Honey Laundering: A sticky trail of intrigue and crime
A far cry from the innocent image of Winnie the Pooh with a paw stuck in the honey pot, the international honey trade has become increasingly rife with crime and intrigue.
2 April, 2009 – The Fisheries Council of Canada (FCC) and U.S.-based Better Seafood Bureau (BSB) are praising the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s (CFIA) letter to seafood importers urging them to comply with the country’s labeling requirements.
I noticed a post on The Daily Caveat about Investigators lying in the reports they submitted to the US Office of Personnel Management, which handles the background inquiries for more than 100 US government agencies. It is alleged that Investigators lied about interviews they didn’t conduct to earn more money. Some of the Investigators were working for contractors U.S. Investigation Services and Kroll.
For more details go to the The Washington Post article.
Corporate espionage is always a threat, but when the economy is sour the temptation is greater and finding broke or disgruntled employees is easier.
How the recession is impacting IT security and top tips to ring fence your data to minimise risk.
Two Wyko engineers are alleged to have used a mobile telephone to photograph a secret piece of equipment at an American factory
Strive for ’100 steps per minute’
You should be taking 100 steps each minute for half an hour a day if you want to achieve “moderate” exercise by walking, a study shows.
The following article illustrates the dangers of using web-base collaborative applications.
Google Privacy Blunder Shares Your Docs Without Permission
by Jason Kincaid on March 7, 2009
In a privacy error that underscores some of the biggest problems surrounding cloud-based services, Google has sent a notice to a number of users of its Document and Spreadsheets products stating that it may have inadvertently shared some of their documents with contacts who were never granted access to them.
Associated Press is reporting that Swiss police came across an enormous marijuana crop using Google Earth. What a bummer dude!
That’s a lot more interesting than looking at some competitor’s plant to count the parking spaces and loading docks.
The following post is an excellent example of how a disciplined due diligence process saved an investor from ruin.
If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?
Actually, the formulation of that headline that I prefer these days is the famous inversion by the Nobel economist Paul Samuelson: “If you’re so rich how come you’re so dumb?”
And yes, that brings us promptly to the Bernard Madoff scandal.
But this week Barron’s brings us one: “Living to Tell About Madoff,” an interview with James Hedges (not, I assume, a stage name, although in the circumstances it ought to be), “president and founder of LJH Global Investments in Naples, Fla., who has invested billions in hedge funds and private equity since 1990 through relationships with numerous hedge funds.”
Eleven years ago, Hedges spent two hours meeting with Madoff in his New York office planning to invest a few billion dollars of his clients’ money. He walked out without a deal.
Here are some of the reasons why…
Online marketing firm, Hubspot, released a report today that details the “State of the Twittersphere” for the fourth quarter of 2008.
The report lists the following Twitter statistics:
The full report is available on Hubspot’s research page.
An all-to-common phone fraud story from the CBC.
Phone systems are often a weak link in loss prevention and security plans, and cost you real money. When you get defrauded and contact the telco you find that don’t care, they just want the bill paid.
Paul Kelly and colleagues at Loughborough University found that a disulfur dinitride (S2N2) polymer turned exposed fingerprints brown, as the polymer reaction was initiated from the near-undetectable remaining residues.
Traces of inkjet printer ink can also initiate the polymer. The detection limit is so low that details of a printed letter previously in an envelope could be read off the inside of the envelope after being exposed to S2N2.
“A one-covers-all versatile system like this has obvious potential,” says Kelly.
“This work has demonstrated that it is possible to obtain fingerprints from surfaces that hitherto have been considered extremely difficult, if not impossible, to obtain,” says Colin Lewis, scientific advisor at the UK Ministry of Defence. “The method proposed has shown that this system could well provide capabilities which could significantly enhance the tools available to forensic scientists in the future.”
Original article: Paul F. Kelly, Chem. Commun., 2008, DOI: 10.1039/b815742a
Provided by Royal Society of Chemistry
New York money manager Bernie Madoff was essentially running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme…
Not everyone was fooled. According to a story in the Wall Street Journal one hedge fund adviser actually hired a private investigator to look into Madoff’s accountants. He found that the firm had only three employees, one of whom was a 78-year-old accountant who lived in Florida and another who was a secretary.
couple served with legal documents via Facebook
Mark McCormack, a lawyer in Canberra, persuaded a court to allow him to use the unusual method after other attempts to reach them failed.
Victims lash out at Hollywood private investigator
Victims of former Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano say they have never been able to free themselves from the emotional and financial fallout caused by crimes he committed while wiretapping the rich and famous.
How spyware nearly sent a teacher to prison
By: Robert McMillan – IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)(NA) (28 Nov 2008)
Julie Amero faced 40 years behind bars for allegedly exposing her students to inappropriate images on her classroom computer. Read about her four year ordeal and how anti-malware company exec helped her get a guilty verdict overturned
Twitter news about the terrorist attacks every few seconds, at Mumbai, Bombay, #Mumbai, and @BreakingNewz.
The Wikipedia page about these attacks features a picture of a gun-toting attackers and is becomining the clearing house for information about the attacks just as it did for the Virginia Tech shooting. In the Virgina Tech shooting over 8000 amendments to the Wikipedia article were posted in 2 weeks.