Tag Archive for: busy

Binance’s Busy Day, Kraken’s Second SEC Fight


Binance is paying one of the largest fines in corporate history to the U.S. Department of Justice, while its founder and CEO, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, stepped down from his role running the platform as part of a settlement with multiple federal agencies. Meanwhile, Kraken is facing a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that echoes the SEC’s previous wave of suits.

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Binance settled charges with multiple U.S. agencies (with one major exception), ending one of the most highly anticipated regulatory actions in crypto.

Binance is the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, and just agreed to pay what federal officials are describing as some of the nation’s largest fines.

Binance and Changpeng “CZ” Zhao settled with multiple federal agencies on Tuesday, agreeing to pay billions of dollars in a deal that will also see Zhao face potential prison time, Binance make a “complete exit” from the U.S. and agree to strict oversight from monitors over the next several years.

If you missed Tuesday’s regulatory extravaganza:

If you noticed the numbers don’t add up, you’re right. It’s a confusing mess, largely because the amounts overlap with each other and involve some financial punishments that are put off unless the company strays again. An actual total of $4.3 billion will move from Binance to U.S. government coffers, officials said. FinCEN is collecting $780 million. Another $150 million is a suspended penalty, while $2.47 billion will be credited to the DOJ and CFTC. OFAC will collect another $70 million and credit another $898 million to the DOJ. CoinDesk’s Jesse Hamilton checked and the CFTC is for sure getting the $1.35 million fine.

“One of the things that Treasury works hard in collaboration with the Justice Department on is that a substantial amount of this penalty will go to the victims of state-sponsored terrorism in a fund that supports payments to those families and individuals,” a senior Treasury official said.

Binance’s role as a major crypto exchange that operated secretively within the U.S. is maybe the…

Source…

Patch Tuesday gets off to a busy start for January


For this week’s Patch Tuesday, the first of the year, Microsoft addressed 97 security issues, six of them rated critical. Though six vulnerabilities have been publicly reported, I do not classify them as zero-days. Microsoft has fixed a lot of security related issues and is aware of several known issues that may have inadvertently caused significant server issues including:

  • Hyper-V, which no longer starts with the message, “Virtual machine xxx could not be started because the hypervisor is not running.”
  • ReFS (Resilient) file systems that are no longer accessible (which is kind of ironic).
  • And Windows domain controller boot loops.

There are a variety of known issues this month, and I’m not sure whether we’ll see more issues reported with the January server patches. You can find more information on the risk of deploying these latest updates with our helpful infographic.

Key testing scenarios

There are no reported high-risk changes to the Windows platform this month. However, there is one reported functional change, and an additional feature added.

  • Test local and remote printing and test printing over RDP.
  • Test site-to-site VPN, including new and existing connections.
  • Test reading or processing ETL files.
  • Check starting and stopping Hyper-V on your servers.
  • Run Transactional NTFS (TxF) and CLFS test scenarios while including tests for ReFS file I/O transfers.

Known issues

Each month, Microsoft includes a list of known issues that relate to the operating system and platforms included in this update cycle. I’ve referenced a few key issues that relate to the company’s latest builds, including:

Busy North Korean hackers have new malware to target ATMs – Ars Technica

Busy North Korean hackers have new malware to target ATMs  Ars Technica

Hackers widely believed to work for North Korea’s hermit government have developed a new strain of malware that steals data used at automatic teller machines …

“malware news” – read more

Everyone In the Cook County Criminal Court System Too Busy Pointing Fingers To Fix Its Antiquated Records System

When you write regularly about lawsuits, you learn very quickly that not all court systems are equal when it comes to allowing modern access to public filings and records. The country is a veritable panoply of an access spectrum, with some districts offering modern e-filing systems and websites to review documents, while other districts are far more antiquated and restrictive. That said, it’s hard to imagine a county court system more backwards than that of Chicago’s Cook County.

Every workday, attorneys enter criminal courtrooms across Cook County, put away their smartphones and operate in a world that their grandparents would have recognized: accordion-style Manila folders to hold paper documents, handwritten orders for judges to sign, even carbon paper to make copies of the paper filings.

“God help us all if the carbon didn’t take,” said defense attorney Alana De Leon, who had never used the outdated copying method — invented more than two centuries ago — before setting foot in a West Side branch court a few years ago.

While the Tribune article notes that these antiquated techniques result in derisive jokes from the attorneys forced to use them, the reality is that they are no laughing matter. The article tells the story of a woman looking for filing information for her boyfriend’s criminal court case and was forced to travel 14 miles just to find out what charges her boyfriend was facing. And this sort of thing isn’t reserved for the lay public. Criminal defense attorneys must also make a similar trek just to find out the basic case information for any clients they may take on in Cook County as well. In the surrounding counties, this information would be available via e-filings via an internet connection. In Cook County, home to the third largest city in the union, its all physical filings and carbon copies.

Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown, in charge of this love letter to the days of robber barons, does not want to hear you blame her for any of this, however.

Circuit Court Clerk Dorothy Brown bristled at the suggestion that her office has been slow to adapt to the internet age, telling the Tribune in an hourlong interview last week that a complete overhaul of the criminal case management system is expected to be completed by March 2019. Brown spoke of an “interactive” system in which much of the work performed by attorneys and judges in the courtrooms could be done electronically. Brown said her ultimate goal is to end the reliance on ink and paper.

While that may all sound good, if quite late, it’s worth noting that Brown is the same Clerk that has gone to court to block press access to e-filings in recent weeks.

Dorothy Brown, Chicago’s elected court clerk, filed her appeal notice this week, challenging a ruling in early January by U.S. District Judge William Kennelly. The judge found the First Amendment prohibits the clerk from withholding new efiled complaints, a regular source of news, from the press corps. He gave the clerk 30 days to provide access.

She made no move to comply and continues to argue that she must first screen the filings for confidentiality. In his 16-page opinion, Kennelly found that argument belied by a number of effective alternatives available to the clerk.

It’s moves like that which create the impression that the lack of transparency that comes along with Cook County’s laughably anachronistic records systems is a feature rather than a bug. Cook County has long been a place where county and city officials have played a game of subterfuge with the press and the public, hiding legal machinations as well as actions taken by the city, such as million dollar payouts to the families of victims of police shootings. Making the court system as opaque as possible for as long as possible seems to be the goal.

Brown, of course, insists otherwise and blames the state Supreme Court and Chief Judge Timothy Evans for Cook County’s woes.

Brown said her hands have been tied by the Illinois Supreme Court dragging its feet in allowing e-filing statewide in criminal cases for the first time just last year. She also blamed Chief Judge Timothy Evans’ office for blocking her from making basic docket information available online for criminal cases.

In an email, however, Evans’ spokesman, Pat Milhizer, denied Brown’s claim, saying his office would consider any such proposal from the circuit clerk.

Many will say this all smells of classic Chicago machine politics. And, in many respects, it certainly comes off that way. The suburban counties all have modern e-filing systems in place, after all, including several rural counties that don’t have nearly the breadth of resources afforded to Cook County. What should be kept top of mind, however, is the tax all of this puts on the public and its interest in justice in the county. Going back to defense attorney De Leon and the use of technology as outdated as carbon copy:

“To a certain extent … the lack of transparency kind of is the ugly product of the old system,” De Leon said. “I don’t know if it’s necessarily on purpose — to keep this information away from the average citizen — but it certainly is a consequence of that.”

And no amount of CYA or finger-pointing should distract anyone from the obvious reality that the public is not being well-served by the Cook County court filing system.

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