Cyberwar: Marketing Data Collection Threatens All

Marketers are after every scrap of customer data they can get, in hopes of increasing their company's sales. Do you know they may be putting you at risk in the process? In the last of our three-part series on cyberwar, learn what IT needs to know about potential security threats rising from companies' marketing habits.
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'Everything points to' bodies in van in Mexico belonging to WA surfers, girlfriend says

Friends of two Australians missing for more than a week in Mexico will travel to Sinaloa following a report that the men’s van has been found, one of the friends said Sunday. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Dfat) issued a statement confirming that the pair’s vehicle had been found, but did not confirm reports that two bodies had been found inside the burnt out van.
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U.S. solicitor general, 18 states and Harvard back Vermont in health data case.

The Vermont Attorney General’s Office will make oral arguments in front of the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 2 in a case about health care price transparency that will set national precedent. The states say access to the data could provide greater price transparency to consumer and ultimately lower health care prices.
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Copyright Industry Still Doesn't Understand This Fight Isn't About Money, But Liberty

With a lot of people streaming music and video from services such as Spotify, Pandora and Netflix, torrenting is less of a visible conflict than ten years ago. But similar fights continue in the shape of net neutrality and privacy, with the same values: it was never about the money.
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Udemy faces criticism for profiting from pirated online courses

Udemy, an online learning service, has come under criticism for selling pirated courses. The controversy began this week, when security specialist Troy Hunt discovered that one of his courses on ethical hacking was available on Udemy under another author's name. As The Next Web reports, the video had been edited to remove Hunt's introduction at the beginning, but was otherwise unchanged from the version available on Pluralsight, the video's copyright holder.
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Sci-Hub, BookFi and LibGen Resurface After Being Shut Down

A few days ago several large online repositories of free books and academic articles were pulled offline. Sci-Hub, BookFi and LibGen had their domain names taken away after Elsevier beat them in court. However, the site's operators are not planning to cease their activities and are continuing their operations through alternative domains and on the dark web.
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The Most Beautiful Bookstore On Earth

A merry band of bohemians built an improbable cultural haven in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Now, they must try to save it. Again.
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Critics Wonder Whether Pennies Make Sense Anymore

Is it finally time to get rid of the penny? The question was put to the top currency official in the country this week after comedian John Oliver took a swing at pennies on his TV show. "Two percent of Americans admitted to regularly throwing pennies in the garbage, which means the U.S. Mint is spending millions to make garbage," Oliver said.
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Massive 'development corridors' in Africa could spell environmental disaster

"One of the key justifications for these corridors is to ramp up farm and food production, but in fact it appears that massive mining investments--securing access to high-volume minerals such as iron ore and coal--are actually a key driver for a number of the corridors,"
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How Long Can Florida's Citrus Industry Survive?

The USDA recently stunned growers when it projected the smallest orange harvest for Florida in more than 50 years. The culprit: A tiny insect that's killing off the state's trees — and industry.
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Ending Loser Liberalism: Why a Market Based Approach Makes Sense

How the wealthy use the government to stack the deck in their favor and how we can use free markets to address inequality.
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Robots and the future of agriculture

Farming in the 20th century was about bigger paddocks and ever bigger machinery, but a new generation of producers sees merit in keeping it small and smart. Modern robotics promises to transform our agricultural sector and address labour shortages.
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Airbus wants to build 'shipping container' cabins that detach from planes

Airbus could be set to create the next-generation of planes after filing a patent featuring detachable cabins. The proposal would see passengers "board" the cabin and take their seats, before it is lifted like a shipping container onto the back of the plane. It is then fixed into place and the plane operates as normal.
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Fattest-Ever U.S. Cattle Herd Signals End to Record Beef Prices

Cattle in the U.S. are now the fattest they’ve ever been, signaling an end to the seven-year run of record beef prices just as losses begin to mount for American feedlot owners.
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Why I'm buying nothing for a year – no clothes, no holidays, no coffee ...

Inspired by the Black Friday counter-movement Buy Nothing Day, I want to see if I can go a whole 12 months without spending on anything but bills and food
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How an International Man of Mystery Scammed My Grandma

My 91-year-old grandmother leapt into action the moment I called to tell her I was in jail and needed $3,000 wired instantly. Only problem: It wasn’t me.
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Japan under pressure to accept more immigrants as workforce shrinks

Ageing population and prediction of 8 million fewer workers spurs calls for government to accept migrants and refugees
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The Refugee Industry in Turkey

Refugees are arriving in Izmir, Turkey, with the hope of traveling elsewhere. In many cases, these hopes can be difficult to obtain.
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$750/pill pharma company reverses decision to lower drug price

Turing Pharmaceuticals AG will not reverse its decision to raise the price of a decades-old drug, Daraprim, by more than 5,000 percent, backing out of previous statements that it would cut the cost by the end of the year. In an announcement on Tuesday, the company said that the list price of Daraprim, which jumped from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill earlier this year, will not change. Instead, the company will offer hospitals up to 50 percent discounts and will make...
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Car Dealers Have Their Way With Congress

It's feeding frenzy time in Congress, as industries vie to attach "riders" to must-pass legislation. And nobody does it better than car dealers. By David Dayen.
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Airlines saved $11 billion on fuel. You saved 8 bucks.

The nation's top airlines have posted record profits thanks to low fuel costs. But passengers aren't seeing too much in the way of savings for themselves. The nation's four top airlines have saved a combined $11.1 billion in fuel costs in the first nine months of 2015, according to their financial reports. Fuel is the largest expense for airlines, so lower prices shaved their costs by 36% compared to last year.
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The Best Restaurant Stories of 2015

Welcome back to Behind Closed Ovens, where we take a look at the best and strangest stories from inside the food industry. This week, we bring you the best BCO submissions of 2015. As always, these are real e-mails from real readers.
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Ted Cruz's 'crazy' tax plan would cost US at least $16tn, thinktank says

Analysis by left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice concludes presidential candidate’s plan to shut down the IRS and set up a flat tax would be devastating
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Meat tax far less unpalatable than government thinks, research finds

Taxing meat to simultaneously tackle climate change and improve global health would be far less unpalatable than governments think, according to new research. Meat production produces 15% of all greenhouse gases – more than all cars, trains, planes and ships combined – and halting global warming appears near impossible unless the world’s fast growing appetite for meat is addressed.
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Unilever Finds That Shrinking Its Footprint Is a Giant Task

Unilever has pledged to cut its environmental impact in half while improving the health of one billion people, but sustainability is turning out to be complicated.
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Is the 2 °C world a fantasy?

Countries have pledged to limit global warming to 2 °C, and climate models say that is still possible. But only with heroic — and unlikely — efforts. By Jeff Tollefson.
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How Walmart Keeps an Eye on Its Massive Workforce

The retail giant is always watching.
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A Storied Bookstore and Its Late Oracle Leave an Imprint on Islamabad

Saeed Jan Qureshi built one of the biggest bookstores in the world and earned a reputation as a source of literary advice. Now, the future of Saeed Book Bank is in his son’s hands.
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Dell apologizes for HTTPS certificate fiasco, provides removal tool

Meanwhile, credential that posed man-in-the-middle threat found on SCADA system. By Dan Goodin.
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Amazon plastered New York transit with Nazi imagery and nobody is happy

New Yorkers boarding buses and subway trains were surprised with a wall of Axis Powers propaganda, courtesy of Amazon, on Monday. The e-commerce giant is promoting its new show Man in the High Castle — an alternate-history period piece that takes place in an America ruled by Nazi Germany and imperial Japan — by blanketing symbols of the two fascist governments across buses, subway trains and online ads, as first reported by Gothamist.
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Agricultural policy: Govern our soils

Luca Montanarella calls for a voluntary international agreement to protect the ground beneath our feet from erosion and degradation.
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The Rise of the Artisanal Funeral

A Los Angeles undertaker wants to end our estrangement from death by bringing corpses back home. By Rebecca Mead.
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Does it matter that Silicon Valley’s unicorns are overvalued?

Square's IPO has shown the rollercoaster ride that overblown private valuations can result in. By James Titcomb.
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Pfizer Chief Defends Merger With Allergan as Good for U.S.

The agreement would be the latest, and largest, aimed at helping an American company lower its taxes by reincorporating overseas, a tactic known as corporate inversion.
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Japan’s post-Fukushima energy challenge

Energy is probably Japan’s greatest vulnerability, both in environmental terms and in assured sources of supply. Japan’s long-run energy policy is simple — obtain stable supplies at low cost — but implementation is complex in what is a global, dynamic, rapidly changing set of related industries.
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Young 'to be poorer than parents at every stage of life'

Young people are on track to be poorer than their parents at every stage of their lives, according to a new report. The study, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), added that households actually grew richer during the financial crisis. But it said that the reason for the growth between 2006-12 was the increase in pension values over the period. And the slow rate of growth in overall wealth suggested that young people would lag behind earlier generations.
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Satellite wars

A new arms race in our skies threatens the satellites that control everything from security to communications. By Sam Jones.
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NYC Is Completely Unaffordable, But New Yorkers Are In Denial

Two-thirds of residents say they live in the "greatest city in the world," yet many of those people are barely getting by.
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Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1%

We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700).
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Google Asked to Remove 1,500 "Pirate Links" Per Minute

Google is facing a never-ending flood of takedown requests from copyright holders, breaking record after record. The company currently processes a record breaking 1,500 links to "pirate" pages from its search results every minute, which is a 100% increase compared to last year. In recent years copyright holders have flooded Google with DMCA takedown notices, asking the company to delete links to pirated content.
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In California, Stingy Water Users Are Fined in Drought, While the Rich Soak

The contrast between strict enforcement on some struggling to conserve water and unchecked profligacy in places like Bel Air has unleashed anger and indignation. By Ian Lovett.
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Swiss alternative bank breaks negative rates taboo

A tiny Swiss bank specialised in financing social and environmental projects will on January 1 go where no retail lender has gone before, applying negative interest rates on individual clients.
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How to Decimate a City

Syracuse thought that by building a giant highway in the middle of town it could become an economic powerhouse. Instead, it got a bad bout of white flight and the worst slum problem in America. By Alana Semuels.
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Who Took Care of Rosie the Riveter's Kids?

Government-run childcare was crucial in enabling women’s employment during World War II, but today the program has largely been forgotten.
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The Expansionary Austerity Zombie

**Submission Note: view site in privacy/incognito mode.** The doctrine of expansionary austerity — the proposition that cuts in government spending would actually cause higher growth despite their direct negative impact on demand, thanks to the confidence fairy — was all the rage in policy circles five years ago. But it brutally failed the reality test; instead, the evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the continued existence of something very like the old-fashioned Keynesian multiplier.
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EU against Bitcoin payments after Paris attacks

European Union countries are planning a crackdown on Bitcoin and other anonymous payment methods in light of the Paris attacks.
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Yahoo is locking down Mail access for some people with ad blockers

Yahoo Mail is not looking kindly on some users of ad-blocking software. A thread on the forums for the service Adblock Plus, first spotted by Digiday, suggested some Yahoo Mail users were being prevented from accessing their email unless they disabled their ad blockers, and a Yahoo spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the message is indeed part of a "test" for some users.
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HHS: Bailing out Obamacare insurers an 'obligation' of the federal government

Insurerers found that enrollees in Obamacare are disproportionately sicker, and losses are piling up.
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Nasa signs first contracts with SpaceX for manned commercial spaceflight

The cost of contracting out low-orbit manned operations to commercial operations like Boeing and SpaceX is considerably less than what Nasa currently pays the for use of the Soyuz vehicle. Launches to the ISS provisionally set to take place before the end of 2017
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Airbnb Raises Over $100 Million as It Touts Strong Growth

Airbnb Inc. has raised over $100 million in a new round of funding that has closed, according to a person familiar with the matter. The round was done at the same $25.5 billion valuation where the company raised capital over the summer.
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