Lots happening on the Apple v. FBI backdoor story, but let's turn your attention to another branch of Government's security woes: the IRS.
The IRS is one of the services we would hope is best at protecting user information - as you know, death and taxes are the only two constants in life. Everyone has some sort of information warehoused at the IRS, so hopefully they can keep it safe... right? Right?
Remember those IRS hacks last year, which have the consistently increasing number of affected taxpayers? Turns out the system the IRS is using to protect the identities of those taxpayers that were hacked - the PIN required to submit returns - was ALSO hacked.
That's some metahacking.
Links We Liked!
- An excellent age/demographic based post at Free By 50 on the savings habits of Millennials.
- Sherry at S.S.S. overheard retail working Millennials discussing life and wrote it up.
- Is Uber good for the environment? Matt Kahn discusses. Part 1. Part 2.
- Political Calculations sees dividend cut announcements increasing in early March... again creeping into historically negative territory. (Also at PC, graphing the affordability of new homes)
- Anne at Money Propeller shares some ways to get out the door early every morning.
- At WSJ, are people leaving Silicon Valley for parts north? Maybe they are!
- Also at WSJ, an excellent new feature which tracks mutual fund valuations of pre-IPO stocks - so you can see how fund company valuation committees are valuing stocks after their funding rounds - and it's usually a lot lower.
- Sponsored content has been punished in the past by search engines, but one place it finds a lot of success is on TV - Bloomberg had a piece on American Express sponsoring content on NBC.
- Is your ad blocker making money doing the same things as the ads it was blocking were trying to do?
- Christophe Cariou at chcariou.fr graphed the average amount people hold in their savings accounts.
- Remember last week when we linked the Buffett Berkshire letter? Ben Carlson at a Wealth of Common Sense notes some weird Buffett-related observations he's seen over the years related to said letters.
- Interesting story about growing up in (the most?) a famous house in LA. Particularly interesting since I now own a MCM home - flat roof and all.
- ISIS is now day-trading to raise funds. If 1999 is any indication, that must mean it's the beginning of the end, right?
