Thursday, May 26, 2016

I still think Donald Trump will not get too deep into this – unless the FBI finds something more interesting. 
Hillary Clinton Is Criticized for Private Emails in State Dept. Review
The State Department’s inspector general has sharply criticized Hillary Clinton’s exclusive use of a private email server while she was secretary of state, saying she had not sought permission to use it and would not have received it if she had.
In a report delivered to members of Congress on Wednesday, the inspector general said that Mrs. Clinton “had an obligation to discuss using her personal email account to conduct official business” with officials responsible for handling records and security but that inspectors “found no evidence” that she had requested or received approval from anyone at the department to conduct her state business on a personal email.
   It also added new detail about Mrs. Clinton’s motivation for using the private server, which she has said was set up for convenience.  In November 2010, her deputy chief of staff for operations prodded her about “putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.”  Mrs. Clinton, however, replied that she would consider a separate address or device “but I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible.”
   through her lawyers, she declined to be interviewed by the State Department’s inspector general as part of his review. So did several of her senior aides.
   While State Department officials never directly told Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Powell that they needed to end their use of personal email, the report found, they did do so with Mr. Gration, a lower-level diplomat who did not have the same political clout.

(Related)
State Dept. inspector general report sharply criticizes Clinton’s email practices
   The new report focuses on record keeping and how Clinton and previous secretaries of state maintained documents regarding public business.  She has said she complied with laws requiring the preservation of documents, including emails, because she emailed other government officials at their official accounts, knowing their emails would be retained on public servers. [No need for her to do it.  She has Minions!  Bob]
But she has not explained how she intended to preserve emails sent to private citizens, who did not use government email.

(Related) Probably not all due to the emails.
Hillary Clinton Now Loses to Trump in Polls. Bernie Sanders Beats Trump by 10.8 Points.


For my Enterprise Architecture students.  Plan to keep up with technology.
Government agencies keep sacrificing cash to zombie IT systems, GAO finds
Some of the most critical business systems run by US government agencies are older than many of the IT people who support them, written in mainframe assembler code or COBOL.  That might not shock or surprise anyone who works in mainframe-centric industries like insurance and finance, where the time-tested reliability of some systems has granted them lives that reach back to the Johnson administration.  But a new GAO report has called out some of these systems as being so archaic that they're consuming increasingly larger portions of agencies' IT budgets just for operation and maintenance.  As the breach at the Office of Personnel Management demonstrated, old systems are also a security risk—particularly when they've been "updated" with now-unsupported versions of Windows Server and Internet and database components that were end-of-life'd by their creators years ago.

(Related) Could the government change this quickly? 
Facebook Is Shutting Down Its Desktop-Based Ad Retargeting Exchange
   Idema told Adweek that the company has already begun moving clients and ad tech partners over to newer products with the goal of being fully migrated by Nov. 1.  Idema said advertisers started moving their budgets over to newer products even before the "sunset" of Facebook Exchange was announced, largely due to the results they've seen.  According to the company's most recent earning's report, mobile now accounts for 82 percent of the company's overall revenue.


Another Architecture consideration.  How do you structure IT to handle this?
Where Predictive Analytics Is Having the Biggest Impact
   Survey-based reports find that firms are currently spending an estimated $36 billion on storage and infrastructure, and that is expected to double by 2020.
Once companies are logging and storing detailed data on all their customer engagements and internal processes, what’s next?
   Our goal in this article is to offer specific, real-world case studies to show how big data has provided value for companies that have worked with Microsoft’s analytics teams.  These cases reveal the circumstances in which big data predictive analytics are likely to enable novel and high-value solutions, and the situations where the gains are likely to be minimal.


Incentive (blood in the water) for lawyers?
Eriq Gardner reports that Gawker’s appeal of the jury verdict in Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit failed to persuade the judge:
After a review of the stunning verdict in March in Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker over the publishing of an excerpt of a sex tape, Florida Circuit Judge Pamela Campbell on Wednesday decided not to order a new trial nor touch the $140 million verdict.
The decision comes as the case has gained renewed attention thanks to a report that PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel provided financial backing to Hogan as the former professional wrestler pursued claims of having his privacy violated and his publicity rights infringed through an October 2012 post viewed by an estimated 7 million people.  Campbell’s decision will soon allow this dispute to proceed to a Florida appeals court.
Read more on Hollywood Reporter.

(Related)
Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker
A billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur was outed as being gay by a media organization.  His friends suffered at the hands of the same gossip site.  Nearly a decade later, the entrepreneur secretly financed a lawsuit to try to put the media company out of business.


Perspective.  Are robots cheaper than cheap labor?  Apparently.  Another article for my Architecture students. 
Foxconn replaces '60,000 factory workers with robots'
One factory has "reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots", a government official told the South China Morning Post.
Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: "More companies are likely to follow suit."
China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.
   Economists have issued dire warnings about how automation will affect the job market, with one report, from consultants Deloitte in partnership with Oxford University, suggesting that 35% of jobs were at risk over the next 20 years.
Former McDonald's chief executive Ed Rensi recently told the US's Fox Business programme a minimum-wage increase to $15 an hour would make companies consider robot workers.
"It's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who is inefficient, making $15 an hour bagging French fries," he said.

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