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XKCD forum goes offline after discovery of data leak affecting 562K members

Sep02
by on September 2, 2019 at 2:35 pm
Posted In: Around the Web


XKCD forum, the bulletin board associated with the popular webcomic XKCD, has been taken offline after personal information of more than 562,000 members was exposed online. According to security researcher Troy Hunt, the breach occurred two months ago (on July 1 2019). The compromised data has been added to breach alerting site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). “We’ve been alerted that portions of the PHPBB user table from our forums showed up in a leaked data collection,” XKCD said in a notice. “It is likely that it was gathered up in some automated scan taking advantage of a vulnerability in…

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6 futuristic jobs that will soon exist in the financial industry

Sep02
by on September 2, 2019 at 1:27 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Future of Finance


It used to be that a job in finance would set you up for life. Steady, reliable, dependable, calculators and sweater vests. These things come to mind when you think of a career in finance. Just like in other industries, AI and machine learning are entering the scene and causing great disruption in what used to be one of the most stable career choices. In the US, one report found that 1.3 million bank workers will lose their jobs or be reassigned due to automation. Globally, finance leaders are predicting that 50% of jobs could be lost.  As these technologies…

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European Central Bank bigwig outlines why Facebook’s Libra isn’t real cryptocurrency

Sep02
by on September 2, 2019 at 12:36 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, blockchain, cryptocurrency, Hard Fork


A representative of the European Central Bank (ECB) has slammed Facebook‘s quasi-cryptocurrency Libra, referring to its proposed ecosystem as a “siren call.” Yves Mersch, Luxemborgian lawyer and ECB executive board member, even told attendees of the European System of Central Banks’ legal conference the Libra ecosystem will be “cartel-like.” After prefacing his concerns with a history lesson on trust (which unimaginatively centered on the notion that the only “trustworthy” money is the sort backed by the state), Mersch actually painted a realistic picture of Facebook‘s intention for its funny-money: centralized governance, centralized issuance, centralized control. “To begin with, Libra coins will…

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Meet the college drop-out educating Pakistan’s poorest with a smartphone app

Sep02
by on September 2, 2019 at 11:40 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Plugged


I’m sat with Haroon Yasin in the swanky cocktail lounge of Salt Lake City’s Grand America Hotel. A few hours ago, he got off stage at the prestigious Pluralsight Live conference. In his hand is a smartphone. He’s showing me an app which looks like a standard children’s game, but is in fact responsible for the educations of thousands of disadvantaged children in his home nation of Pakistan. Yasin has been on a journey. I’m not merely talking about the tortuous 30-hour flight from Islamabad to Utah, which took him through Istanbul and San Francisco. Like many middle-class Pakistanis, he…

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