FBI
Suspects Insiders in $81 Million Bangladesh Central Bank Theft: Report
Quoting sources familiar with the matter, the Journal said
FBI agents investigating the case "have found evidence pointing to at
least one bank employee acting as an accomplice."
But it added that "a handful of others" may have
also aided the hackers in breaking into the computers of Bangladesh Bank.
… The involvement
of the New York Fed has brought the FBI into the case, but the Fed is not being
viewed as blameworthy.
Separately, the global financial transfers network SWIFT
on Monday rejected
reported accusations by Bangladesh police and bank officials that it was to
blame for low security protections.
"SWIFT was not responsible for any of the issues
cited by the officials, or party to the related decisions," it said in a statement.
If they only subscribe to other services, do they need to
inform anyone?
Catalin Cimpanu writes:
This past Thursday, the FBI proposed that its biometric database be exempt
from several provisions of the Privacy Act, US legislation that mandates that
any federal agency must inform individuals about the records they collect and
keep about them.
The FBI’s Next Generation
Identification System (NGIS) is a database of biometrics information such as
fingerprints, eye scans, facial scans, and even DNA samples.
The database is often used to
identify crime suspects, and while in past times the database was rarely used,
with the emergence of modern biometrics authentication systems, the database’s
importance has grown tenfold because it also allows the FBI access to locked
devices.
Read more on Softpedia.
[From the
Softpedia article:
Back in 2015, after a long battle in court, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation discovered that the database already contained details for
over 52 million people. The US has a
population of around 320 million.
In March 2016, The San Diego Union-Tribune discovered that the FBI was
actively going after biometrics data contained in private databases managed by
services such as Ancestry.com and 23andme.
Drones. When you
hear that word, think of the Hitchcock movie “The Birds.”
Delivery Drones: Coming to the Sky Near You?
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on May 10, 2016
CRS Reports & Analysis Legal Sidebar – Delivery
Drones: Coming to the Sky Near You? – 05/06/2016: “Can you prevent a drone
from flying over your house to deliver a package to your neighbor? Until now, that question has been of purely
theoretical interest. However, the
Senate recently passed a bill that could significantly change the operational
landscape for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS or drones) and make these kinds of
hypothetical delivery drones a reality..”
Think this will spread to more states?
From the Tenth Amendment Center:
The Vermont legislature has
passed a sweeping bill that would establish robust privacy protections in the
state. If ultimately signed into
law, it would not only limit warrantless surveillance and help ensure
electronic privacy in Vermont, but would also hinder several federal
surveillance programs that rely on cooperation and data from state and local
law enforcement.
As passed, the legislation would
ban the warrantless use of stingray devices to track the location of phones and
sweep up electronic communications, restrict the use of drones for surveillance
by police, and generally prohibit law enforcement officers from obtaining
electronic data from service providers without a warrant or a judicially issued
subpoena.
Read more on Tenth
Amendment Center and hope the Governor signs this into law.
One of the few things Congress can respond to quickly…
GOP sinks teeth into Facebook bias allegations
Allegations of political bias at Facebook exploded into
national view on Tuesday as a Senate chairman pressed the company on whether
conservative content is suppressed on the site.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) sent a letter asking Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg to address the “serious allegations” that conservative content has
been excluded from the site’s “Trending Topics” section.
… Facebook
vehemently denies the charge, with an executive stating flatly on Tuesday that
the company has “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.”
“Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to
systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve
designed our tools to make that technically not feasible,” said Tom Stocky,
vice president for search at the social network, in a post. “At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are
logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.”
(Related) This may be why the Republicans believe the
rumors. Still, this amount is trivial
compared to a bias in favor of Hillary.
Clinton is largest beneficiary of Facebook donations
Facebook employees as individuals have donated more than
$114,000 to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton this election cycle, by far
the most of any presidential candidate.
(Related) You know politics has sunk to a new low when they
can be used to market Apps that help you leave the country.
http://thehill.com/regulation/technology/279380-anti-trump-dating-app-helps-americans-move-to-canada
Dating app may help anti-Trump Americans move to Canada
If Donald Trump
is elected president, a new dating app known as Maple Match promises to help
Americans fall in love with their neighbors to the north and move to
Canada.
“Make dating great again,” reads the slogan from Maple Match, which promises to “make it
easy for Americans to find the ideal Canadian partner to save them from the unfathomable horror of a Trump presidency.”
The matchmaking service has yet to launch, but nearly
5,000 people have already signed up, according
to The Guardian.
Access to a new tool. As I read it, you have to have the mobile app
on your phone first.
WhatsApp Finally Launches Desktop Apps For Windows And Mac
Though it’s the biggest messaging application in the world
with more than 1 billion active users, WhatsApp has for years lived primarily
on mobile phones. That could change
significantly from Wednesday, when WhatsApp launched its first desktop apps for
Windows 8 and Mac OS 10.9 and up.
The apps
sync with a WhatsApp user’s account on their mobile device, once
they’ve downloaded them and scanned a QR code from inside Settings >
WhatsApp Web on the mobile app.
Because: Europe?
Facebook Moments: Facial recognition app launched that isn’t
allowed to recognise people’s faces
Facebook has launched its facial-recognition photos app in
Europe and Canada – without facial recognition.
The company first launched its “Moments” app in the US
last year. It is meant as an easy way of
sharing photos, using recognition technology to pick out photos that include
the same people and grouping them together.
But since people were automatically opted into that
feature, and so had their faces and identities analysed by people who were
using the app, privacy watchdogs in the EU and Canada stopped it coming from
the UK.
Perspective. Slack
is big enough to take on the big boys.
'Sign-in With Slack' Takes on Facebook, Google, and Microsoft
… On Tuesday,
Slack, the company behind the hot corporate chat service of the same name, said
users can now sign into non-Slack services using their existing Slack
identities. This is something you can
already do with Facebook
Connect, Twitter, Google
Apps Identity and Microsoft’s Azure
Active Directory services.
According to an online
post, people can now use Sign
in with Slack to log into Quip, a document
creation application. Users can then
give their existing Slack team members access to Quip documents and lists. And it’s easy to convert Slack chats to Quip
documents, if needed.
Five other companies Figma, Kifi, OfficeVibe, Slackline,
and Smooz have also integrated their apps with Slack, the company said.
… That means fewer
passwords to remember, which most will agree is a good thing.
Amusing, but I probably won’t be sharing this one with my Computer
Security students.
This Popular Porn Site Debuted a Bug Bounty Program on the
Same Platform as the Pentagon
Maximum bounty for hackers: $25,000.
Pornhub, one of the world’s most popular pornography
sites, unveiled a bug bounty program on Tuesday.
The company, owned by Canadian private firm MindGeek, will
pay white hat hackers for finding computer bugs on its site and reporting those
vulnerabilities to its owners. The site
is running the program through the startup HackerOne, a bug bounty software
startup that spun
out of Facebook and that operates similar
programs for companies such as General Motors,
Uber, Twitter, Yahoo, Dropbox—and even the United States
Department of Defense.
I want the App for that!
The 2016 Rich List of the World's Top-Earning Hedge Fund
Managers
At a conference a year ago, David
Siegel, co-chairman of quantitative hedge fund firm Two
Sigma and an artificial-intelligence expert, predicted that computer-driven
managers will one day rule the markets. "The challenge facing the investment
world is that the human mind has not become any better than it was 100 years
ago, and it's very hard for someone using traditional methods to juggle all the
information of the global economy in their head," he said. "Eventually, the time will come that no
human investment manager will be able to beat the computer."
Apparently, Siegel's future has already become a reality. This year about half of the 25 highest-earning
hedge fund managers topping Alpha's 15th annual Rich List used computer-generated
investing strategies to produce all or some of their investment gains. They include Siegel and John
Overdeck, his Two Sigma co-chairman and co-founder, who qualify for the
Rich List for the first time. They tie
for seventh place after earning $500 million each last year.
In fact, six of the top eight on this year's ranking are
considered to be full-fledged quants: managers who rely heavily on
sophisticated computer programs as part of their process. This is a far cry from 2002, when just two
computer-driven managers qualified for the initial ranking, including Renaissance
Technologies founder James
Simons, the only person to appear all 15 years.
This year Simons shares the top spot with Citadel's
Kenneth
Griffin, who has invested huge sums over the years in what he touts as a
state-of-the-art computer system. They
each earned $1.7 billion in 2015 after posting roughly midteens gains in their
main hedge funds.
Bridgewater
Associates'
Raymond Dalio, who also strongly relies on computers for making investment
decisions, is tied for No. 3 with Appaloosa
Management's David
Tepper, the most successful hedge fund manager of all time among those who
don't depend on computers.
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