If your algorithm is really, really fast, you can
make or lose lots of money. It is possible to 'trigger' trades if
you know how the algorithm works. Connecting these guys to some
particular trader is going to be difficult.
SEC Reviews
Dubious Avon Bid
What appears to be a bogus filing with the
Securities and Exchange Commission claimed that Avon Products Inc.
was the target of a takeover bid, sending the embattled
beauty-products company’s stock soaring on Thursday and leaving the
agency looking for answers.
Avon’s shares shot up by more than 20% midday to
nearly $8 after an entity calling itself PTG Capital Partners Ltd.
said in a securities filing that it had lodged a bid of $18.75 a
share to buy the company.
Avon
said it hadn’t received such a bid and hadn’t
even been able to confirm that PTG Capital existed. A person
familiar with the matter said the company was treating the offer as a
hoax.
… The apparent Avon hoax underscores a
weakness in the SEC’s “Edgar” filing system. It is relatively
easy to set up a fake account and make fraudulent filings directly to
a legitimate firm’s cache of disclosures. To make filings, one
only needs to provide Edgar with a street address and a document
signed by a notary, according to an Edgar user’s manual published
by the SEC.
… The PTG filing includes a number of
instances of odd spacing and typos, including twice referring to the
firm as TPG, a known private-equity firm that acquired an Avon
business in Japan in 2010 and reportedly considered a bid for Avon
earlier this year. The language used in the SEC filing about “PTG
Capital” mimics the wording that TPG uses to describe itself.
… The purported offer bears a resemblance to
one received in December 2012 by Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory
Inc., a small publicly traded confectioner. In that case, someone
calling themselves PST Capital Group Ltd. claimed they offered $13.50
a share for Rocky Mountain.
You don't have to put everything on the same
server or even the same network. You can log access to files, but
then you would have to actually look at the logs!
InfoSecurity reports:
Last fall, it came to light that Chinese hackers had roamed around unnoticed for months inside the network of USIS, the biggest commercial provider of background investigations to the federal US government. In fact, two of the company’s biggest customers are the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Onapsis Research Labs analysis finds that the breach most likely utilized an SAP attack vector that Onapsis has been tracking in the wild and warning enterprises about. It marks the first time an SAP attack against a national security service provider has been publicly uncovered.
Read more on InfoSecurity.
“We make it up as we go along” or “Because
they supported the other candidate” are probably not part of the
written guidelines.
Jenna
Greene reports:
The Federal Trade Commission this week was sued for refusing to turn over information about how the agency decides to bring data security cases.
The Freedom of Information Act suit by Philip Reitinger, a former Department of Homeland Security official who is now president of a cybersecurity company, comes as the FTC defends its role as data security cop in two ongoing cases.
“The FTC’s data security activity has increased in recent years and is likely to continue to do so,” wrote Reitinger’s lawyers, Steptoe & Johnson LLP partners Michael Baratz and Stewart Baker, in the complaint.
The FTC’s response to their FOIA request will
likely irritate a number of people. As Greene reports:
In refusing Reitinger’s request for internal documents about data security enforcement, the FTC claimed FOIA exemption 5, asserting that all the material is protected by the “deliberative-process privilege.” It also said that FOIA Exemption 7(E) applied, alleging that the documents are also law enforcement guidelines, and that their disclosure could “reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.”
Well, if
you want compliance, wouldn’t it make sense to to make
the guidelines not only public, but loudly public, to foster greater
compliance? [But if you
want political power, being able to strike when and where you choose
is the more attractive option. Bob]
Read more on Legal
Times.
I might use this as the basis for an “incident
response” project.
FTC –
Recovering from identity theft is easier with a plan
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on May 14, 2015
“IdentityTheft.gov
is the federal government’s one-stop resource for identity theft
victims. The site provides streamlined checklists and sample letters
to guide you through the recovery process.”
Do you have the right to confront the technology
accusing you? Could I create a guilt-o-meter(TM)
for prosecutors that would convince a jury but not be available for
cross-examination?
Ellen Nakashima reports:
In a handful of criminal cases around the country, local police officers have testified in recent months that non-disclosure agreements with the FBI forbid them from acknowledging the use of secret cellphone-tracking devices. In some, prosecutors have settled cases rather than risk revealing, during court proceedings, sensitive details about the use of the devices.
The FBI, however, says such agreements do not prevent police from disclosing that they used such equipment, often called a StingRay. And only as a “last resort” would the FBI require state and local law enforcement agencies to drop criminal cases rather than sharing details of the devices’ use and “compromising the future use of the technique.”
Read more on The
Washington Post.
Not just a “slippery slope,” this reminds me
of the New Jersey basketball “cheer” following a bad call:
“Elevator, elevator, we got the shaft!” Does this suggest that
people entering Australia illegally phone ahead?
This is exactly what civil libertarians and
privacy advocates in Australia tried to warn the public about.
Josh Taylor reports that less than two months
after the government passed a hotly debated data retention law for
ISPs, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has been
added to the list of agencies that can access Australians’ telecom
data:
Under the mandatory data-retention legislation, only a select number of government agencies can access the stored call records, assigned IP addresses, location information, and other telecommunications data for the purposes of investigating breaches of the law.
When the Australian Labor Party announced that it would side with the government and pass mandatory data-retention legislation in March, the support came with a number of amendments to the legislation, designed to increase oversight and improve accountability over government access to the stored data.
Read more on ZDNet.
Should we all start learning Chinese?
Colter Hettich reports:
Chinese web search giant Baidu unveiled its latest technology Monday, saying it had taken the lead in the global race for true artificial intelligence.
Minwa, the company’s supercomputer, scanned more than 1 million images and taught itself to sort them into about 1,000 categories — and did so with 95.42% accuracy, the company claims, adding that no other computer has completed the task at that same level.
Google’s system scored a 95.2% and Microsoft’s, a 95.06%, Baidu said.
Read more on NY
Daily News.
Interesting. Could this be why SurveyMonkey was
able to predict the UK elections when everyone else failed?
The expansion of online polling in recent years
could be a negative for 2016 candidates.
A study by Pew
Research released Thursday found members of the public
tend to be more willing to express a "very unfavorable"
view of politicians when they are surveyed online, compared to
questioned on the phone.
The share of people who view Hillary Clinton as
"very unfavorable" increased 8 percentage points when
polled online, compared to the phone. Sarah Palin's negatives
increased 13 percent, Michelle Obama's increased 9 percent, George W.
Bush's increased 9 percent, Harry Reid's increased 8 percent, and
Mitch McConnell's increased 5 percent.
Pew found people are more likely to report
increasingly negative views of politicians online if they are a
member of the opposite party. For Clinton, 36 percent of Republicans
gave her a "very unfavorable" rating when polled on the
phone, but that number shot up to 53 percent online.
Resources for my spreadsheet students.
An Excel
Template for Every Occasion
“Pop quiz today!” (Well, I find it amusing)
Breaking
News from ClassTools.net
Breaking
News is Russel Tarr's latest creation on ClassTools.net.
Breaking News is a
template for creating fake breaking news screens like
those that you might see on CNN or BBC News. Russel sent me a
Twitter message about Breaking News this morning and I quickly tried
my hand at making a fake breaking news screen. Through the template
you can add a news headline, a ticker, a location, and custom
background image. After completing the template you can download
your news screen as an image or host it online at Imgur.
Applications
for Education
Russel
Tarr has a bunch of examples of Breaking
News screens created about historical events like the
assassination of President Lincoln. You could also have students
create Breaking News screens about major turning points in the plots
of their favorite fiction works.
One of my students tipped me to this one. Also
available for iPhones and Windows phones
Learn C++
Learn C++ is another FREE programming course by
SoloLearn.
[Makes
me wonder if any of these are useful:
http://www.sololearn.com/
Dilbert explains how to crush the competition in
the age of social media!
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