Recag/C4_4 · Datasets at Hugging Face

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U.S. authorities accuse the Gulf cartel of smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.
Sunnis: Are they friend or foe?
To the editor:I recently read about American and Iraqi forces jointly engaging against Sunni insurgents. To me, this is like U.S. Republican forces being engaged in battle against Democratic insurgents or vice-versa.
It is a well-known fact that the Sunnis are backed by our friends in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and the Shiites are backed by our worst enemy, Iran. It does not take a genius to know that we should not be waging war against any political group, much less against the wrong one. I am sure the president of Iran will be grateful that President Bush is helping Iran eventually take over Iraq.
The problem reportedly began in 2003 when presidential envoy Paul Bremer dismissed 33,000 Baathists from ministry positions and 500,000 members of the country's military and intelligence personnel. In 2004, Meghan O'Sullivan, special assistant to the president, advocated strong support for the Shiite candidates in the "democratic" national-assembly elections. Needless to say, these two huge mistakes forced the Sunnis (now called the insurgents) to, in some cases, join al-Qaida and rebel against the Shiite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki.
It may be too late, but we should make every effort to get the Sunnis involved in the new government and stop fighting them and helping the Shiites and Iran take over the country.
MANILA, November 15, 2004 (STAR) By Marvin Sy - A "cordial" phone conversation between US President George W. Bush and President Arroyo Wednesday night is proof of the strong ties between the two countries, Malacañang said yesterday.
Presidential Spokesman Ignacio Bunye said Bush called up Mrs. Arroyo at around 8 p.m. Wednesday, and the conversation lasted 10 minutes.
"He told (her), let us keep our friendship strong," Bunye said.
The call was apparently meant to ease differences between the two leaders that emerged after Mrs. Arroyo decided in July to withdraw the Philippines’ small humanitarian contingent from Iraq to save the life of Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz, who was kidnapped by Iraqi militants.
Mrs. Arroyo had originally been one of the staunchest supporters of Bush’s war on terror and his decision to invade Iraq.
Her decision to give in to the demands of the Iraqi kidnappers so De la Cruz could be freed was bitterly criticized by Washington, which recalled US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone for "consultations."
American officials said the Philippines’ decision was a mistake because it would embolden terrorists, encourage more kidnappings and place lives of other coalition members in Iraq at greater risk.
The US government, however, maintained that the Philippines remained a partner and friend in the fight against international terrorism.
Bunye said Mrs. Arroyo congratulated Bush on his victory over the Democrats’ John Kerry, which gave Bush another four years in the White House.
She noted that Filipinos view Bush’s win as a "triumph of values." Bush had pegged his election campaign as a fight to return to old-fashioned "moral values."
Bush was quick to add that it was also a victory of his foreign policy, which has sparked controversy in several arenas.
His decision to assault Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the US invited harsh criticism from several parts of the world and caused divisions within the United Nations.
On the other hand, Bush’s decision was seen by others as a strong statement against terrorism and his commitment to protecting his homeland.
Bush and Mrs. Arroyo will see each other during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit in Santiago, Chile, this weekend, along with other world leaders.
The summit will tackle economic issues affecting the region, the campaign against terrorism, and — for the first time — the issue of corruption.
Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Franklin Ebdalin said last August it is only normal that countries sometimes clash on policy decisions since each country has different interests to uphold.
He explained that the Philippines’ national interest, as shown during the hostage crisis last July, is to protect Filipinos above everything else but this apparently did not coincide with US interests.
Ebdalin stressed that the withdrawal of the Filipino troops from Iraq did not mean the Philippines’ commitment to fight terrorism has weakened.
"Our vital interests lie wherever there are Filipinos. Our seven million overseas Filipinos are in over 165 countries and on ships on all the world’s oceans. It is within this reality... of the Filipino diaspora that we (crafted) our foreign policy," he said.
Ebdalin explained that while "our allies are important to us... (they) will have to understand that even as we hold them in the highest esteem, the protection of overseas Filipinos will have to come first."
There were questions raised about the status of the Philippines’ membership in the "coalition of the willing" after US Secretary of State Colin Powell hinted that the country is already out of the loop.
Then Foreign Affairs Secretary Delia Albert responded by saying the Philippines is still part of the coalition even without contributing any more personnel to the coalition’s peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts in Iraq.
The pullout by one of Washington’s biggest backers in the war on terror was considered a major blow to the unity of the US-led coalition in Iraq.
The July hostage crisis had put Mrs. Arroyo squarely between domestic concerns and her previously strong commitment to the US.
With a terror threat of its own, the Philippines has been relying on Washington to beef up its poorly armed military to battle al-Qaeda-linked groups in Mindanao. There had been concerns that local Muslim militants, such as the Abu Sayyaf group, may be encouraged once the government has agreed to meet the demand of the Iraqi captors.
Another Filipino has since been kidnapped in Iraq while a Filipino diplomat working with the United Nations has been abducted in Afghanistan.
PARIS (AP) — French club Guingamp says it will hire Jocelyn Gourvennec to replace Antoine Kombouare as coach.
Gourvennec previously coached the Brittany club from 2010-16 before Kombouare took over.
Guingamp fired Kombouare this week following poor results that left the club at the bottom of the league.
Guingamp, which hosts Lyon on Saturday, has won only one league game this season and lost to Nantes 5-0 last weekend.
Next: hitchBOT – Privacy invading hitchhiking robot or fun social experiment?
The cops call it money laundering, but in this case it might as well be called card washing.
Krebs writes that earlier this month, police in Everett, Massachusetts arrested a local man named Jean Pierre for possessing nine stolen credit cards.
Those cards hadn’t actually been stolen. Rather, they were gift cards that had been re-encoded with data from cards that were stolen from a variety of data breaches at merchants, including the Connecticut car wash.
Back in May, a South Carolina sheriff’s department called Everett police to tell them that a resident had reported his credit card being used repeatedly for bogus purchases at a Family Dollar store in Everett.
Everett Detective Michael Lavey got hold of security camera footage from the local Dollar Store and asked the store clerk if he knew the people who showed up in the video at the date and time of the fraudulent transactions.
The clerk said that yes, those suspects had been visiting the store for months, several times each week, to buy gift cards.
The clerk told me they would come into the store in pairs, using multiple credit cards until one of them was finally approved, at which point they’d buy $500 each in prepaid gift cards. We have two Family Dollar stores in Everett and a bunch in the surrounding area, and these guys would come in three to four times a week at each location, laundering money from stolen cards.
The suspect Jean Pierre was one of the men recognisable in the video. He had been questioned by Boston police at a city hospital after being stabbed in the legs and buttocks in an unrelated robbery, but he had refused to answer questions about the robbery or attack.
When police seized his trousers as evidence, they discovered several prepaid gift cards in the pockets.
Detective Lavey told Krebs that he subpoenaed the credit card records and, working with MasterCard and American Express, traced at least one of the cards down to having been stolen from Splash Car Wash in Connecticut.
Lavey was soon working with Michael Chaves, a Connecticut detective who’d been investigating card breaches at 14 separate car washes, including the one at Splash.
It turns out that at least 40 car washes across the country had been hacked, with thieves getting away with countless account details since at least February 2014, Krebs reports.
Upon interviewing some of the car wash owners, Chaves says he found they were all using similar point-of-sale (POS) systems, some of which were sold by US-based Micrologic Associates.
The pcAnywhere credentials were created by Micrologic, but unchanged for years.
But it wasn’t just default passwords the crooks were exploiting, claims Micrologic President and CEO Miguel Gonzalez. He pointed the finger at vulnerabilities in the remote software, as well.
What the investigators we've worked with so far have been able to gather is that [the thieves] were exploiting not the pcAnywhere credentials, but a flaw in old versions of pcAnywhere.
In fact, as Krebs reports, Symantec in 2012 told users to pull the plug on pcAnywhere after discovering that its source code had been stolen 6 years earlier.
Krebs points to the disheartening frequency with which crooks use remote-access tools such as pcAnywhere to jimmy open PoS systems.
That’s reflected in Verizon’s 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report, which suggests that 2013 might well be dubbed “the year of the retailer breach”.
It was, Verizon said, a year of “transition from geopolitical attacks to large-scale attacks on payment card systems”, ushered in at the start by a new Citadel Trojan malware variant crafted to attack POS systems using a Canadian payment card processor, closing out with the whale-sized POS breach at Target in November, and stuffed with plenty of POS breaches at restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and other brick-and-mortar retailers sandwiched in between.
In fact, the carwash combo of pcAnywhere with a POS system is the number one no-no on Verizon’s most current list of recommendations.
Verizon found that the shared vector for the major POS breaches of 2013 were combining third-party remote-access software with a POS system.
The security of the remote access products isn’t the issue, here, Verizon said – rather, it’s just that they’re often implemented in “a very insecure manner”, according to its report.
As the Verizon report bluntly puts it and Detective Lavey confirms, the money in each one of these rip-offs amounts to small potatoes on an individual basis.
But add them up, and we get a picture of serious money getting bled out of non-secure POS setups that gang members have figured out how to take advantage of.
Individually, this card fraud doesn’t meet the threshold where the federal government is going to say 'Hey, let's grab these guys'. Locally, they're doing it across broad jurisdictions and jumping from state to state and coming away with hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Police obviously have their work cut out for them when it comes to tracking down POS system-bleeding crooks across jurisdictions.
In the meantime, it behooves businesses to do their best at securing systems so they don’t get fleeced.
Besides avoiding the risky combo of remote-access software and POS systems, Verizon suggests having serious business discussions with third-party POS management vendors about how and when they’ll access POS systems via remote access.
Another top priority involves making absolutely sure there aren’t any factory default passwords hanging around in the POS systems, be they the name of the device vendor, dictionary words, otherwise weak passwords or the like.
And if a third party deals with passwords, require and verify that they’re not giving you the same password that they hand out to other customers.
Other advice includes considering two-factor authentication, monitoring for suspicious network activity, using security software, and making sure nobody’s using the POS systems to do non-POS stuff online.
After all, POS systems are there to keep the cash coming. They’re pretty important.
Micrologic has implemented additional measures to defend against further intrusions and will remain responsive in assisting Law Enforcement officials throughout their investigations.
Image of card, raindrops and car wash courtesy of Shutterstock.
The article reviews provisions within the Affordable Care Act legislation and discusses key risk- adjustment implementation issues for states establishing health insurance exchanges. The paper also presents results from a simulation using data from 5 million insured persons to show how risk-adjusted transfer payments will be essential to help minimize selection bias across participating health plans.
States have a very tight timeline to form Health Insurance Exchanges (HIEs) that will serve as the clearinghouse where millions of Americans will get access to health insurance, often with a federal subsidy. Much attention has been focused on getting the new Exchanges up and running, but the premise of this article is that in the very near future, when the HIEs are functional, the strategies and tools they will use to pay the plans and transfer resources from those plans with healthier enrollees to those with sicker ones, will rapidly become a top issue.
The analysis in this article applied the Johns Hopkins ACG System, a diagnosis-based risk-adjustment methodology widely used in over 15 nations, which is being made available to State exchanges as a public service of the University. For more information on this methodology, go to www.acg.jhsph.edu.
He thinks that because I don’t have a cell phone, I am hopelessly mired in the past. Also because I don’t have a DVR or tivo or any of those other modern gadgets. He thinks I’m a fuddy duddy. I don’t think I’m a fuddy duddy. Hey, I have a Facebook page. I have a digital camera and I know how to download the photos. I’ve synced my iPod Shuffle myself. I have CDs and DVDs and I’ve almost got my DVD player to work. I am with it!
Truth to tell, all this technology is moving much too fast for me. I just need a little space and time to get used to it. It overwhelms me sometimes to think about things like how much you can do with a cell phone. Take pictures, make videos, send e-mails, start your car remotely – oh, and make a phone call, too. Do I really need a device that does all that? My landline phone just sits there. It doesn’t dance or sing or order pizza for me. And I like it like that.
Part of it is I don’t want to get caught up in all the high-falutin’ high-tech craziness going on. I like things simple. I don’t think an iPhone, an iPad or any other gadget beginning with a lower-case vowel will simplify my life. It’s just that much more to keep up with. And I don’t feel I need to be in constant touch with anybody.
Another part of it is a cautious aversion to getting too dependent on these innovations. What if the satellite grid fails again – remember it happened a couple of years ago, and nobody could use their cell phone? What if we overload our circuits and lose everything in a blaze of electronic glory? What would happen then? (Like that scene in Independence Day, where they had to resort to Morse code to get a message to the armies assembled against the aliens.) What if all our gadgets suddenly became like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
A Chattahoochee motorcyclist was killed Sunday in a crash on a rural Gadsden County highway.
City officials felt initially wary of signing an agreement with NextEra Energy looking to run high-power transmission lines through Tallahassee.
From cribs, pack and plays, onesies, books to bikes, the seasonal One Week Boutique is a must-attend event for penny pinchers.
More than 25,000 eggs were scattered throughout Myers Park.
A two-day tour last week brought business leaders to see for themselves the slow pace of recovery after the Category 5 storm six months ago.
Tallahassee Police have launched a death investigation after one person was found dead on Columbia Drive early Sunday morning.
Tallahassee Police Department spokesman Damon Miller gives an update after a body was found outside Chartre West Apartments Sunday morning.
Former Mayor Andrew Gillum's hearing on state ethics charges starts Wednesday. Appearances by an FBI agent and another key witness remain remain in question.
Reformers want want to rethink three-strike laws, mandatory sentences and a low threshold for felony offenses to reduce a 96,000 prison population.
An 8-year-old girl died in Friday’s severe weather after a tree fell on her family's Woodville home.
A weekly roundup of political nuggets.
We now have a clearer picture of how inconceivable this monster storm really was.
A House committee unanimously approved a bill providing death benefits and cancer coverage to firefighters.
The Northwood Centre was submitted as a possible new home for the Tallahassee Police Department a total of 32 times.
The Florida A&M University College of Agriculture and Food Sciences Cooperative Extension Program will host a Family Heirs' Property Town Hall 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday.
Carl Madison purchased the winning ticket at TLSE Petro 1, on Capital Circle Southeast in Tallahassee.
The new location replaces the former Wharf Seafood Restaurant site has been opened for about three weeks.
According to the city's online power outage map, as of 1:30 p.m., there were approximately 149 outage orders affecting 1,883 customers.
Scientists have confirmed that Hurricane Michael was a Category 5 storm when it made landfall in Florida.
The threat of severe weather in the Tallahassee area overnight has resulted in Florida State and Florida A&M universities opening later Friday morning.
Look back on the last few years of the swankiest gala in town.

U.S. authorities accuse the Gulf cartel of smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States.

Sunnis: Are they friend or foe?

To the editor:I recently read about American and Iraqi forces jointly engaging against Sunni insurgents. To me, this is like U.S. Republican forces being engaged in battle against Democratic insurgents or vice-versa.

It is a well-known fact that the Sunnis are backed by our friends in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and the Shiites are backed by our worst enemy, Iran. It does not take a genius to know that we should not be waging war against any political group, much less against the wrong one. I am sure the president of Iran will be grateful that President Bush is helping Iran eventually take over Iraq.

The problem reportedly began in 2003 when presidential envoy Paul Bremer dismissed 33,000 Baathists from ministry positions and 500,000 members of the country's military and intelligence personnel. In 2004, Meghan O'Sullivan, special assistant to the president, advocated strong support for the Shiite candidates in the "democratic" national-assembly elections. Needless to say, these two huge mistakes forced the Sunnis (now called the insurgents) to, in some cases, join al-Qaida and rebel against the Shiite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki.

It may be too late, but we should make every effort to get the Sunnis involved in the new government and stop fighting them and helping the Shiites and Iran take over the country.

MANILA, November 15, 2004 (STAR) By Marvin Sy - A "cordial" phone conversation between US President George W. Bush and President Arroyo Wednesday night is proof of the strong ties between the two countries, Malacañang said yesterday.

Presidential Spokesman Ignacio Bunye said Bush called up Mrs. Arroyo at around 8 p.m. Wednesday, and the conversation lasted 10 minutes.

"He told (her), let us keep our friendship strong," Bunye said.

The call was apparently meant to ease differences between the two leaders that emerged after Mrs. Arroyo decided in July to withdraw the Philippines’ small humanitarian contingent from Iraq to save the life of Filipino truck driver Angelo de la Cruz, who was kidnapped by Iraqi militants.

Mrs. Arroyo had originally been one of the staunchest supporters of Bush’s war on terror and his decision to invade Iraq.

Her decision to give in to the demands of the Iraqi kidnappers so De la Cruz could be freed was bitterly criticized by Washington, which recalled US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone for "consultations."

American officials said the Philippines’ decision was a mistake because it would embolden terrorists, encourage more kidnappings and place lives of other coalition members in Iraq at greater risk.

The US government, however, maintained that the Philippines remained a partner and friend in the fight against international terrorism.

Bunye said Mrs. Arroyo congratulated Bush on his victory over the Democrats’ John Kerry, which gave Bush another four years in the White House.

She noted that Filipinos view Bush’s win as a "triumph of values." Bush had pegged his election campaign as a fight to return to old-fashioned "moral values."

Bush was quick to add that it was also a victory of his foreign policy, which has sparked controversy in several arenas.

His decision to assault Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the US invited harsh criticism from several parts of the world and caused divisions within the United Nations.

On the other hand, Bush’s decision was seen by others as a strong statement against terrorism and his commitment to protecting his homeland.

Bush and Mrs. Arroyo will see each other during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit in Santiago, Chile, this weekend, along with other world leaders.

The summit will tackle economic issues affecting the region, the campaign against terrorism, and — for the first time — the issue of corruption.

Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Franklin Ebdalin said last August it is only normal that countries sometimes clash on policy decisions since each country has different interests to uphold.

He explained that the Philippines’ national interest, as shown during the hostage crisis last July, is to protect Filipinos above everything else but this apparently did not coincide with US interests.

Ebdalin stressed that the withdrawal of the Filipino troops from Iraq did not mean the Philippines’ commitment to fight terrorism has weakened.

"Our vital interests lie wherever there are Filipinos. Our seven million overseas Filipinos are in over 165 countries and on ships on all the world’s oceans. It is within this reality... of the Filipino diaspora that we (crafted) our foreign policy," he said.

Ebdalin explained that while "our allies are important to us... (they) will have to understand that even as we hold them in the highest esteem, the protection of overseas Filipinos will have to come first."

There were questions raised about the status of the Philippines’ membership in the "coalition of the willing" after US Secretary of State Colin Powell hinted that the country is already out of the loop.

Then Foreign Affairs Secretary Delia Albert responded by saying the Philippines is still part of the coalition even without contributing any more personnel to the coalition’s peacekeeping and humanitarian efforts in Iraq.

The pullout by one of Washington’s biggest backers in the war on terror was considered a major blow to the unity of the US-led coalition in Iraq.

The July hostage crisis had put Mrs. Arroyo squarely between domestic concerns and her previously strong commitment to the US.

With a terror threat of its own, the Philippines has been relying on Washington to beef up its poorly armed military to battle al-Qaeda-linked groups in Mindanao. There had been concerns that local Muslim militants, such as the Abu Sayyaf group, may be encouraged once the government has agreed to meet the demand of the Iraqi captors.

Another Filipino has since been kidnapped in Iraq while a Filipino diplomat working with the United Nations has been abducted in Afghanistan.

PARIS (AP) — French club Guingamp says it will hire Jocelyn Gourvennec to replace Antoine Kombouare as coach.

Gourvennec previously coached the Brittany club from 2010-16 before Kombouare took over.

Guingamp fired Kombouare this week following poor results that left the club at the bottom of the league.

Guingamp, which hosts Lyon on Saturday, has won only one league game this season and lost to Nantes 5-0 last weekend.

Next: hitchBOT – Privacy invading hitchhiking robot or fun social experiment?

The cops call it money laundering, but in this case it might as well be called card washing.

Krebs writes that earlier this month, police in Everett, Massachusetts arrested a local man named Jean Pierre for possessing nine stolen credit cards.

Those cards hadn’t actually been stolen. Rather, they were gift cards that had been re-encoded with data from cards that were stolen from a variety of data breaches at merchants, including the Connecticut car wash.

Back in May, a South Carolina sheriff’s department called Everett police to tell them that a resident had reported his credit card being used repeatedly for bogus purchases at a Family Dollar store in Everett.

Everett Detective Michael Lavey got hold of security camera footage from the local Dollar Store and asked the store clerk if he knew the people who showed up in the video at the date and time of the fraudulent transactions.

The clerk said that yes, those suspects had been visiting the store for months, several times each week, to buy gift cards.

The clerk told me they would come into the store in pairs, using multiple credit cards until one of them was finally approved, at which point they’d buy $500 each in prepaid gift cards. We have two Family Dollar stores in Everett and a bunch in the surrounding area, and these guys would come in three to four times a week at each location, laundering money from stolen cards.

The suspect Jean Pierre was one of the men recognisable in the video. He had been questioned by Boston police at a city hospital after being stabbed in the legs and buttocks in an unrelated robbery, but he had refused to answer questions about the robbery or attack.

When police seized his trousers as evidence, they discovered several prepaid gift cards in the pockets.

Detective Lavey told Krebs that he subpoenaed the credit card records and, working with MasterCard and American Express, traced at least one of the cards down to having been stolen from Splash Car Wash in Connecticut.

Lavey was soon working with Michael Chaves, a Connecticut detective who’d been investigating card breaches at 14 separate car washes, including the one at Splash.

It turns out that at least 40 car washes across the country had been hacked, with thieves getting away with countless account details since at least February 2014, Krebs reports.

Upon interviewing some of the car wash owners, Chaves says he found they were all using similar point-of-sale (POS) systems, some of which were sold by US-based Micrologic Associates.

The pcAnywhere credentials were created by Micrologic, but unchanged for years.

But it wasn’t just default passwords the crooks were exploiting, claims Micrologic President and CEO Miguel Gonzalez. He pointed the finger at vulnerabilities in the remote software, as well.

What the investigators we've worked with so far have been able to gather is that [the thieves] were exploiting not the pcAnywhere credentials, but a flaw in old versions of pcAnywhere.

In fact, as Krebs reports, Symantec in 2012 told users to pull the plug on pcAnywhere after discovering that its source code had been stolen 6 years earlier.

Krebs points to the disheartening frequency with which crooks use remote-access tools such as pcAnywhere to jimmy open PoS systems.

That’s reflected in Verizon’s 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report, which suggests that 2013 might well be dubbed “the year of the retailer breach”.

It was, Verizon said, a year of “transition from geopolitical attacks to large-scale attacks on payment card systems”, ushered in at the start by a new Citadel Trojan malware variant crafted to attack POS systems using a Canadian payment card processor, closing out with the whale-sized POS breach at Target in November, and stuffed with plenty of POS breaches at restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and other brick-and-mortar retailers sandwiched in between.

In fact, the carwash combo of pcAnywhere with a POS system is the number one no-no on Verizon’s most current list of recommendations.

Verizon found that the shared vector for the major POS breaches of 2013 were combining third-party remote-access software with a POS system.

The security of the remote access products isn’t the issue, here, Verizon said – rather, it’s just that they’re often implemented in “a very insecure manner”, according to its report.

As the Verizon report bluntly puts it and Detective Lavey confirms, the money in each one of these rip-offs amounts to small potatoes on an individual basis.

But add them up, and we get a picture of serious money getting bled out of non-secure POS setups that gang members have figured out how to take advantage of.

Individually, this card fraud doesn’t meet the threshold where the federal government is going to say 'Hey, let's grab these guys'. Locally, they're doing it across broad jurisdictions and jumping from state to state and coming away with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Police obviously have their work cut out for them when it comes to tracking down POS system-bleeding crooks across jurisdictions.

In the meantime, it behooves businesses to do their best at securing systems so they don’t get fleeced.

Besides avoiding the risky combo of remote-access software and POS systems, Verizon suggests having serious business discussions with third-party POS management vendors about how and when they’ll access POS systems via remote access.

Another top priority involves making absolutely sure there aren’t any factory default passwords hanging around in the POS systems, be they the name of the device vendor, dictionary words, otherwise weak passwords or the like.

And if a third party deals with passwords, require and verify that they’re not giving you the same password that they hand out to other customers.

Other advice includes considering two-factor authentication, monitoring for suspicious network activity, using security software, and making sure nobody’s using the POS systems to do non-POS stuff online.

After all, POS systems are there to keep the cash coming. They’re pretty important.

Micrologic has implemented additional measures to defend against further intrusions and will remain responsive in assisting Law Enforcement officials throughout their investigations.

Image of card, raindrops and car wash courtesy of Shutterstock.

The article reviews provisions within the Affordable Care Act legislation and discusses key risk- adjustment implementation issues for states establishing health insurance exchanges. The paper also presents results from a simulation using data from 5 million insured persons to show how risk-adjusted transfer payments will be essential to help minimize selection bias across participating health plans.

States have a very tight timeline to form Health Insurance Exchanges (HIEs) that will serve as the clearinghouse where millions of Americans will get access to health insurance, often with a federal subsidy. Much attention has been focused on getting the new Exchanges up and running, but the premise of this article is that in the very near future, when the HIEs are functional, the strategies and tools they will use to pay the plans and transfer resources from those plans with healthier enrollees to those with sicker ones, will rapidly become a top issue.

The analysis in this article applied the Johns Hopkins ACG System, a diagnosis-based risk-adjustment methodology widely used in over 15 nations, which is being made available to State exchanges as a public service of the University. For more information on this methodology, go to www.acg.jhsph.edu.

He thinks that because I don’t have a cell phone, I am hopelessly mired in the past. Also because I don’t have a DVR or tivo or any of those other modern gadgets. He thinks I’m a fuddy duddy. I don’t think I’m a fuddy duddy. Hey, I have a Facebook page. I have a digital camera and I know how to download the photos. I’ve synced my iPod Shuffle myself. I have CDs and DVDs and I’ve almost got my DVD player to work. I am with it!

Truth to tell, all this technology is moving much too fast for me. I just need a little space and time to get used to it. It overwhelms me sometimes to think about things like how much you can do with a cell phone. Take pictures, make videos, send e-mails, start your car remotely – oh, and make a phone call, too. Do I really need a device that does all that? My landline phone just sits there. It doesn’t dance or sing or order pizza for me. And I like it like that.

Part of it is I don’t want to get caught up in all the high-falutin’ high-tech craziness going on. I like things simple. I don’t think an iPhone, an iPad or any other gadget beginning with a lower-case vowel will simplify my life. It’s just that much more to keep up with. And I don’t feel I need to be in constant touch with anybody.

Another part of it is a cautious aversion to getting too dependent on these innovations. What if the satellite grid fails again – remember it happened a couple of years ago, and nobody could use their cell phone? What if we overload our circuits and lose everything in a blaze of electronic glory? What would happen then? (Like that scene in Independence Day, where they had to resort to Morse code to get a message to the armies assembled against the aliens.) What if all our gadgets suddenly became like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

A Chattahoochee motorcyclist was killed Sunday in a crash on a rural Gadsden County highway.

City officials felt initially wary of signing an agreement with NextEra Energy looking to run high-power transmission lines through Tallahassee.

From cribs, pack and plays, onesies, books to bikes, the seasonal One Week Boutique is a must-attend event for penny pinchers.

More than 25,000 eggs were scattered throughout Myers Park.

A two-day tour last week brought business leaders to see for themselves the slow pace of recovery after the Category 5 storm six months ago.

Tallahassee Police have launched a death investigation after one person was found dead on Columbia Drive early Sunday morning.

Tallahassee Police Department spokesman Damon Miller gives an update after a body was found outside Chartre West Apartments Sunday morning.

Former Mayor Andrew Gillum's hearing on state ethics charges starts Wednesday. Appearances by an FBI agent and another key witness remain remain in question.

Reformers want want to rethink three-strike laws, mandatory sentences and a low threshold for felony offenses to reduce a 96,000 prison population.

An 8-year-old girl died in Friday’s severe weather after a tree fell on her family's Woodville home.

A weekly roundup of political nuggets.

We now have a clearer picture of how inconceivable this monster storm really was.

A House committee unanimously approved a bill providing death benefits and cancer coverage to firefighters.

The Northwood Centre was submitted as a possible new home for the Tallahassee Police Department a total of 32 times.

The Florida A&M University College of Agriculture and Food Sciences Cooperative Extension Program will host a Family Heirs' Property Town Hall 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday.

Carl Madison purchased the winning ticket at TLSE Petro 1, on Capital Circle Southeast in Tallahassee.

The new location replaces the former Wharf Seafood Restaurant site has been opened for about three weeks.

According to the city's online power outage map, as of 1:30 p.m., there were approximately 149 outage orders affecting 1,883 customers.

Scientists have confirmed that Hurricane Michael was a Category 5 storm when it made landfall in Florida.

The threat of severe weather in the Tallahassee area overnight has resulted in Florida State and Florida A&M universities opening later Friday morning.

Look back on the last few years of the swankiest gala in town.