Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m not sure if you’re supposed to have a favourite supply chain fraud or not but I do, and it is the famous case of the vegetable oil that almost bankrupted American Express (and went some way toward making Warren Buffet a multi-billionaire). The essence of the story is that a conman, Anthony “Tino” DeContinue reading “Salad Days”

xxx ‘found worrying or nasty in some way’ From Making Britain the safest place in the world to be online – GOV.UK Yes, well I find things like this every single day on the internet. For example, I am very worried about 

xxx While the implausible nature of the $9 billion price tag may have been a red flag to human traders, Apple did briefly see its stock rise to $158 before settling back down to around $156, raising the possibility that some algos were fooled. From Fake news: Dow Jones blames technical error for headlines claiming…Continue reading “Fake news: Dow Jones blames technical error for headlines claiming…”

Perhaps the universe was telling me something, because it seems to me beyond coincidence that I don’t remember hearing the word “homophily” before and yet I’ve just come across it twice in the same day: once when listening to historian Niall Ferguson on the BBC’s Today programme while in the shower and then again a coupleContinue reading “Book review: Big Mind”

xxx “Zero-knowledge proofs are one of the biggest inventions in the last two decades in cryptography,” said Emin Gun Sirer, an associate professor of computer science at Cornell University. It “will allow a slew of applications we can’t even imagine right now.” From ‘Mind-Boggling’ Math Could Make Blockchain Work for Wall Street – Bloomberg xxx

As I’ve written many times (e.g., here), it is difficult to overestimate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial services industry. As Wired magazine said, “it is no surprise that AI tops the list of potentially disruptive technologies”. With Forrester further forecasting that a quarter of financial sector jobs will be “impacted” by AI before 2020, there’s an urgentContinue reading “POST Machines learning about fraud”

xxx According to RBA estimates, the merchant will pay an average of about 0.55 per cent of the transaction’s value in a “merchant service fee” to their bank when the payment goes through the credit card network. But if it goes through the eftpos (CHQ or SAV) system, this drops to 0.15 per cent. From TheContinue reading “The hidden cost of the tap-and-go boom”

xxx Officers initially confiscated his passport before Ali changed his name by deed poll and applied for a new one, flying to Dubai two days before he was to be tried for possessing a quantity of bullets. From Arab driver filmed himself in his Porsche going 180mph | Daily Mail Online xxx

snippet To maintain their cover, undercover detectives were posting and sharing abuse material on Childs Play. Other users continued to post and view images while the site was under police control. [From Australian police sting brings down paedophile forum on dark web | Society | The Guardian ] snippet

xxx The accumulating evidence on economic growth, meanwhile, has become damning. Between July and September 2016, India’s GDP grew 7.53 percent. Between January and March 2017 it grew 5.72 percent. Former head of the Reserve Bank of India Raghuram Rajan, now returned to the University of Chicago, links the drop to demonetization: “Let us notContinue reading “India’s Failed Demonetization Program and Its Retreating Economic Defenders – Alt-M”