China’s Massive Hack of U.S. Employees an Inside Job

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This new HBO documentary will make you want to delete your search history

businessinsider

Ian Phillips

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Obama Nat'l Security Advisor Rice Falls for Internet Hoax

breitbart

By Warner Todd Huston

Obama’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, fell for a social media hoax on Monday, posting that a famous Nigerian writer had died that day. But in fact, the author died two years ago.

On Monday morning, Rice tweeted her condolences to the Nigerian people for the death of Chinua Achebe, who authored the famed Nigerian classics “Things Fall Apart” and “Arrow of God.”

“A giant of African lit., he brought the Continent–and Nigeria, in particular–2 the world. His works left lasting impression on me & my gen.,” Rice tweeted.

Obama’s security adviser then added, “Despite the promise of the future, today is a somber day in Nigeria, as Chinua Achebe was laid to rest in his native village.”

The only problem is that Achebe died back in 2013.

Rice made this mistake despite being the top Africa adviser in the State Department from 1997 to 2001. With that background, one might assume Rice would be keeping up on news in Africa, especially since she is now one of Obama’s top advisers.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.

'Innocent mistake': UK’s nuclear weapons web data routed through Ukraine

UK traffic diverted through Ukraine included nuclear weapon maker AWE http://t.co/Df15sVUsDg pic.twitter.com/8BvpsbwR6w
— Dyn Research (@DynResearch) marzo 13, 2015

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FCC Approves 'Net Neutrality' Plan to Control Internet Access

Breitbart

WASHINGTON (AP) — Internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile now must act in the “public interest” when providing a mobile connection to your home or phone, under rules approved Thursday by a divided Federal Communications Commission.

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Irritado? Inbox a cero

microsiervos
1. Seleccionar todos los correos
2. Marcar como leídos
3. Archivar
4. Borrar
5. Eliminar cuenta
6. Tirar el ordenador por la ventana

– @porras

Operaciones bursátiles tan rápidas que dejan en desventaja a los que operan desde más lejos

microsiervos

Tal y como deja ver Eric Scott Hunsader en este gráfico, la velocidad de la información no es infinita y la de los reguladores del mercado bursatil en cambio es tremendamente lenta. Como ejemplo, este ejemplo en el que las operaciones de «alta velocidad» del mercado norteamericano dejan en desventaja a quienes operan en bolsa desde la lejanía –si acaso estar en la otra costa del país es lejanía– porque más de un 30 por ciento de las órdenes ellas se cancelan antes de que alguien de la otra costa pueda reaccionar.

Lo que quiere decir el mapa es que en lo que que tarda en llegar un precio de Nueva York a California (1) y un broker en enviar una orden de vuelta (2) es más que lo que tarda el sistema de trading en lanzar la oferta y acto segundo cancelarla – que es la técnica que utiliza este tipo de operaciones de alta frecuencia. No solo el retardo en llegar a California es considerable (30% del total): el 20% también se pierden tan pronto salen del estado en la que opera la bolsa. (Y de cuándo llegan a Europa, ni mención). ¿No debería estar esto regulado?

La revista Wired contaba hace tiempo cómo las empresas de trading compiten por tener no solo mejores datacenters, sino miles de cientos de kilómetros de fibra de alta velocidad para comunicarlos de forma más rápida y además por alquilar los mejores espacios físicos lo más cerca posible de los puntos de interconexión de las bolsas. Y es que aquí, más que nunca, cada microsegundo es oro.

Básicamente consiste en saturar el mercado con operaciones y cancelaciones ultrarrápidas del orden de milisegundos e incluso microsegundos buscando cerrar compraventas en las que haya un mínimo margen del beneficio, en ocasiones céntimos o fracciones de céntimo. Si todo va bien, esos céntimos acumulados a lo largo del día pueden sumar millones en poco tiempo.

El vídeo muestra a modo de ejemplo lo que sucede con la cotización y órdenes de General Electric en diversas bolsas. Lo impresionante es que el vídeo dura en total 1/4 de segundo; el paso de los dígitos del centro marca cada milisegundo.

Y es que el HTF (High Frequency Trading, Negociación de alta frecuencia) ha sido controvertido desde que se inventó, con expertos reclamando más regulación y que se investiguen «casos» que suceden en ese extraño reino de algoritmos y milisegundos.

Las críticas al HFT parten de que esta fórmula parece premiar únicamente a la tecnología y las operaciones rápidas y automáticas, no a otros factores más propios de los mercados bursátiles y las empresas que cotizan en él. Según cuentan, hace menos de cinco años se calculó que las operaciones mediante HFT suponían entre el 60 y 70% del volumen de las que se realizaban todos los días; actualmente se calcula del 40% tanto para Estados Unidos como para Europa. En países como Italia se impuso el año pasado un impuesto del 0,002% para cada transacción realizada en menos de 0,5 segundos.

Entre otras cosas, se atribuye al HFT el Flash Crash de 2010, en el que el índice Dow Jones perdió y recuperó la barbaridad de un 9% en cuestión de minutos.

Road to Wealth: What It's Like To Sell On Amazon

TIME

Los peligros de la wifi

microsiervos
La wifi no daña la salud a no ser que te caiga el «router» sobre el pie.

– @lagamez

El mejor consejo del mundo

microsiervos
El mejor consejo para cualquier cosa es: «Búscalo en Google».

– Adam Newman
(vía @unmundolibre)

Illicit e-commerce: The Amazons of the dark net | The Economist

THE first ever e-commerce transaction, conducted by students from Stanford and MIT in the early 1970s, involved the sale of a small quantity of marijuana. For decades afterwards, the online drugs trade was severely constrained by the ability of law enforcement to track IP addresses and the means of payment. The trickle of transactions threatened to become a flood with the emergence a few years ago of Silk Road, a drug-dealing site on the “dark net”. These e-depths cannot be reached through a normal browser but only with anonymising software called Tor. Buyers and sellers transact there pseudonymously in bitcoin, a crypto-currency.

Silk Road was shut last year with the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the 29-year-old American whom investigators believe to be Dread Pirate Roberts, the site’s founder. Mr Ulbricht is due to stand trial in New York next January on charges that include computer hacking and money laundering. But law enforcers who predicted that Silk Road’s demise would mark the beginning of the end for online black-market bazaars were wrong. Instead, dozens of dark-net Amazons and eBays (also known as crypto-markets) have sprung up to fill the void. They are not only proving remarkably resilient but expanding their offerings and growing more sophisticated.

Keep reading on The Economist >>

Here Are the World's Five Cybercrime Hotspots

TIME

Forbes Media's websites will now be majority owned by a Chinese company

breitbart

By Warner Todd Huston 

Back in 2007 Forbes magazine purchased 51 percent of the then-wildly growing website RealClearPolitics.com. Now, in 2014, a Chinese company has purchased a majority position in Forbes itself.

A highly visited site, RealClearPolitics.com was created in Chicago in the year 2000 by John McIntyre and Tom Bevan and grew at an amazing rate, becoming one of the most trafficked political sites on the web. By 2007 Forbes Media took notice and purchased a 51 percent share in the site.

Upon the purchase, Forbes Media decided to let McIntyre and Bevan continue to run the site as they had always done before.

For the last year or so, Forbes itself has been up for sale, and after eight months on the block, this sale was anything but a sure bet as one company after another bowed out of the running. At last the media company found an investor in China.

This week Forbes Media confirmed that it has sold a controlling interest in the company to Hong Kong-based Integrated Asset Management, founded by Tak Cheung Yam. The price tag reportedly tops $300 million.

The Forbes family will hold a minority stake in the 97-year-old company that bears their name.

"This is a major milestone for the company and our family, and we're pleased to partner with a forward-looking investor group to further drive the evolution and growth of this exceptional company," current company chief Steve Forbes told the media Friday.

As of now, Steve Forbes, the company's chairman and editor, and chief executive Steve Perlis will remain with the company.

In a statement, new majority owner Mr. Yam said, "Given the tremendous growth of digital in the past decade, Forbes Media's future plans include additional Internet and social media expansion projects."

With over 27.7 million unique visitors, Forbes Media's websites will now be majority owned by the Chinese company.

However, Steve Forbes went to pains to insist that the magazine and the company's various websites will retain editorial control here in America.

"To mess with that would undermine the investment," he said.

Signs that this was a last-ditch effort to save the company were everywhere. The Forbes family has undergone a long campaign of selling off assets in hopes of keeping the nearly 100-year-old company afloat. The family sold out many of its real estate holdings, closed its longtime Greenwich Village headquarters, and even sold off its impressive collection of Fabergé eggs.

Perlis, though, assured employees that there would be no layoffs.

"This is an investment move," the chief executive said. "The reason it took as long as it did to do the deal was that we were looking for a particular kind of buyer who would understand the tradition of the Forbes brand and an investor [who] would back the family’s and current management’s plan to grow the company."

Sina Weibo and Alibaba, the Chinese E-Giants Coming to U.S.

NBC News.com

www.crunchbase.com

By Julianne Pepitone

Two of the biggest Internet companies in the world are going public in the United States, but most Americans have never heard of Chinese powerhouses Weibo Corp. and Alibaba.

Despite both companies' lack of recognition in the U.S., they are poised to make massive stock-market debuts in New York — and make a play to become household names in America, too.

Sina Weibo

Weibo kicked off the buzz on Friday, when the company filed paperwork to raise $500 million in an initial public offering.

The company owns Sina Weibo, China's largest microblogging site. Sina Weibo is similar to Twitter, with short posts from brands, celebrities and regular folks.

The site has managed to grow rapidly — the service had more than 129 million active users as of December, up 77 percent in just two years — despite a tightly controlled media environment in China. Hundreds of Weibo users have reportedly been arrested in China over posts that angered the government.

Sina Weibo does have a small English-language section featuring celebrity users like David Beckham, Tom Cruise and British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Sina Weibo is still big and buzzy, but it has also struggled to retain its cachet amid the rise of apps like Tencent's WeChat: a rival to the WhatsApp service that Facebook is planning to buy for $16 billion. 

Alibaba: China's Amazon, eBay, PayPal and more

E-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group is more difficult to describe. It has been described as China's Amazon, eBay and PayPal wrapped into one. But Alibaba isn't a perfect mirror of any of those U.S. counterparts, and its scope is much broader.

Alibaba followed Sina Weibo's news by revealing its own plans on Sunday: a New York debut that could reportedly raise $15 billion for the company. While Alibaba hasn't filed its official paperwork yet, its stock-market debut is slated to be the buzziest since that of Facebook.

The company said in its announcement on Sunday that the U.S. IPO "will make us a more global company and enhance the company’s transparency, as well as allow the company to continue to pursue our long-term vision and ideals."

Alibaba employs about 20,000 people in more than 70 offices in China, Singapore, India and the United States. The company's nine major businesses span all parts of the e-commerce process, and they're split between consumer- and business-focused missions.

On the consumer side, Alibaba's crown jewel is Taobao Marketplace: an eBay-like online shopping site with a whopping 760 million product listings as of March 2013, the most recent data available. According to Internet site ranking company Alexa, it's the 8th most popular site in the world and the No. 3 site in China.

The more upscale Tmall sells brand-name goods from from 70,000 global companies including Apple, Nike, Gap and Adidas. ETao is a search engine exclusively for shopping, which lets users hunt for products, coupons, hotels and more. Alibaba also runs a Groupon competitor called Juhuasuan.But Alibaba was founded for businesses, and that legacy continues. The namesake Alibaba.com is a trading site that connects small businesses with two million suppliers. Both 1688.com and AliExpress focus on the wholesale marketplace. The PayPal-like Alipay is the biggest third-party online payment platform in China, and Aliyun.com sells cloud computing and data services to other companies.

Alibaba's CEO is the charismatic Jack Ma, who created the company in 1999 with 17 co-founders working out of an apartment in Hangzhou, China. Unlike many of the dot-coms that went bust during that time, Alibaba became profitable just three years later. That attracted big investors like Yahoo, which currently owns about a quarter of Alibaba, and Japan's Softbank, which owns about 37 percent.

Like Sina Weibo, however, Alibaba also faces competition. The large Chinese investment firm Tencent announced this month that it will buy a 15 percent in JD.com, the country's No. 2 e-commerce company.

How to Make a Strong Password (and Actually Remember It)

TIME

30-Second Tech Trick: How to Schedule Email to Be Sent Later

TIME

Robots superan a los Humanos en el trafico de Internet

microsiervos

La gente de Incapsula publicó esta curiosa infografía acerca del Tráfico de robots en Internet durante 2013. El resultado: que entre pitos y flautas los no-humanos ya superan claramente a los seres humanos en cuanto a tráfico; concretamente 61,5% vs. 38,5%. Comparativamente el año pasado prácticamente había un empate (49% vs. 51%).

Los tipos de bots más maliciosos: scrapers que «roban» el contenido (para duplicarlo, analizar a la competencia, etcétera); software malicioso para robot datos de tarjetas de crédito, distribuir malware, modificar contenidos, etc; spammers para publicar contenido publicitario irrelevante, publicar enlaces, crear granjas de enlaces…

En total examinaron unas 1.450 millones de visitas durante 3 meses en 20.000 sitios web distintos.

(Vía Cool Infographics.)
# Enlace Permanente

How to Unsend Email

TIME

How To Find The Invisible Internet [INFOGRAPHIC] - Business Insider

Business Insider
Greg Morcroft, International Business Times 

NSA Uses Google Tracking Cookies to Spy on Potential Targets

breitbart

irwebreport.com

A new information leak from Edward Snowden reveals that the NSA is using Google's tracking cookies to identify targets for government hacking. The Washington Post reports that Snowden's documents "show that when companies follow consumers on the Internet to better serve them advertising, the technique opens the door for similar tracking by the government. The slides also suggest that the agency is using these tracking techniques to help identify targets for offensive hacking operations."

These tracking cookies allow a website to identify a user's browser, but do not contain any personal information.  "This cookie allows NSA to single out an individual's communications among the sea of Internet data in order to send out software that can hack that person's computer."

The slides released by Snowden do not say how the government accesses Google's tracking cookies, "but other documents reviewed by the Post indicate that cookie information is among the data NSA can obtain with a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act order."