1 Cyber attacks top US threat list (BBC) US
intelligence agencies have placed cyber attacks from foreign governments and
criminals at the top of their list of threats to the country. Online assaults
would increasingly undermine US economic competitiveness and national security,
said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
A report issued by his office said Russia's military
was setting up a cyber command to carry out attacks. The report also describes
China, Iran and North Korea as leading threats. In testimony to a congressional
committee, Mr Clapper said he no longer believed the US faced "cyber
Armageddon". The idea that major infrastructure such as financial networks
or power grids could be disabled by hackers now looked less probable, he said.
However he warned: "We foresee an ongoing
series of low-to-moderate level cyber attacks from a variety of sources over
time, which will impose cumulative costs on US economic competitiveness and
national security." Over the past year there have been a series of
high-profile cyber attacks against US targets.
2 Facebook claims 2m advertisers (San Francisco
Chronicle) Facebook has said it has more than 2 million active advertisers,
double its amount from a year and a half ago. “Our mission is to make the world
more open and connected, and an important part of that is helping people
connect with businesses,” said Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl
Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a blog post.
Facebook has tried to woo small businesses,
encouraging them to pay to promote their posts on the social network, narrowing
their audience by interests, location and age. In 2013, it got complaints from
small businesses upset that the network’s algorithms made it harder for their
posts to be seen on Facebook’s news feed without paying for an ad.
Facebook continues to grab global digital ad
revenue. Last year, it had nearly 8 percent market share in this category, up
from about 6 percent in 2013, according to research firm eMarketer. Rob Enderle
of the advisory services firm Enderle Group, warned that Facebook does face
challenges from smaller, niche social networks such as Nextdoor, which focuses
on neighborhoods, or LinkedIn for business people.
3 Punishing big banks (Khaleej Times) Often claimed
to be too big to fall (or to fail), the world’s biggest banks are now in the
eyes of the public too big to be honest. And that absence of honesty is why
HSBC chairman Douglas Flint has failed to take responsibility for the bank’s
alleged criminal transgressions in Switzerland.
More infuriating still for the British public, who
have followed the workings of a Treasury Select Committee taking evidence about
HSBC and its possible role in tax evasion, is that neither Flint nor the bank’s
CEO, Stuart Gulliver, have mentioned personal responsibility for the
transgressions.
HSBC is Britain’s largest — and the world’s second
largest — bank, and has been caught quite red-handed facilitating
industrial-scale tax evasion, committed by some of its wealthiest clients. In
keeping with the appalling absence of honesty, integrity and responsibility
that HSBC has displayed from at least 2008 the bank’s chairman initially denied
HSBC’s Swiss subsidiary had facilitated tax avoidance.
There is now a clear signal that the latest
transgression by HSBC, and the widespread vociferous public reaction to the
leak, has moved the authorities in the UK to act. Under the circumstances,
better late than never may be some comfort to the public in Britain and
elsewhere. The impunity of big banks has indeed been galling. The Libor scandal
was exposed in 2012, implicating a cartel of banks in the fraudulent manipulation
of the average interest rate of London banks.
And, in November 2014 five of the world’s biggest
banks — JP Morgan Chase, UBS, Citigroup, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and HSBC —
were collectively fined US$4.25bn by British, Swiss and American authorities
for fixing foreign exchange rates. It is well past high time for strict,
long-lasting penalties on those who keep the hard-earned monies of the public.
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