Einstein supported socialism.

Pyschos like Trump support capitalism.

More than One in Four Home-Sellers Dropped their Price Last Month

Share of homes with price drops reached a record-high in September

Signs continue to point toward a changing market that’s letting homebuyers be more selective as supply constraints begin to ease in the hottest markets. As a result, sellers are feeling compelled to adjust their expectations — and their prices. In the four weeks ending on September 16, 26.6 percent of homes listed for sale had a price drop, the highest level on record since Redfin began tracking this metric in 2010. We define a price drop as a listing price reduction of more than 1 percent and less than 50 percent.



“After years of strong price growth and intense competition for homes, buyers are taking advantage of the market’s easing pressure by being selective about which homes to offer on and how high to bid,” said Taylor Marr, Redfin senior economist. “But there are some early signs of a softening market, and the increase in price drops may be another indicator that sellers are going to have trouble getting the prices, and the bidding wars, that they may have just months ago. Instead, many are finding their homes are sitting on the market without much interest until they start reducing their prices.”

According to a Redfin analysis of all homes actively listed on the MLS for sale in the markets where Redfin operates during the four weeks ended September 16:

• The share of home-sellers who dropped their price increased 4.8 percentage points from the same period a year earlier, when 21.7% of homes had a price drop.
• The share of homes with price drops has been posting year-over-year gains consistently since late March.
• Las Vegas (+12.3 points to 28.1%), San Jose (+10.7 pts to 25.7%), Seattle (+10.1 pts to 37.1%), and Atlanta (+9.0 pts to 27.9%) were among the markets that posted the biggest year-over-year increases in the share of homes with price drops.

The Redfin Housing Demand Index — a monthly indicator of homebuyer demand that was flat for the third consecutive month in July — also suggests easing inventory is giving buyers more room to carefully consider their purchases.

“In a market where we’re seeing more inventory, sellers may choose to use price reductions to continue to generate interest in their home for sale,” said Jessie Culbert, a Redfin agent who works with sellers in Seattle. “Ultimately, the market dictates the appropriate price for any given home. We use data and on-the-ground insight to recommend the initial price, but sometimes we just need more exposure to the market, or more time to hear feedback, and then we’ll work with our clients to adjust the price accordingly.”

https://www.redfin.com/blog/2018/09/more-than-one-in-four-home-sellers-dropped-their-price-last-month.html

Audits and criminal referrals are down sharply since Congress cut the tax agency’s budget and management changed priorities.

Tax evasion is at the center of the criminal cases against two associates of the president, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. The sheer scale of their efforts to avoid paying the government has given rise to a head-scratching question: How were they able to cheat the Internal Revenue Service for so many years?

The answer, researchers and former government auditors say, is simple. The IRS pursues fewer cases of tax evasion than it did less than 10 years ago. Provided you’re not a close associate of President Donald Trump, there may never be a better time to be a tax cheat.

Last year, the IRS’s criminal division brought 795 cases in which tax fraud was the primary crime, a decline of almost a quarter since 2010. “That is a startling number,” Don Fort, the chief of criminal investigations for the IRS, acknowledged at an NYU tax conference in June.

Bringing cases against people who evade taxes on legal income is central to the revenue service’s mission. In addition to recouping lost revenue, such cases are supposed “to influence taxpayer behavior for the hundreds of millions of American citizens filing tax returns,” Fort said. With fewer cases, experts fear, Americans will get the message that it’s all right to break the law.

Starting in 2011, Republicans in Congress repeatedly cut the IRS’s budget, forcing the agency to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. But that drop doesn’t entirely explain the reduction in tax fraud cases.

Over time, crimes only tangentially related to taxes, such as drug trafficking and money laundering, have come to account for most of the agency’s cases.



“Due to budget cuts, attrition and a shift in focus, there’s been a collapse in the commitment to take on tax fraud,” said Chuck Pine, who used to be the third-ranking criminal enforcement officer at the IRS and is now a managing director at BDO Consulting. “I believe there are thousands of individuals who have U.S. tax obligations and are not complying with U.S. tax laws.”

The result is huge losses for the government. Business owners don’t pay $125 billion in taxes each year that they owe, according to IRS estimates. That’s enough to finance the departments of State, Energy and Homeland Security, with NASA tossed in for good measure. Unlike wage earners who have their income separately reported to the IRS, business owners are often on the honor system.

The IRS declined to comment on its enforcement efforts.

Cohen’s and Manafort’s cases illustrate different but common types of tax cheating, and how the IRS has struggled to enforce the law. Cohen failed to report income from domestic businesses. Manafort used exotic foreign locales and shell corporations to hide his money.

Cohen’s tax evasion schemes were straightforward. Besides paying off a pornographic movie star and a former Playboy model in violation of campaign finance laws, he pleaded guilty to lying on his tax return. Whether it was income from his business owning taxi medallions, millions of dollars in interest payments on a loan he’d made to another taxi operator or the $30,000 he made by brokering the sale of a luxury handbag, Mr. Cohen simply hid the money from his accountant and the government. Over five years, he didn’t disclose $4.1 million, saving himself $1.5 million in taxes.

The IRS typically catches such evasion by auditing taxpayers. Theoretically, evidence picked up in audits can be used to start criminal cases.

But the rate at which the agency audits tax returns has plummeted by 42 percent since the budget cuts started. Criminal referrals were always rare and are becoming rarer still, dropping from 589 referrals in 2012 to 328 in 2016. With the government conducting 1.2 million audits in 2016, that’s one criminal referral for roughly every 3,600 audits.

“The focus of auditors and tax collectors is not to identify fraud, it’s to collect tax,” said a special agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Management has set other priorities, he says. “So by default, the employees are not doing it.”

In addition, current and former IRS agents say that audits are not as intensive as they used to be. Because the IRS pushes agents to close audits more quickly, they make fewer requests for records and interviews.

“The quality of those referrals was also down,” said Marie Allen, a recently retired auditor who worked at the IRS for more than 30 years conducting complex financial investigations. “That is what people popularly think we should be doing, and I’m trying to say it ain’t so.”

Budget cuts have diminished the criminal investigation division, trimming the number of agents by a fifth since 2010. Recently, the IRS closed four of its 25 field offices, according to Fort. In New York state, home of the country’s financial industry, the revenue service is down to 161 agents, about a hundred fewer than it had 15 years ago.

It doesn’t help that many agents prefer chasing flashier crimes than tax evasion. Rob Warren, a research associate at Catholic University who previously spent a quarter century at the IRS, interviewed 30 former special agents. He asked each agent which of their cases had been their favorite. The answers, Warren said, typically were only tangentially related to taxes.

“It was usually narcotics, Ponzi schemes, some public corruption,” Warren said. “Agents loved Ponzi cases because there was a real victim, an old lady or something like that.”

Federal prosecutors seek out special agents for these cases because they are skilled financial investigators. And tax crimes, like failing to declare illegal income from, say, a bribe or cocaine sales, can be easier to prove than bribery or selling drugs.

In recent years, the IRS has also been pulled away from classic tax dodging cases by soaring rates of identity theft. IRS management assigned scores of agents to chase perpetrators who used stolen identities to collect tax refunds.

One tax fraud hotbed that has been a clear priority of both the IRS and the Justice Department is going after money Americans stashed overseas without reporting it to the federal government. But there are clear reasons that Manafort, who hid his money in places like Cyprus and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, might still have escaped detection.

Switzerland has been the Justice Department’s primary target over the past 10 years, an effort that has resulted in settlements with the giant Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse, and dozens of smaller institutions.

The IRS allowed Americans with foreign accounts to voluntarily disclose them and pay a smaller penalty than they would have had they been caught hiding the information. Some 56,000 people participated, netting the government $11.1 billion. The IRS’s criminal division also brought several cases against people for concealing accounts.

For all this success, there has been little change in the amount of wealth stashed overseas. Americans have about $1.2 trillion of personal assets in tax havens, according to data compiled by Gabriel Zucman, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and two colleagues. It’s unclear what portion has been disclosed to the IRS.

“What has happened over the last 10 years is real progress,” Zucman said. “But what the data suggest is that it has not had a dramatic effect on the amount of offshore wealth.” Money has flowed out of Switzerland and into Asian tax havens like Hong Kong and Singapore.

Moreover, the IRS has made little use of new weapons in the fight against wealth hidden overseas. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law that was supposed to provide a crucial tool for government auditors and prosecutors. That law, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, required banks with American account holders to report information to the United States. Like employers filing W-2 forms about their workers, these reports would force account holders to come clean.

Eight years later, the program is still getting off the ground. Countries around the world have signed agreements, and more than 100,000 foreign banks have sent information to the United States. But “there is no ongoing compliance impact of the FATCA at this time,” according to a report this year by the inspector general for the IRS.

The report found serious problems with the millions of records collected so far. About half of the records, for example, didn’t include identification numbers for the taxpayers, making it difficult to match the accounts with specific individuals. The IRS hadn’t set up a process for using the records. The agency said it was working on such a system.

Here, too, the cuts to the IRS’s budget have had an impact. During the Obama administration, the IRS asked Congress for hundreds of millions of dollars to carry out the program, but received nothing. Since Trump took office, the revenue service has stopped asking.

https://www.propublica.org/article/after-budget-cuts-the-irs-work-against-tax-cheats-is-facing-collapse

The only advantage to a money you can print on demand is that the printer can enrich politically connected parties with the new money.

There is absolutely no problem keeping a money supply fixed, and increases lead to inflation. In the era of mercantilism, as gold flowed from the New World back to Western Europe, they experience long periods of inflation where before there was none. During the classical gold standard in the early-mid 19th Century, the United States experienced a prolonged deflation, with consumer goods prices falling modestly for decades. This is hugely beneficial to standards of living. A central bank would have printed its way out of the deflation, negating the benefits to the middle class.

Interest rates are determined on the market when demand for debt meets the supply of savings to lend. The acts of market participants set those rates. As more people save, interest rates go down. As more people demand to borrow, interest rates go up. Artificial interference in this process distorts the market and in fiat currency systems leads to the boom-and-bust business cycle.

I would love to see a more economically-literate general public But you don't need a PhD to know that when everything in life gets a little more expensive every year, you're losing money if you save, so you should spend. This leads to more consumerism and less savings and investment, which are the only sure way to raise standards of living in the long term.

I would argue the opposite: meddling with the money supply often causes more problems than the original crisis. As long as it's divisible, any quantity of money is enough for an economy. Long article here if you're curious.

The need for currency becomes pretty much nil when everybody has machines that can literally rearrange atoms into whatever they want. That is the truth of the distant future, nanoscale micro-assemblers, the end of patents, the end of currency, the end of trade entirely.

Institutional investors are becoming more involved in the $220 billion cryptocurrency market than many observers may realize.

Buyers such as hedge funds have replaced high-net-worth individuals as the biggest buyers of large swaths of digital coins worth more than $100,000 through private transactions, according to Bobby Cho, global head of trading at Cumberland, the Chicago-based cryptocurrency trading unit of DRW Holdings LLC, which handles the over-the-counter purchases.

“Wait until institutional investors embrace crypto” has long been the rallying cry for digital-currency enthusiasts as prices surged and collapsed in the past year amid shifting expectations for regulatory acceptance of the asset class.

Meanwhile, the big sellers -- miners, whose computers generate coins by confirming transactions -- have begun scheduling regular coin sales instead of holding or waiting to offload them during market rallies. Many of the largest miners have also set up their own liquidity desks and operations.

“What that’s showing you is the professionalization that’s happening across the board in this space,” Cho said. “The Wild West days of crypto are really turning the corner.”

The over-the-counter market facilitated anywhere from $250 million to $30 billion in trades per day in April, according to researchers including Digital Assets Research and TABB Group. Exchanges have recently handled about $15 billion in daily trades, according to CoinMarketCap.com.

“We’ve seen triple-digit growth enrolling in our OTC business," said Jeremy Allaire, chief executive office of Boston-based Circle Internet Financial. “That’s a big growth area."

While the OTC market has declined along with crypto prices, it likely hasn’t dropped as much as volume on exchanges, which is down 80 percent since its peak, according to Digital Asset Research. Many institutional buyers have dived into crypto recently because the wide swings in prices have eased, Cho said.

"One of the biggest criticisms of crypto by institutional investors has been the volatility," Cho said. "Over the last four to six months, the market has been trading in a very tight range, and that’s seems to be corresponding with traditional financial institutions becoming more comfortable diving into the space." A third of DRW’s transactions are happening during Asia hours, he said.

Large buyers and sellers like private sales because transactions on exchanges can move coin prices. In a private sale, parties can fix the price in advance, instead of worrying about a sudden plunge or spike just as the transaction takes place.

"If they are liquidating [coins], they are liquidating them via OTC," said Tom Flake, founder of Bcause, a provider of mining facilities whose customers are institutional miners with hundreds to thousands of machines. The largest miners also sell their coins to sellers directly or through brokers.

One of the biggest reasons to buy coins outside of exchanges, though, is that there are often not as many coins offered for sale as the institutional buyers would like to buy, according to Sam Doctor, managing director and head of data science research at Fundstrat Global Advisers.

“At this point in time, because more and more institutions are beginning to enter the market, there’s more of an imbalance,” Doctor said. That’s why brokerage firms are springing up to help institutional buyers find inventory, he said.

What’s more, miners can offer something unique: brand-new, “virgin” coins, which some investors covet. Such coins command a premium of up to 20 percent, according to Travis Kling, founder of the hedge fund Ikigai. It’s easier to prove they’ve not been involved in money-laundering operations, he said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-01/institutional-investors-are-using-back-door-for-crypto-purchases

Had a look at the odds on offer at the moment, then got distracted by the margins for the outright markets

Nitrogensports = ~3%
Cloudbet = ~5%
Sportsbet.io = ~8%

Why are some much bigger than the others?

Corporate insiders are dumping stock in their companies at a rate not seen in 10 years.

With September not yet over, stock sales by company executives reached $5.7 billion, according to data from TrimTabs Investment Research -- the highest September in a decade. August's $10.3 billion in insider sales also reached a 10-year record.

At the same time, stock buybacks are roaring ahead, pumping up U.S. share prices to new heights. Companies this year have announced $827 billion in spending to purchase their own shares -- well above the buybacks that took place during all of 2007, which set the previous annual record.

"Insiders have been committing lots of money for stock buybacks, and they're not doing buybacks because they think stocks are cheap. They're doing to it to pump up the stock so they can sell it," said David Santschi, director of liquidity research at TrimTabs.

Some investors like buybacks because they boost the value of the rest of the company's stock. They also bolster top executives' pay, much of which comes in the form of shares. But they're a purely financial play that don't improve a company's position in the long term, the way investing in equipment or in hiring might.

"Stock buybacks have seemed to be the main use of the corporate tax savings this year. Acquisitions haven't been particularly high, and we're not seeing much wage growth," Santschi added.

TrimTabs' figures underestimate the true amount of corporate insider activity, Santschi noted, because only certain insiders -- a company's highest-ranking executives or directors, as well as investors who hold more than 10 percent of the stock -- are required to disclose stock sales. So nonexecutive employees who sell stock aren't included in this measure.

Buybacks have come under scrutiny of late, with Securities and Exchange Commissioner Robert Jackson calling them out in a recent speech. "We give stock to corporate managers to convince them to create the kind of long-term value that benefits American companies and the workers and communities they serve," he said. "Instead, what we are seeing is that executives are using buybacks as a chance to cash out their compensation at investor expense." In June, a group of senators asked the SEC to review its buyback rules.

Said Santschi: "Insiders are doing one thing with their own money, and another thing with shareholders' money."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/insider-stock-sales-by-company-executives-soar-to-a-record-pace/

Wasn't khabib the guy mcgregor attacked at the bus incident? There is no explanations to this, either mcgregor was pushed to do some sort of media move and get more viewers by making a scene and creating troubles for himself and than fight would be watched more. Or since this already happened dana white probably said "well might as well" and just arranged a match between them.

I however did not know mcgregor used cocaine

After months of speculation, Bitmain  — the world’s largest provider of crypto miners — has opened the inner details of its business after it submitted its IPO prospectus with the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong. And some of the growth numbers are insane.

The document doesn’t specify how much five-year-old Bitmain is aiming to raise from its listing — that’ll come later — but it does lift the lid on the incredible business growth that the company saw as the crypto market grew massively in 2017. Although that also comes with a question: can that growth continue in this current bear market?

The company grossed more than $2.5 billion in revenue last year, a near-10X leap on the $278 million it claims for 2016. Already, it said revenue for the first six months of this year surpassed $2.8 billion.

Bitmain is best known for its ‘Antminer’ devices — which allow the owner to mine for Bitcoin  and other cryptocurrencies — and that accounts for most of its revenue: 77 percent in 2016, 90 percent in 2017, and 94 percent in the first half of 2018. Other income is generated by its mining farms, shared mining pools, AI chips and blockchain services.

The company is fabless, which means it develops its own chip design and works with manufacturing partners who bring them to life as physical chips. Those chips are then used to power mining hardware which lets the owner earn a reward by mining Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitmain claims over 80,000 customers with just under half of sales in China and the rest overseas.

The company said it posted $701 million in net profit in 2017, up from $104 million in 2016. For the first half of this year, it is claiming a gross profit of $743 million. (Operational profit touched $1 billion for that period.)

That’s quite staggering growth, but there are some signs that 2018 comes with more challenges.

Margins are down. Gross margin in the first six months was 36 percent, down from 48 percent in 2017 and 54 percent in 2016. Contributing to that, the cost of sale percentage in the first half of 2018 rose to 64 percent from 51 and 52 percent in 2017 and 2016, respectively.

Bitmain is trying to bat away those concerns by using H1 2018 figures, rather than splitting that period into two quarters. That’s important because the crypto market has plunged massively since January, losing more than half of its value. That has impacted most crypto companies — whether it is exchanges seeing less trading or wallets less traffic — and it is sure to have had a toll on Bitmain.

The question is to what extent?

That’s crucial because it is what will give this IPO momentum, but Bitmain isn’t playing ball and showing us the full picture.

Interestingly, Bitmain accepts Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as payment for its miners, with some 27 percent of purchases last year paid for using crypto. As a result, those payments aren’t included in revenue but do show up as “investing cash inflow” when they are converted to fiat and used in the business. That’s a 2018 accounting problem right there.

As a result, Bitmain has a negative net cash used in operating activities position but those become positive when factoring in the crypto. The company said it held $887 million in crypto as of the end of the first half of 2018, that’s up from $872 million in 2017, $56 million in 2016 and $12 million in 2015. The company said that changes in the market saw it lose $102.7 million in value from its crypto hoard. During the first six months of 2018, it cashed out $516.5 million worth of crypto, having exchanged $529 million in 2017.

The wild ride of 2017, however, led the company to over-estimated demand and, as a result, its inventory ballooned by $1 billion.

Here’s Bitmain explanation of how it managed to get it so wrong:

In early 2018, we anticipated strong market growth for cryptocurrency mining hardware in 2018 due to the upward trend of cryptocurrencies price in the fourth quarter of 2017, and we placed a large amount of orders with our production partners in response to the anticipated significant sales growth. However, there had been significant market volatility in the market price of cryptocurrencies in the first half of 2018. As a result of such volatility, the expected economic return from cryptocurrency mining had been adversely affected and the sales of our mining hardware slowed down, which in turn caused an increase in our inventories level and a decrease in advances received from our customers in the first half of 2018. Going forward, we will actively balance our business growth strategy, inventories and cryptocurrency asset levels to ensure a sustainable business growth and a healthy cash flow position, and we will adjust our procurement and prediction plan to maintain an appropriate liquidity level.

Despite an extra $1 billion in inventory, Bitmain estimates it has the working capital — including crypto pile and the result of its IPO — to sustain operations for at least another 12 months. That, according to its figures, is around $343 million in cash and cash equivalents but clearly it needs another megahit product or for the market demand to rise again.

Indeed, Bitmain just last week announced its newest mining chip — shrunk down to 7nm — which it believes will offer more power and greater efficiency for miners. That progress coupled with the rising value of crypto — i.e. what owners of Bitmain miners can earn — has helped the company steadily raise the price of its hardware.

Average selling price for its Bitcoin mining machines in 2015 was just $463, but that jumped to $767 in 2016, $1,231 in 2017 and $1,012 in the first half of 2018.

Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu is the face of the company and one of its largest shareholders with a 20 percent stake

Beyond mining, the company is also developing AI chips, the first of which launched last year. They are used for developing cloud systems, as well as object, image and facial recognition purposes.

Citing third party figures, Bitmain claims to have a dominant 75 percent of the ASIC mining hardware market. It is investing heavily in R&D, which reached $73 million last year and $86 million during the first half of 2018. In addition, around one-third of its 2,594 employees are listed as working in research and development.

It’s likely that Bitmain sees more revenue in crypto than any other company on the planet.

Bitmain’s document confirms the company raised some $784 million across Series A, Series B and Series B rounds.

Its investor roster is fairly public thanks to leaks and it includes the likes of IDG, Sequoia China, and Kaifu Lee’s Sinovation fund. However, the prospectus does confirm that shareholders include retailer NewEgg, EDBI — the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board — and Uber investor Coatue. Founders Ketuan Zhan and Jihan Wu are the largest shareholders and they control 36 and 20 percent, respectively.

We can expect Bitmain to flesh out the prospectus with more juicy information, including a target raise which will also generate its valuation. But for now there are over 400 pages of information to process, you can find them all right here.

Note: The original version of this article has been updated to correct the figures for Bitmain’s crypto holdings.

Editorial note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/bitmain-hong-kong-ipo/

A Jan. 31, 2019, deadline for direct suppliers; others to follow in the next year

Walmart Inc., in a letter to be issued Monday to suppliers, will require its direct suppliers of lettuce, spinach and other greens to join its food-tracking blockchain by Jan. 31. The retailer also will mandate that farmers, logistics firms and business partners of these suppliers join the blockchain by Sept. 30, 2019.

The supplier push comes after 18 months of testing the blockchain system from developed by International Business Machines Corp. Tests to trace berries, mangoes, baby food, chicken and other foods on the IBM Food Trust blockchain have produced a more complete view of the food system than under current federal regulations, according to Nestlé SA, Dole Food Co., and other participants in the project.

Pinpointing the source of food contamination can improve public safety, cut the amount of time illness goes unchecked and could save money for retailers and farmers who can be swept into overly broad product recalls, said Frank Yiannas, head of food safety at Walmart. Millions of bags and heads of romaine lettuce had to be thrown out as an eruption of E.coli linked to romaine spread through 36 states early this year. As investigators worked, 210 people got sick and five died, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A directive for suppliers to use the Food Trust blockchain will help the industry create a more complete picture of the food system than is possible under current federal regulations, Mr. Yiannas said in an interview. The goal is to speed up and improve the accuracy of recalls when food-borne illness or other problems emerge, he said.

“Today, the requirement for traceability by law is one step up and one step back. That doesn’t work any more,” he said.

Early this year, as investigators worked to understand an outbreak of E. coli linked to romaine lettuce grown in the region of Yuma, Ariz., 210 people in 36 states got sick. Five people died, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“Blockchain can and should be used to promote transparency around food safety,” said Natalie Dyenson, vice president of food safety and quality at Dole, which, with Walmart and eight food companies, founded the Food Trust group.

Retaining consumer trust in product safety is valuable, she said. Beyond public health concerns, incidents like this year’s romaine problem can erode sales across the industry.

“We didn’t have any growers that were part of that outbreak. But when one fails, we all fail because customers don’t look at a head of lettuce and say, ‘Dole didn’t have a problem.’ They just don’t buy lettuce,” she said.

“Every single lettuce processor in the U.S., Canada and Mexico took a financial hit,” she said.

Corporate use of blockchain technology is aimed at governing transactions with many hand-offs while preserving one consistent history. Blockchain establishes authorship or ownership that experts say can’t be faked and eliminates costly middle layers because of its peer-to-peer structure. The encrypted data stays up-to-date on all participants’ systems. Food Trust is based on IBM’s version of the Hyperledger blockchain platform, an open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Walmart in the past has mandated that suppliers use other technologies, including RFID tags on pallets and cases of goods, in the early 2000s. The retailer’s push to require the use of blockchain by suppliers likely will accelerate use of the technology, said Greg Buzek, principal at IHL Group, which analyzes the retail industry.

“This is unlike some of the other mandates that Walmart has [made], which primarily only benefited Walmart and added costs to manufacturers,” Mr. Buzek said in an email. “In this case, there are benefits to manufacturers, Walmart and the consumers.” 

Farmers and others use a variety of technologies and some hardly any, instead keeping records on paper. Getting information about fields, lots and shipments into Food Trust will require a variety of methods, Ms. Dyenson said.

The group has developed a web portal that farmers can use from a desktop or laptop computer to enter data, she said. In addition, IBM is expected to announce this month a mobile app for accessing Food Trust. IBM continues to work closely with Walmart and other Food Trust members to expand the blockchain platform and add tools for using the data.

Dole, a key supplier to Walmart, has uploaded shop-keeping units and other data about packages of lettuce and spinach to Food Trust and is now uploading information about more complex products such as salad kits, she said. Dole expects to meet the January deadline and is helping its own suppliers prepare their data, she said.

At larger growers, data is available through existing electronic-data interchange systems that the grocery industry has used for decades, she said. Small family-owned farms can export spreadsheets or use the mobile app, she said.

https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/09/24/walmart-requires-lettuce-spinach-suppliers-to-join-blockchain/

On stats, we can really see the difference but Conor wont really be on that position if hes not capable  

Btw, still no update about UFC embedded vlog series for UFC 229 on youtube?

Could it be MEGA.nz is unaware that their chrome extension is somehow compromise and that the attackers have somehow integrated the malicious software without them knowing? Because I have a strong feeling that is the case since there is no news yet the the extension is compromised on their Firefox extension, and to know that this software only goes active on certain websites tells us that the malicious software wants to remain undetected in the system for a while.

Why I’m done with Chrome

This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random 512px-Google_Chrome_icon_(September_2014).svg“someone is wrong on the Internet” posts. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from time to time something bothers me enough that I have to make an exception. Today I wanted to write specifically about Google Chrome, how much I’ve loved it in the past, and why — due to Chrome’s new user-unfriendly forced login policy — I won’t be using it going forward.

A brief history of Chrome
When Google launched Chrome ten years ago, it seemed like one of those rare cases where everyone wins. In 2008, the browser market was dominated by Microsoft, a company with an ugly history of using browser dominance to crush their competitors. Worse, Microsoft was making noises about getting into the search business. This posed an existential threat to Google’s internet properties.

In this setting, Chrome was a beautiful solution. Even if the browser never produced a scrap of revenue for Google, it served its purpose just by keeping the Internet open to Google’s other products. As a benefit, the Internet community would receive a terrific open source browser with the best development team money could buy. This might be kind of sad for Mozilla (who have paid a high price due to Chrome) but overall it would be a good thing for Internet standards.

For many years this is exactly how things played out. Sure, Google offered an optional “sign in” feature for Chrome, which presumably vacuumed up your browsing data and shipped it off to Google, but that was an option. An option you could easily ignore. If you didn’t take advantage of this option, Google’s privacy policy was clear: your data would stay on your computer where it belonged.

What changed?
A few weeks ago Google shipped an update to Chrome that fundamentally changes the sign-in experience. From now on, every time you log into a Google property (for example, Gmail), Chrome will automatically sign the browser into your Google account for you. It’ll do this without asking, or even explicitly notifying you. (However, and this is important: Google developers claim this will not actually start synchronizing your data to Google — yet. See further below.)

Your sole warning — in the event that you’re looking for it — is that your Google profile picture will appear in the upper-right hand corner of the browser window. I noticed mine the other day:

The change hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed: it received some vigorous discussion on sites like Hacker News. But the mainstream tech press seems to have ignored it completely. This is unfortunate — and I hope it changes — because this update has huge implications for Google and the future of Chrome.

In the rest of this post, I’m going to talk about why this matters. From my perspective, this comes down to basically four points:

Nobody on the Chrome development team can provide a clear rationale for why this change was necessary, and the explanations they’ve given don’t make any sense.
This change has enormous implications for user privacy and trust, and Google seems unable to grapple with this.
The change makes a hash out of Google’s own privacy policies for Chrome.
Google needs to stop treating customer trust like it’s a renewable resource, because they’re screwing up badly.
I warn you that this will get a bit ranty. Please read on anyway.

Google’s stated rationale makes no sense
The new feature that triggers this auto-login behavior is called “Identity consistency between browser and cookie jar” (HN). After conversations with two separate Chrome developers on Twitter (who will remain nameless — mostly because I don’t want them to hate me), I was given the following rationale for the change:

To paraphrase this explanation: if you’re in a situation where you’ve already signed into Chrome and your friend shares your computer, then you can wind up accidentally having your friend’s Google cookies get uploaded into your account. This seems bad, and sure, we want to avoid that.

But note something critical about this scenario. In order for this problem to apply to you, you already have to be signed into Chrome. There is absolutely nothing in this problem description that seems to affect users who chose not to sign into the browser in the first place.

So if signed-in users are your problem, why would you make a change that forces unsigned–in users to become signed-in? I could waste a lot more ink wondering about the mismatch between the stated “problem” and the “fix”, but I won’t bother: because nobody on the public-facing side of the Chrome team has been able to offer an explanation that squares this circle.

And this matters, because “sync” or not…

The change has serious implications for privacy and trust
The Chrome team has offered a single defense of the change. They point out that just because your browser is “signed in” does not mean it’s uploading your data to Google’s servers. Specifically:

While Chrome will now log into your Google account without your consent (following a Gmail login), Chrome will not activate the “sync” feature that sends your data to Google. That requires an additional consent step. So in theory your data should remain local.

This is my paraphrase. But I think it’s fair to characterize the general stance of the Chrome developers I spoke with as: without this “sync” feature, there’s nothing wrong with the change they’ve made, and everything is just fine.

This is nuts, for several reasons.

User consent matters. For ten years I’ve been asked a single question by the Chrome browser: “Do you want to log in with your Google account?” And for ten years I’ve said no thanks. Chrome still asks me that question — it’s just that now it doesn’t honor my decision.

The Chrome developers want me to believe that this is fine, since (phew!) I’m still protected by one additional consent guardrail. The problem here is obvious:

If you didn’t respect my lack of consent on the biggest user-facing privacy option in Chrome (and  didn’t even notify me that you had stopped respecting it!) why should I trust any other consent option you give me? What stops you from changing your mind on that option in a few months, when we’ve all stopped paying attention?

The fact of the matter is that I’d never even heard of Chrome’s “sync” option — for the simple reason that up until September 2018, I had never logged into Chrome. Now I’m forced to learn these new terms, and hope that the Chrome team keeps promises to keep all of my data local as the barriers between “signed in” and “not signed in” are gradually eroded away.

The Chrome sync UI is a dark pattern. Now that I’m forced to log into Chrome, I’m faced with a brand new menu I’ve never seen before. It looks like this:

Does that big blue button indicate that I’m already synchronizing my data to Google? That’s scary! Wait, maybe it’s an invitation to synchronize! If so, what happens to my data if I click it by accident? (I won’t give it the answer away, you should go find out. Just make sure you don’t accidentally upload all your data in the process. It can happen quickly.)

In short, Google has transformed the question of consenting to data upload from something affirmative that I actually had to put effort into — entering my Google credentials and signing into Chrome — into something I can now do with a single accidental click. This is a dark pattern. Whether intentional or not, it has the effect of making it easy for people to activate sync without knowing it, or to think they’re already syncing and thus there’s no additional cost to increasing Google’s access to their data.

Don’t take my word for it. It even gives (former) Google people the creeps.

Big brother doesn’t need to actually watch you. We tell things to our web browsers that we wouldn’t tell our best friends. We do this with some vague understanding that yes, the Internet spies on us. But we also believe that this spying is weak and probabilistic. It’s not like someone’s standing over our shoulder checking our driver’s license with each click.

What happens if you take that belief away? There are numerous studies indicating that even the perception of surveillance can significantly greatly magnify the degree of self-censorship users force on themselves. Will user feel comfortable browsing for information on sensitive mental health conditions — if their real name and picture are always loaded into the corner of their browser? The Chrome development team says “yes”. I think they’re wrong.

For all we know, the new approach has privacy implications even if sync is off. The Chrome developers claim that with “sync” off, a Chrome has no privacy implications. This might be true. But when pressed on the actual details, nobody seems quite sure.

For example, if I have my browser logged out, then I log in and turn on “sync”, does all my past (logged-out) data get pushed to Google? What happens if I’m forced to be logged in, and then subsequently turn on “sync”? Nobody can quite tell me if the data uploaded in these conditions is the same. These differences could really matter.

The changes make hash of the Chrome privacy policy
The Chrome privacy policy is a remarkably simple document. Unlike most privacy policies, it was clearly written as a promise to Chrome’s users — rather than as the usual lawyer CYA. Functionally, it describes two browsing modes: “Basic browser mode” and “signed-in mode”. These modes have very different properties. Read for yourself:

In “basic browser mode”, your data is stored locally. In “signed-in” mode, your data gets shipped to Google’s servers. This is easy to understand. If you want privacy, don’t sign in. But what happens if your browser decides to switch you from one mode to the other, all on its own?

Technically, the privacy policy is still accurate. If you’re in basic browsing mode, your data is still stored locally. The problem is that you no longer get to decide which mode you’re in. This makes a mockery out of whatever intentions the original drafters had. Maybe Google will update the document to reflect the new “sync” distinction that the Chrome developers have shared with me. We’ll see.

Update: After I tweeted about my concerns, I received a DM on Sunday from two different Chrome developers, each telling me the good news: Google is updating their privacy policy to reflect the new operation of Chrome. I think that’s, um, good news. But I also can’t help but note that updating a privacy policy on a weekend is an awful lot of trouble to go to for a change that… apparently doesn’t even solve a problem for signed-out users.

Trust is not a renewable resource
For a company that sustains itself by collecting massive amounts of user data, Google has  managed to avoid the negative privacy connotations we associate with, say, Facebook. This isn’t because Google collects less data, it’s just that Google has consistently been more circumspect and responsible with it.

Where Facebook will routinely change privacy settings and apologize later, Google has upheld clear privacy policies that it doesn’t routinely change. Sure, when it collects, it collects gobs of data, but in the cases where Google explicitly makes user security and privacy promises — it tends to keep them. This seems to be changing.

Google’s reputation is hard-earned, and it can be easily lost. Changes like this burn a lot of trust with users. If the change is solving an absolutely critical problem for users , then maybe a loss of trust is worth it. I wish Google could convince me that was the case.

Conclusion
This post has gone on more than long enough, but before I finish I want to address two common counterarguments I’ve heard from people I generally respect in this area.

One argument is that Google already spies on you via cookies and its pervasive advertising network and partnerships, so what’s the big deal if they force your browser into a logged-in state? One individual I respect described the Chrome change as “making you wear two name tags instead of one”. I think this objection is silly both on moral grounds — just because you’re violating my privacy doesn’t make it ok to add a massive new violation — but also because it’s objectively silly. Google has spent millions of dollars adding additional tracking features to both Chrome and Android. They aren’t doing this for fun; they’re doing this because it clearly produces data they want.

The other counterargument (if you want to call it that) goes like this: I’m a n00b for using Google products at all, and of course they were always going to do this. The extreme version holds that I ought to be using lynx+Tor and DJB’s custom search engine, and if I’m not I pretty much deserve what’s coming to me.

I reject this argument. I think It’s entirely possible for a company like Google to make good, usable open source software that doesn’t massively violate user privacy. For ten years I believe Google Chrome did just this.

Why they’ve decided to change, I don’t know. It makes me sad.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/09/23/why-im-leaving-chrome/