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The season of giving is now upon us — but don’t forget, it’s also the season of stealing — and no, I don’t mean your wallet or the gift package at your doorstep, but your Social Security number, credit card information, medical records and any other highly confidential information that you have stored on your computers.

Thieves want your data — the information stored in your smartphone, laptop and other devices. People are especially vulnerable to this crime when they travel. Don’t let the hustle

The words “spying” and “stalking” have negative connotations, but there’s a flipside to the coin: parents monitoring their kids’ online activities and physical locations. And how about middle-aged adults keeping track of the whereabouts of their aged parents with dementia?

If you fear that apps for “spying” might get banned, here’s bad news: U.S. Senator Al Franken is pushing for this.

However, Franken’s proposed law will actually permit these constructive uses. His plan is to require companies to

Even though the highly publicized retail data breaches have involved off-line brick and mortar stores, this doesn’t mean that security is high with online shopping. Scammers and hackers are waiting for you in more ways than you know, such as:

• Fake product reviews
• Non-existent products
• Delivered products that don’t match what was seen on the retail site
• Shoppers being tricked into typing their credit card information into a purchase form on a phony shopping site
• Malicious attachments and phishing emai

Are you a shredder? I hope so. No identity thief on this planet is going to want to attempt to reconstruct cross-shredded documents.

So what, then, should you make a habit of shredding?

• All financial documents and information, including financial information you’ve jotted on a Post-it note.
• Credit card receipts unless you want to file these away for end-of-month calculations, but ultimately, you have your monthly statements so you will not have use for them anyways.
• Old property tax statements (keep

In light of recent events, the Environmental Protection Agency is using new monitoring techniques to evaluate the quality of companies’ classifications and reporting of hazardous materials. Ironically, as we all learned recently, even the EPA itself isn’t immune to catastrophic, if preventable, mistakes. New compliance regulations increase the importance of standardized risk identification, mitigation, and monitoring strategies.

Two takeaways from this new development:

1. A variety of companies, part

Thinking of bringing a credit card with you on your travels? You can end up in a jam: You just treated your extended family to fine dining in France. Time to pay; your credit card is declined.

If you try to make a purchase overseas, your credit card company might think it’s fraudulent, since it would appear anomalous, relative to your usual, U.S. purchases.

So before you leave for your trip:

• Back up credit card data. It’s always important to have a backup of your card data, both online and in print

Sexting is the act of sending images of a sexual nature via cell phone, often naked pictures. Because texting technology is so readily available and easy to understand, parents should be quite leery of telling themselves, “Oh, MY kid would never do that!” Studies showy your kid already did it. 12-17 year olds sext. And studies show 50-75 year olds do it as much as 18-25 year olds. Picture that!

Sexting is not the same as when a teen shows a naked Polaroid photo to the crowd huddled in front of th

Despite the growing necessity of robust risk management software for companies of all sizes, it’s easy to think of risk solutions as akin to insurance, like guardrails that prevent a vehicle from careening off a narrow mountain road; the thought of actually needing them in the event of a failure is too unsettling to dwell on.

That functionality is of course important, but what about day-to-day operations and costs? An efficient risk management process starts with identifying and assessing risks a

The holiday season is ramping up. And so are burglars. Even if you don’t get very festive, burglars may still target your home. Your dark, unlit home among all the dazzling festive homes will stick out like a sore thumb. Whether you have 10,000 decorative lights on or none, here’s what to do:

• Keep all possible entrances (even the second-story window next to the big tree branches) locked at all times with high quality locks in excellent working condition.
• Put reinforcements on your doors so that th

Banking in Theory and Practice

Source:

Mejstřík Michal - Pečená Magda - Teplý Petr

Karolinum 2015

Published: March 2015

This new bilingual banking textbook awarded by Charles University as a best textbook within socio-economic field and humanities.

You can read the entire article in the following link:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/banking-theory-practice-michal-mejstrik?trk=hb_ntf_MEGAPHONE_ARTICLE_POST

Reinventing Banking: From Russia to Iceland to Ecuador

Source:

Ellen Brown

EllenBrown.com 11 December 2015

Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Among other interesting news items:

◾In Russia, vulnerability to Western sanctions has led to proposals for a banking system that is not only independent of the West but is based on different design principles.
◾In Iceland, the booms and busts culminating in th

The solution for working with our tendency for impulsiveness can be found in Daniel Kahnemann’s book Thinking Fast and Slow. He gives more than forty heuristics, where we take mental shortcuts to make a quicker decision. (Erik Johnson has a nice summary of each of them here). Kahnemann explains how each of these are by no means foolproof and suggests that we need to identify the times when we should slow down our thinking to check if the heuristic in play is valid in each case.

I take Kahnemann’s

So what will you be doing this holiday season to avoid getting scammed? The scammers really come out of the woodwork during the holidays, waiting to snatch their victims. It’s easier than you think to avoid getting ripped off or getting your entire bank account sucked dry. Here’s how to avoid getting tangled in a scammer’s net:

• Always inspect every purchase on your credit card statements to make sure you recognize them.
• If you must go with a lesser-known seller (because the product is very unique)

Here at LogicManager, we’ve spent a lot of time considering issues related to cybersecurity. To find a new way in which a cybercriminal has exploited electronic vulnerabilities, all you need to do is skim today’s newspaper, which will almost inevitably report a data breach or fraud-related scandal. An evolving set of threats means incident likelihood is increasing, and generally, cybersecurity risks have serious impacts – meaning such risks have very high inherent indices, or combinations of imp

Virtual Currencies: The Elusive Creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto

Source:

Binoy Kampmark

Global Research, December 09, 2015

“The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized… We try until it works.” - Craig S. Wright, Jan 10, 2009

One of the co-creators of Bitcoin, the supposedly named and frustratingly elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, has become the subject of police attention in Australia. The person in question was identified in two investigations by ‘Wired and Gizmodo’ as Craig Wright. (Bot

As the holiday season creeps upon us, research shows that an astonishing 24% people who are buying online have been duped by scammers. Whether you are buying shoes, electronics or the latest fashions and accessories, research companies are showing that you are at risk of being duped.

When you look at the overall shopping behavior of consumers, we see that about 34% do all of their shopping online, and during the holiday season, this number rises to 39% of all consumers. That is a lot of people fo

Enrique Suarez Presenting:

Alternative Investments 2020

The Future of Alternative Investments

Source:

World Economic Forum

Executive Summary

This report examines the forces driving today’s alternative investment industry and considers where these may take the industry in the coming years, focusing on the core asset classes of private equity buyouts, hedge funds and venture capital. Alternative investment has matured over the last 30 years and is gradually becoming  part of the mainstream financial ind

Video: Noam Chomsky on Corporations

"An Unexamined Life is not Worth Living"

Socrates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYxGkFxb7f4

If someone is “borrowing” your Wi-Fi service, there’s more to this than just the nerve of someone secretly mooching off of you.

Their use of your service could interfere with bandwidth and mess up your connection. If they’re a bad guy hacker or even a skeevy child porn peddling pedophile and get caught, it can be traced to your connection—and you will have a lot of explaining to do to the authorities when they bang on your door at 4am with a battering ram.

How can you tell if someone’s riding on y

“Angst” Against Encryption: National Security and the Surveillance State. The Global Crackdown

Source: