caused
every year by back-up accidents.
… However, NHTSA
has come under heavy criticism from safety advocates and families of
children injured and killed in back-over accidents for not acting
sooner.
A lawsuit was scheduled to be heard Tuesday in a federal appeals
court that sought to force the DOT to act on a law Congress
passed with bipartisan support in 2008. The Cameron Gulbransen Kids
Transportation Safety Act was named after a 2-year-old who was killed
when his father backed over him in 2002.
This law required the
DOT to issue a standard for rear visibility by 2011. Yet the agency
filed four extensions between 2011 and 2013 and had announced it did
not intend to enforce the law until January 2015, according to Scott
Michelman, an attorney with Public Citizen, the consumer advocate
group that was headed to court Tuesday.
It's far easier to kill
stolen phone and forget them than to trace the phone and arrest the
thief! Phones are too trivial to bother with.
Report:
Smartphone kill-switch could save consumers $2.6 billion per year
… Law enforcement
officials and politicians are pressuring cellular carriers to make
such technology standard on all phones shipped in the U.S. in
response to the increasing number of smartphone thefts. They believe
the so-called “kill switch” would reduce the number of thefts if
stolen phones were routinely locked so they became useless.
For my lawyer
friends...
Law
Firms Are Pressed on Security
for Data
Matthew
Goldstein, New York Times: ”A growing number
of big corporate clients are demanding that their law firms take more
steps to guard against online intrusions that could
compromise sensitive information as global concerns about hacker
threats mount. Wall Street banks are pressing outside law firms to
demonstrate that their computer systems are employing top-tier
technologies to detect and deter attacks from hackers bent on getting
their hands on corporate secrets either for their own use or sale to
others, said people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition
of anonymity. Some financial institutions are asking law firms to
fill out lengthy 60-page questionnaires detailing their cybersecurity
measures, while others are doing on-site inspections. Other
companies are asking law firms to stop putting files on portable
thumb drives, emailing them to nonsecure iPads or working on
computers linked to a shared network in countries like China and
Russia where hacking is prevalent, said the people briefed on the
matter. In some cases, banks and companies are threatening to
withhold legal work from law firms that balk at the increased
scrutiny or requesting that firms add insurance coverage for data
breaches to their malpractice policies… The vulnerability of
American law firms to online attacks is a particular concern to law
enforcement agencies because the firms are a rich repository of
corporate secrets, business strategies and intellectual property.
One concern is the potential for hackers to access information about
potential corporate deals before they get announced. Law
enforcement has long worried that law firms are not doing enough to
guard against intrusions by hackers… F.B.I. officials and
security experts say, law firms remain a weak link when it comes to
online security. But the push from corporate clients may have more
impact on changing law firm attitudes than anything else.”
This kind of article
comes every April and I have to explain the difference between
avoiding and evading. Would the stockholders expect them to overpay
their taxes?
Caterpillar
dodged paying $2.4 billion in taxes: Senate report
… Starting in 1999,
through 2012, Caterpillar paid PricewaterhouseCoopers more than $55
million to develop and implement a tax strategy built around
redirecting to Switzerland its taxable profits from sales of
Caterpillar-branded replacement parts, according to the report.
… In a prepared
statement, PricewaterhouseCoopers said Monday: "Our advice to
Caterpillar and its external counsel helped Caterpillar evaluate how
best to organize its expanding global operations, aligning the
economics of such global operations with carefully considered U.S.
tax policies. Our advice was founded on years of extensive work
overseas and in the United States and included detailed analyses of
Caterpillar's global operations and the impact of various potential
business reorganizations on Caterpillar's tax position.
Explaining the
“benefits” of increasing the minimum wage.
AMERICAN SAMOA AND THE
COMMONWEALTH OF THE NORTHERN MARIANA ISLANDS
Economic Indicators
Since Minimum Wage Increases Began
For my programming
students.
Move
Over Shell-Scripts: Sh.py Is Here, And It’s Awesome.
… When I’m not
writing for MakeUseOf, I’m writing code in Python for fun and
profit. I really like Python due to its flexibility, its inherent
beauty and how it mandates the writing of good code by design. If
that sounds good to you, but you don’t already know this awesome
language, why don’t you check out these five
great websites to learn Python programming?
I came across this
really awesome library a few months back called sh.py, which allows
you to call programs, pass parameters and handle outputs, all within
the confines of a Python program.
So, what does this
mean? Simply put, it means that you have the full functionality of
shell scripts, but from within a language that is easy to read, is
modular in nature and supports object oriented programming.
… As it is right
now, sh.py doesn’t work on Windows. However, if need be, you can
always install a Linux virtual machine. My colleague Justin Pot has
written a pretty useful article about this, which
you can check out here.
It's spring, and my
thoughts turn to statistics! (Or at lest one way to start talking
about statistics)
Here
Is Every U.S. County's Favorite Baseball Team (According to Facebook)
Happy Opening Day.
What’s your favorite baseball team?
Wait, no, let me
rephrase that: What’s the team you ‘like’ the most?
The Facebook Data
Science has just answered that question for the whole country, at
least at the county level.
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