Security researchers from the Anti-virus firm Trend Micro have discovered a new variant of banking malware that not only steals users’ information from the device it has infected but, has ability to “sniff” network activity in an effort to compromise the devices of same network users as well.
The banking malware, dubbed as EMOTET spreads rapidly through spammed emails that masquerade itself as a bank transfers and shipping invoices. The spammed email comes along with an attached link that users easily click, considering that the emails refer to their bank or financial transactions.
Category: Corporate Statism
Ex-BP official faces criminal charges
I remember online trolls telling me I was lying when I said there was a lot more oil spilled than BP admitted. Why do people want to believe these assholes?
June 29 (Reuters) – A U.S. federal appeals court has reinstated a criminal charge of obstruction of Congress against a former BP Plc executive accused of downplaying the severity of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans on Friday said a lower court judge misinterpreted the obstruction statute in dismissing the charge against David Rainey, a former BP exploration vice president.
Rainey was also charged with making false statements to law-enforcement agents, which was not at issue in the government’s appeal. He has pleaded not guilty.
The April 20, 2010, explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig led to 11 deaths and the largest U.S. offshore oil spill.
Prosecutors accused Rainey of telling the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Environment on May 4, 2010, and in a subsequent letter that just 5,000 barrels of oil a day were being released, when his own estimates suggested a much higher flow rate.
Yet another reason to avoid Facebook
And while you’re at it, stop answering Buzzfeed quizzes and customer service surveys, too. They’re all collecting your information:
It already knows whether you are single or dating, the first school you went to and whether you like or loathe Justin Bieber. But now Facebook, the world’s biggest social networking site, is facing a storm of protest after it revealed it had discovered how to make users feel happier or sadder with a few computer key strokes.
It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users’ home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of “emotional contagion”.
In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users’ news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users’ exposure to their friends’ “positive emotional content”, resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to “negative emotional content” and the opposite happened.
The study concluded: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.”
Lawyers, internet activists and politicians said this weekend that the mass experiment in emotional manipulation was “scandalous”, “spooky” and “disturbing”.
Here we go again
Does this sound familiar? I thought it would!
WASHINGTON—Intense competition in a slow-growth, low-interest-rate environment is continuing to fuel riskier lending by banks, a top U.S. regulator warned in a report released on Wednesday.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency highlighted two areas in particular where banks took on more risk in pursuit of profits: high-yielding loans issued to more speculative borrowers and indirect auto loans, in which banks provide financing through a car dealer. Banks also are easing lending standards in commercial loans, the report said.
The report cites “erosion in underwriting standards” for leveraged loans and said banks have taken on other kinds of risks, such as offering longer terms, in the area of indirect auto lending.
“The OCC sees signs that credit risk is now building after a period of improving credit quality and problem loan cleanup,” according to the report, which looked at bank data during the second half of 2013.
That buildup comes despite an effort by regulators to clamp down on so-called leveraged lending by warning banks against funding debt-laden deals. Leveraged-loan issuance reached a record in 2013, the report said, noting that the largest OCC-supervised banks reported the highest share of loosening underwriting standards among various size groups.
Aereo
I can’t seem to wrap my head around this ruling. Unless I’m missing something important, this sounds a lot like the arguments TV networks used to make about VCRs. And is it the job of the Supreme Court to cut off innovation if it threatens someone else’s monopoly? What am I missing?
The real question has always been whether a ruling against Aereo would have implications for other online services. Many of the arguments broadcasters made against Aereo could just as easily be made against conventional cloud storage services such as Google Music and Dropbox, which also transmit copyrighted content to consumers.
In its 6-3 ruling against Aereo, the Supreme Court went out of its way to emphasize that the ruling shouldn’t be seen as a threat to other services that transmit copyrighted content at the request of users. Yet a legal scholar whose work was heavily cited by Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion says that the case will have cloud storage and consumer electronics companies “looking over their shoulders.”
“They’re just different, trust us.”
“The court is sending a very clear signal that you can’t design a system to be the functional equivalent of cable,” says James Grimmelmann, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland. “The court also emphasizes very strongly that cloud services are different. But when asked how, it says, ‘They’re just different, trust us.'”
The problem is that “trust us” isn’t going to be very reassuring for entrepreneurs and investors building the next generation of media technologies. Silicon Valley needs clear rules about what’s legal and what isn’t. The Supreme Court didn’t just fail to provide such such clarity, it blew up the legal principle that has served as the foundation for the cloud storage economy since 2008.
If you have any doubt there’s a class war, read this
I wish I could say I was surprised, but after all, they did work for the president who has done more to cripple public education than even George Bush:
Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.
The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead role in the public relations initiative.
The involvement of such high-profile Obama alumni highlights the sharp schism within the Democratic Party over education reform.
Teachers unions have long counted on Democrats as their most loyal allies. But in the past decade, more and more big-name Democrats have split with the unions to support charter schools, tenure reform and accountability measures that hold teachers responsible for raising students’ scores on standardized tests.
The national legal campaign is being organized by Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who told POLITICO that she has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent months to get the effort off the ground. She intends to start with a lawsuit in New York, to be filed within the next few weeks, and follow up with similar cases around the country. Her plans for the New York lawsuit were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Brown’s campaign will be modeled on the recent Vergara v. California trial, which dealt a major blow to teachers unions. In that case, a judge earlier this month struck down California’s tenure system and other job protections embedded in state law, ruling that they deprived students of their constitutional right to a quality education because they shielded even the most incompetent teachers from dismissal. Teachers unions have said they will appeal.
The Vergara trial cost the plaintiffs’ team several million dollars, most of that bankrolled by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Dave Welch.
Another secret trade agreement
Read why #TISA is more scary than #TTIP (#TAFTA) or #TPP:
http://t.co/P3Iag7sE0e. #wikileaks #TPPA #WorldTradeCup pic.twitter.com/4RB6JHJAM0
— Global Trade Watch (@PCGTW) June 23, 2014
This one, for the international banking community. Geeze, I didn’t even know about this one! And they get to keep it secret for five years after they pass it?
The text of a 19-page, international trade agreement being drafted in secret was published by WikiLeaks on Thursday as the transparency group’s editor commemorated his two-year anniversary confined to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Fifty countries around the globe have already signed on to the Trade in Service Agreement, or TISA, including the United States, Australia and the European Union. Despite vast international ties, however, details about the deal have been negotiated behind closed-doors and largely ignored by the press.
In a statement published by the group alongside the leaked draft this week, WikiLeaks said “proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets,” and have participated in “a significant anti-transparency manoeuvre” by working secretly on a deal that covers more than 68 percent of world trade in services, according to the Swiss National Center for Competence in Research.
This message may be recorded for quality purposes
Or for use by an algorithm that analyzes your voice and tells the customer service rep what to say to calm you down:
We already know insurers, United and Blue Cross are buying our MasterCard and Visa records. It was odd and you can’t make this up, but Blue Cross said they buy them to look at to see if their insured members are starting to buy a size larger clothes. You have to laugh at that we know they are querying a lot more than that as that’s what query masters do, it’s habit as I used to be a query master and your brain is stuck on queries to find more value. It’s the way it works when you are developing software and of course once the SQL statements are done and given to
management, well they do all kinds of “scoring” as the next move as it will be tied to money.It’s too bad they can’t get their claims processing working any better but they want to predict everything they can to include a mortality rate on you, and yes they do that too. Remember though that predictions are based on patterns and there are levels of errors that will show up.
Again every company may not be set up to use voice analytics but it’s out there and I expect more to jump on as everyone wants every stick of predictive data and patterns they can get their hands on. This is partly why we have such a glut of software out there today, everybody wants to score and analyze you ever way they can, whether it be underwriting or shipping ads your way but the problem as I wrote below is that with a lot of what we have out there “we don’t work that way” and conforming to software to change us will create upheaval and more desire to get the radar in time as there’s only so much we can take and again too when data and analytics keep getting resold and re-queried, the error factors rise. There’s no incentive for correcting flawed data for consumers either as banks and big corporations have an absolute free labor pool and that is us to fix errors as we get denied something or access along the way after they have made their billions in profit selling us.
I am speaking to a man on the phone – but he’s not the only one listening. As I talk, software is analyzing my voice, measuring the speed of my speech, and building a graph that shows how the conversation is going.I’m talking to Josh Feast, CEO of a company called Cogito in Boston. His algorithms work away while people talk, highlighting awkward pauses, tense tones of voice and one-sided conversations. Next time you call your insurer, bank or any other call center, a version of Cogito’s software called Dialog could be running in the background, helping the customer service agent deal with you. If you start to get upset or angry, the agent can see that and take action to soothe you. Cogito calls its service “digital intuition”. It is useful in call centers because it can give feedback on conversations in real time, says Feast. One day, a version of it could even be running on your smartphone, analyzing every call you make and helping you spot if you are depressed, for example (see “A phone that listens“).
A blue bar that measures how much each person is speaking fills up as I listen to Feast. The fact he is dominating a phone interview about his software is to be expected, but if a call center agent saw that they were speaking as much as he is, they might want to ask more open-ended questions and bring the customer into the conversation. The software also measures the dynamic range of the caller’s voice, and the speed at which they speak. High dynamism, when a caller’s voice contains a lot of variation in pitch and emphasis, could mean they are excited or angry, for example. Low dynamism, a monotonous flat tone, might indicate disinterest or boredom.
The real scroungers
The BBC political shows are so much more interesting than ours, aren’t they?
Salma Yaqoob called Tory bigwig Iain Duncan Smith a “scrounger” on Thursday’sQuestion Time, attacking the secretary for works and pensions over austerity measures that have left “13 million Britons living below the poverty line”.
“I’m sitting next to Iain Duncan Smith who labels poor people as scroungers when you {IDS} claim £39 for a breakfast, like you can’t afford your own breakfast, and you live on your wife’s estate and have taken a million pounds of taxpayers’ money, that’s what I call scrounging,” the Birmingham chair of Stop the War and the former leader of the Respect party said.
“What a load of old nonsense,” replied the angered Tory, before dismissing his attacker with a wave of the hand. “I have never, ever labelled them as scroungers at all,” he said, shaking his head. He also denied that he had claimed the money for breakfast.
Earlier, Yaqoob had called Duncan-Smith “patronising” when he spoke about poverty.
“There are people in this country, 13 million people, who are now below the poverty line. People in one of the richest countries in the world face the indignity of relying on food banks,” she said.
“My full-time job is in mental health and I have seen myself how people have become suicidal. I have counselled people who have lost members of their family who did not want to go on, because they didn’t want to be a burden after having their support taken away. These are very, very real issues.
“We have this drive on people called ‘scroungers’ but half the people on welfare benefits are pensioners. Our pensioners are not scroungers. And 60% of people claiming benefits are in work, because their wages are not paying enough.
Oh, and here’s the receipt for the breakfast he insists he didn’t claim:
Iain Duncan Smith said @SalmaYaqoob was lying when she accused him of claiming £39 for breakfast but here's a receipt pic.twitter.com/zdyuwXrMX2
— Eoin Clarke (@DrEoinCl) June 15, 2014
Clusterfucked
I still don’t have a copy of my policy. They sent me a link to the online version, but my password doesn’t work and I’ve spent hours on the phone with Independence Blue Cross, just waiting for someone to answer:
Obamacare’s enrollment glitches might have been fixed long ago, but they’re still causing headaches at doctors’ offices and clinics around the country.
Patients and health care providers, in a series of interviews with The Huffington Post, complained that they are havingtrouble confirming that patients are insured, working out what their plans cover and figuring out which plans doctors will accept.
These complaints are signs that the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform law, is suffering growing pains more than six monthssince its insurance policies took effect.