Tuesday, August 27, 2013

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Former top cop calls for the persecution of whistleblowers

Posted: 27 Aug 2013 04:27 AM PDT

A former top cop has decided that whistleblowers should be arrested on sight.

The Guardian reports the former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Blair has said that there was material the state had to keep secret, and powers had to be in place to protect it.

The announcement comes after cops were patting themselves on the back that they had got their paws on copies of thousands of classified documents from David Miranda  who along with his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, has been reporting leaks from the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The documents were obtained when the Home Office used anti-terrorism laws to detain and question Miranda at Heathrow airport earlier this month. Of course, they only received copies, the rest of the documents were secretly stored elsewhere.

Lord Blair said the state has to have secrets as it is the only way to defend itself against terrorists.

He said that the UK needs a law that covers a situation when somebody wishes to disclose secrets, because it can be dangerous for individual citizens to make those secrets available to terrorists.

The Snowden leaks revealed an unprecedented, secret dragnet spying operation in the US and the UK.

Blair claimed that the threat from international terrorism was always changing and there was a need to review the law on whistleblowers.

Lord Blair said that it was a new threat which is not of somebody personally intending to aid terrorism, but of conduct which is capable of facilitating terrorism. Curiously this was the same line used in the prosecution of Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks - and the judge in that case did not agree.

We are not sure that Lord Blair has thought this one through.

Having laws against whistleblowers could result in problems for his former colleagues on the force. After all, who is going to want to talk to the police if they can be arrested for telling them information or exposing political corruption? 

Wall Street traders pinched source code

Posted: 27 Aug 2013 03:40 AM PDT

Three Wall Street Traders have been arrested after they borrowed their firm's computer software source code with the idea of setting up their own business.

Flow Traders has specialised in building in-house software that responds instantly to information, trading securities, futures, options, exchange-traded-funds and commodities, bonds, and foreign exchange instruments. As such its source code would be pretty useful for someone starting up their own share trading business.

According to Network World, Jason Vuu worked for Flow Traders but wanted out. His friend Simon Lu wasn't a Flow Traders employee but thought that the source code Vuu was using would be rather useful for a new business the pair were setting up.

Vuu, who quit in March 2013, sent secret e-mails to himself between August 2011 and August 2012. To cover the files' nature he changed the file format of the attachments to make it difficult to recognise their content. Vuu shared source code with Lu using Dropbox.

Glen Cressman, who was another trader at the New York office of Flow Traders, sent e-mails to himself in December 2012 with trading strategies and valuation algorithms. It is not clear what his involvement with the other two was. Cressman claims he is innocent and when everything about the case is aired, it will be clear he did nothing wrong.

Jeremy Saland, a lawyer for Vuu, was quoted as saying that Flow Traders did not suffer any economic loss as the company's algorithms and code weren't taken or used in any malicious way that damaged or compromised their financial security 

Intel to release budget Haswell range

Posted: 27 Aug 2013 03:37 AM PDT

Fashion bag maker  Intel is going to release seven new Haswell chips into the budget market.

The chips have a lower performance in comparison with what we have seen from the company so far.

According to CPU World, the chips are appearing for the first time on Intel's price list and should be available any day.

There will be three new dual-core Pentium processors the first G3220 which will have a clock speed of 3GHz. The G3420 will have a speed of 3.2GHz, and the G3430 3.3GHz.

Each ships with 3MB of on-board cache and HD Graphics as standard.

Where Chipzilla appears to have saved its cash is that none of the chips have Turbo Boost or Hyper-Threading and all have a TDP of 54W.

As for pricing, the G3220 will cost $70. The G3420 will set you back $90 and the G3430 $100. They will replace Ivy Bridge CPUs in that price range.

Meanwhile, Intel is releasing dual-core Core i3 processors, the first G3220 which will have a clock speed of 3.4GHz. The G3420 will have a speed of 3.5 GHz, and the G3430 3.6 GHz.

They are rated at 54W TDP, but unlike the Pentiums they have Hyper Threading. The 4130 includes 3MB of cache and a HD 4400 GPU. The 4330 and 4340 both have 4MB of cache and a HD 4600 GPU but have different clockspeeds. Pricing for the three chips is around $137, $155, and $166 respectively.

The last chip in the budget range is the new quad-core Core i5-4440. For $197 the chip has a 3.1GHz processor with Turbo Boost taking that up to 3.3GHz. There's 6MB of on-board cache and a HD 4600 GPU. The TDP for this chip increases to 84W, but there's no Hyper Threading. 

Credit score companies turn to Facebook

Posted: 27 Aug 2013 03:31 AM PDT

Credit score companies are starting to use data gathered from Facebook to determine how much cash finance companies should loan you.

According to CNN, a handful of tech startups are using social data to determine the risk of lending to people who have a difficult time accessing credit.

Normally companies ignore such types which might be a good credit risk because they don't have credit scores.

But apparently financial lending companies are becoming interested in how social connections can be a good indicator of a person's creditworthiness.

One outfit, Lenddo, looks to see if you're friends on Facebook with someone who was late paying back a loan. If so, then that harms your score.

If you only interact with the person a couple of times it probably will not matter so much, but if you talk to the person every day it could really do your finances some harm.

Jeff Stewart, a co-founder and CEO of Lenddo said that humans are really good at knowing who is trustworthy and reliable in their community and this can now be measured by computers.

A German company called Kreditech says that it uses up to 8,000 data points when assessing an application for a loan.

It uses data from Facebook, eBay or Amazon accounts and gathers information based on how customers fill out the online application.

If you read information about the loan on Kreditech's website you will increase your credit score, but if you fill out the application with caps lock on you lose points.

Creditworthiness is also based on where your computer is located and where you say you live or work.

What is a little alarming about all this is that it is based on assumptions on the interactions between humans, which are sometimes a little more complex.

For example, a person might come into contact with people who have poor credit scores for all sorts of reasons.

A person might have a thriving online business which is based from home and not need to use a work computer. These things do not mean that they are a credit risk.

What is more alarming is that this could alter people's behaviour, and those with poor credit scores could actually become lepers. After all if you talk to someone with poor credit it could stop you getting an agreement on that sofa you're after. 
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