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Whatever...

A place to share stuff that isn't at all fintec related but is amusing, absurd or scary.

Matt White

Matt White North America editor at Finextra

Intuit makes tax returns easy - unless you're Tim Geithner

Barack Obama's nominee for Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, has been getting a bit of a hard time at his confirmation hearing over some taxes he failed to pay a few years ago. During questions from the Senate Finance Committee it emerged, to laughter from the chamber crowd, that the supposed finance whizz had used Intuit's off-the-shelf TurboTax ...

Matt White

Matt White North America editor at Finextra

Data cleansing

Barely a week goes by without a data loss story making an appearance on Finextra. A good proportion of these involve staff stupidity so I wasn't particularly surprised when a press release made its way to us claiming 9000 USB sticks are accidently left at UK dry cleaners every year. Data security vendor Credant surveyed 500 dry cleaners and found ...

/security

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Why Telco's can't play at authentication ie. Optus Singtel

I write this as I wait yet again for the Singtel/Optus call centre to deal with my simple request. I placed a call to Singtel/Optus recently in order to unlock a phone from their network. Simple enough, the phone had not been used or connected to their network for more than a year. The number associated with it had been re-allocated. The phone has ...

Paul Penrose

Paul Penrose Head of Research at Finextra

Longer fingers point to bigger profits

Researchers at Cambridge University have found a link between the profitability of male traders at a London bank and the ratio of index to ring fingers on their right hand. The so-called 2D:4D ratio is a biological marker indicating pre-natal exposure to high levels of testosterone in the womb. In a study to be published today in Proceedings of the...

/wholesale

Keith Appleyard

Keith Appleyard IT Consultant at available for hire

Lax Security at New York Kennedy Airport

One is accustomed to being assured that Airport Security ensures that you show a Passport in order to check in, then show your Boarding Pass (but often NOT your Passport) to get through Security to Airside, but finally show both your Passport & Boarding Pass to get on the Plane. On Fri 9 Jan 2009 I was flying with American Airlines from NY JF...

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Identity, Authentication Will Be Important To Rebuild Trust

I'm actually on holidays and of course I come across those fingerprint biometric readers which are being fooled with special tape enabling travelers to perhaps use your identity along with your fingerprints. Terrorists, prostitutes and all manner of criminals continue to roam the world using other people's identities. Good idea that one, just ask ...

/security

Keith Appleyard

Keith Appleyard IT Consultant at available for hire

What is a Leap Year?

For those of you who have been out of touch during the festive season, on New Year’s Eve reports began flooding across the Internet that Microsoft’s Zune media player was experiencing a worldwide freeze. The glitch, caused by software that did not account for the extra day in the 2008 leap year, apparently affected only the 30GB Zune models releas...

Ainsley Ward

Ainsley Ward Vice President, Payments Solutions at CGI

Post-apocalyptic new capitalism - from a Xmas conversation

Strange things happen once the mince pies start to settle, just after you've finished seething at the Queen's speech and set the kids up with the latest Disney. This year a cousin and I began to debate what we'd change following last year's global bust - and in doing so we defined our vision of Post-apocalyptic new capitalism – which I'd like to s...

/regulation

Retired Member

Retired Member 

Yahoo To Shorten Data Retention To 3 months

Yahoo has announced that it will anonymise search records after 90 days and remove any personally identifiable connection to searches. Far short of what could be achieved, the Yahoo announcement is in an effort to stave off legislation in the US and Eu which would probably have even stricter provisions. Yahoo certainly increases pressure on Google ...

Retired Member

Retired Member 

What Do You Want In Identity?

I thought I'd start again with a theoretical discussion to try and stimulate a little thought on what we want from 'identity'. What is identity? Answers gives us: The collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known (by others). The set of behavioral or personal characteristics by which an ind...

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