Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP You know who got a hefty pay increase between 2017 and 2018? The banks! According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s 2018 Q4 report, more than 5,400 federally insured banks made $236.7 billion in profits last year, and saw a $72.4 billion increase in profits from 2017. Per the Hill, $28.8…
The Civil Media Co. bills itself as a solution to some pressing problems in modern journalism, pitching a new cryptocurrency that would help news consumers support quality information and weed out bad actors. So far, the effort isn’t going smoothly. Consumer demand for the new so-called token that the company is selling has been weak…
Some employees in a Wells Fargo WFC +0.15% & Co. unit that handles business banking improperly altered information on documents related to corporate customers, according to people familiar with the matter. The behavior again raises questions about Wells Fargo’s risk-management practices and controls. The bank has been sanctioned in recent months by federal regulators for problems in these areas…
Visa Inc. is ditching the signature. The largest U.S. card network announced Friday that merchants, starting in April, will no longer be required to make consumers sign for debit and credit-card purchases, signaling the demise for a procedure that was once a linchpin of keeping transactions secure. The other major U.S. networks, Mastercard Inc., MA 0.88% American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services , DFS 0.19% in recent months said they would take…
Gee thanks, Gus. Gus isn’t a real person, but it’s the pseudonym Senator Al Franken assigned to the Equifax Inc. employee who holds a lot of the blame for the theft of 145.5 million Americans’ personal data. Former Chief Executive Officer Richard Smith told Franken and other senators Wednesday that Equifax was breached largely because of…
The credit reporting agency, Equifax, announced on Sept. 7 that a hack has impacted the credit histories of up to 143 million Americans. Here’s what you should do if you believe you are affected. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post) This story has been updated with comments from the CFPB and the New York Attorney General’s office….
The credit reporting agency, Equifax, announced on Sept. 7 that a hack has impacted the credit histories of up to 143 million Americans. Here’s what you should do if you believe you are affected. (Jhaan Elker/The Washington Post) Equifax said Thursday that it will offer free credit monitoring services to all U.S. consumers for one year, after…
cache hit 1516:single/related:c1eac07f6d627062c9127c08bed0632d empty It’s a sad reality in 2017 that a data breach affecting 143 million people is dwarfed by other recent hacks—for instance, the ones hitting Yahoo in 2013 and 2014, which exposed personal details for 1 billion and 500 million users respectively; another that revealed account details for 412 million accounts on…
Scanning And Sorting How the banking industry, with an assist from tech, turned an incredibly frustrating, manual process—sorting checks—into an excellent example of automation. Today in Tedium: The physical check, for most general purposes, is a sheer relic—basically used mostly for specific big-ticket purchases like rent, it certainly doesn’t have the sex appeal of, say,…
It’s the dead of winter in Stockholm and I’m sitting in a very small room inside the very inaptly named Calm Body Modification clinic. A few feet away sits the syringe that will, soon enough, plunge into the fat between my thumb and forefinger and deposit a glass-encased microchip roughly the size of an engorged…