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cindylouwho-2 · 5 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, August 19, 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the late July report, although some may be older than that.

Please note I am taking the next week off, starting tomorrow (Aug. 19), so I might be a little slow in replying to any comments.

READ MORE STORIES ABOUT:

Economy Health Politics Donald Trump economy Jobs On the Hill oval office pandemic recovery White House

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OPINION: History in the making by the greatest President, Donald John Trump, like no other in our life time! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

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rjzimmerman · 6 years ago

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Did each of them vote favorably on all environmental and climate-based legislation and other matters (such as confirmation votes on judges and administration officials) because it was the “right thing” to do, or to buff up their credentials for campaign purposes? I bet for some of them, the latter guided their voting on some matters.

Excerpt from this Washington Post article:

Each senator who has announced their candidacy for president received perfect scores in an annual voting scorecard kept by the League of Conservation Voters.

The six declared 2020 candidatesin the Senate — Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) — always aligned with positions the environmental organization deemed “pro-environment.”

So too did a handful of Senate Democrats thought to be considering a run for president, including Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).

Most Senate Democrats had high environmental scores from the group in the years leading up to 2018.

But across-the-board perfect scores among the slate of presidential candidates is a sign they are shoring up their environmental bona fides as they face a Democratic electorate increasingly energized by President Trump’s rollback of environmental rules and his pullout from the Paris climate accord.

It was only five years ago that, for example, Brown and Booker had a score 80 percent or that Gillibrand had a score of 60 percent — meaning they took the environmental group's favored positions in most but not all votes.

The 2018 scores are also a sign there may not be much daylight — yet — between the party’s perceived moderates (like Klobuchar) and progressives (like Warren), at least when it comes to environmental issues.

#2020 presidential campaign #Democrats #environmental issues #climate issues

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arewelemmings · 6 years ago

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Coalition of states sues Trump over national emergency to build border wall.

From the Washington Post:

Coalition of states sues Trump over national emergency to build border wall.

by Amy Goldstein - The Washington Post - Monday, February 18, 2019

A coalition of 16 states filed a federal lawsuit Monday to block President Trump’s plan to build a border wall without permission from Congress, arguing that the president’s decision to declare a national emergency is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit, brought by states with Democratic governors except for one — Maryland — seeks a preliminary injunction that would prevent the president from acting on his emergency declaration while the case plays out in the courts.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California — a San Francisco-based court whose judges have ruled against an array of other Trump administration policies, including on immigration and the environment.

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Accusing the president of “an unconstitutional and unlawful scheme,” the suit says the states are trying “to protect their residents, natural resources, and economic interests from President Donald J. Trump’s flagrant disregard of fundamental separation of powers principles engrained in the United States Constitution.”

The complaint, filed by the attorneys general of nearly a third of the states and representing millions of Americans, immediately becomes the heavyweight among a rapid outpouring of opposition to the president’s emergency declaration. In the White House Rose Garden on Friday, Trump announced that he was instituting a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border because Congress did not provide the money for a wall that has stood as one of the most enduring promises from his 2016 campaign.

Several nonprofit organizations already have gone to court or announced plans to sue. And protesters took to the streets in several cities on Monday. Across from the White House, demonstrators held neon-colored letters that spelled, “POWER GRAB.”

“You wouldn’t expect to celebrate Presidents’ Day this way, but we do what you got to do,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D), leader of the states coalition, said Monday in an interview. “In this case, we are having to commemorate . . . by protesting, whether marching in the street or marching into court.”

Through the president’s declared emergency, White House officials plan to use $8 billion to build sections of a barrier that Trump says will obstruct or deter migrants from crossing into the country. That sum is about $6.6 billion more than Congress allotted for the purpose in its latest spending plan. To fill in the gap, the White House intends, among other things, to divert $3.6 billion from military construction accounts and $2.5 billion from Department of Defense efforts to fight illicit drugs.

In the 56-page complaint, Becerra and his counterparts argue that diverting money that Congress has designated for other purposes violates the separation of powers defined in the Constitution.

The complaint says that once Congress passes laws and a president signs them, the Constitution requires that the president “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Another clause of the Constitution, the lawsuit says, prevents money from being paid from the U.S. Treasury unless Congress has appropriated it.

The lawsuit also alleges that the “federal government’s own data prove there is no national emergency at the southern border that warrants construction of a wall. Customs and Border Protection data show that unlawful entries are near 45-year lows.”

And it enumerates ways that residents of the participating states — and the states themselves — could be harmed by the diversion of funds.

In addition to California, the states participating in the suit are Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Virginia. With the exception of Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), the governors of the states are Democrats.

The suit names as defendants the president, the departments of Defense, Treasury, Interior and Homeland Security and senior officials of those departments.

In filing the case in the San Francisco-based Northern District, the attorneys general chose a jurisdiction that has repeatedly been at odds with the president. According to a count by The Washington Post, the court’s judges have ruled against the Trump administration in at least nine important cases.

Judges there, for example, have ruled against efforts by the Commerce Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, numerous rollbacks of environmental regulations, efforts to curtail asylum for migrants and the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation of special “temporary protected status” for hundreds of thousands of immigrants legally living in the U.S.

Cases appealed from that court go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which has become a whipping post for Trump, who has derided it as “a complete and total disaster” and “a thorn in our side.”

Since the president’s announcement, GOP members of Congress have had mixed opinions of the declaration, with some contending it is legitimate and others portraying it as a power grab that could create a dangerous precedent in the event of a future Democratic president.

Congressional Democrats plan to vote in coming weeks on a joint resolution that would repeal the national emergency, and they predict that some Republicans will support it.

Trump has said his declaration is allowed under a 1976 law called the National Emergencies Act and that it has been used dozens of times. Outside analyses, including by the Brennan Center for Justice, have shown that virtually all such emergencies involved sanctions against foreign governments and groups for reasons such as human rights violations, rather than to spend money Congress intended for other purposes.

President George W. Bush declared a national emergency soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the spending it allowed had not previously been designated by Congress for other purposes.

On Friday, Public Citizen and the Center for Biological Diversity filed separate lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging that Trump’s emergency declaration is unconstitutional.

Another advocacy group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued the Justice Department on Friday, accusing it of failing to provide legal opinions, communications and other documents related to the president’s decision to declare a national emergency.

Fred Barbash, Devlin Barrett and Alex Horton contributed to this report.

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ard1choke · 7 years ago

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The past month has seen one blockbuster revelation after another about how our mobile phone and broadband providers have been leaking highly sensitive customer information, including real-time location data and customer account details. In the wake of these consumer privacy debacles, many are left wondering who’s responsible for policing these industries? How exactly did we get to this point? What prospects are there for changes to address this national privacy crisis at the legislative and regulatory levels? These are some of the questions we’ll explore in this article.

In 2015, the Federal Communications Commission under the Obama Administration reclassified broadband Internet companies as telecommunications providers, which gave the agency authority to regulate broadband providers the same way as telephone companies.

The FCC also came up with so-called “net neutrality” rules designed to prohibit Internet providers from blocking or slowing down traffic, or from offering “fast lane” access to companies willing to pay extra for certain content or for higher quality service.

In mid-2016, the FCC adopted new privacy rules for all Internet providers that would have required providers to seek opt-in permission from customers before collecting, storing, sharing and selling anything that might be considered sensitive — including Web browsing, application usage and location information, as well as financial and health data.

But the Obama administration’s new FCC privacy rules didn’t become final until December 2016, a month after then President-elect Trump was welcomed into office by a Republican controlled House and Senate.

Congress still had 90 legislative days (when lawmakers are physically in session) to pass a resolution killing the privacy regulations, and on March 23, 2017 the Senate voted 50-48 to repeal them. Approval of the repeal in the House passed quickly thereafter, and President Trump officially signed it on April 3, 2017.

In an op-ed published in The Washington Post, Ajit Pai — a former Verizon lawyer and President Trump’s pick to lead the FCC — said “despite hyperventilating headlines, Internet service providers have never planned to sell your individual browsing history to third parties.”

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai.

“That’s simply not how online advertising works,” Pai wrote. “And doing so would violate ISPs’ privacy promises. Second, Congress’s decision last week didn’t remove existing privacy protections; it simply cleared the way for us to work together to reinstate a rational and effective system for protecting consumer privacy.”

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) came to a different conclusion, predicting that the repeal of the FCC privacy rules would allow broadband providers to collect and sell a “gold mine of data” about customers.

“Your mobile broadband provider knows how you move about your day through information about your geolocation and internet activity through your mobile device,” Nelson said. The Senate resolution “will take consumers out of this driver’s seat and place the collection and use of their information behind a veil of secrecy.”

Meanwhile, pressure was building on the now Republican-controlled FCC to repeal the previous administration’s net neutrality rules. The major ISPs and mobile providers claimed the new regulations put them at a disadvantage relative to competitors that were not regulated by the FCC, such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google.

On Dec. 14, 2017, FCC Chairman Pai joined two other Republic FCC commissioners in a 3-2 vote to dismantle the net neutrality regulations.

As The New York Times observed after the net neutrality repeal, “the commission’s chairman, Ajit Pai, vigorously defended the repeal before the vote. He said the rollback of the rules would eventually benefit consumers because broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast could offer them a wider variety of service options.”

“We are helping consumers and promoting competition,” Mr. Pai said. “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas.”

MORE OR LESS CHOICE?

Some might argue we’ve seen reduced competition and more industry consolidation since the FCC repealed the rules. Major broadband and mobile provider AT&T and cable/entertainment giant Time Warner are now fighting the Justice Department in a bid to merge. Two of the four-largest mobile telecom and broadband providers — T-Mobile and Sprint — have announced plans for a $26 billion merger.

The FCC privacy rules from 2016 that were overturned by Congress sought to give consumers more choice about how their data was to be used, stored and shared. But consumers now have less “choice” than ever about how their mobile provider shares their data and with whom. Worse, the mobile and broadband providers themselves are failing to secure their own customers’ data.

This month, it emerged that the major mobile providers have been giving commercial third-parties the ability to instantly look up the precise location of any mobile subscriber in real time. KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that one of these third parties — LocationSmart — leaked this ability for years to anyone via a buggy component on its Web site.

LocationSmart’s demo page featured a buggy component which allowed anyone to look up anyone else’s mobile device location, in real time, and without consent.

We also learned that another California company — Securus Technologies — was selling real-time location lookups to a number of state and local law enforcement agencies, and that accounts for dozens of those law enforcement officers were obtained by hackers. Securus, it turned out, was ultimately getting its data from LocationSmart.

This week, researchers discovered that a bug in T-Mobile’s Web site let anyone access the personal account details of any customer with just their cell phone number, including full name, address, account number and some cases tax ID numbers.

Not to be outdone, Comcast was revealed to have exposed sensitive information on customers through a buggy component of its Web site that could be tricked into displaying the home address where the company’s wireless router is located, as well as the router’s Wi-Fi name and password.

It’s not clear how FCC Chairman Pai intends to “reinstate a rational and effective system for protecting consumer privacy,” as he pledged after voting last year to overturn the 2015 privacy rules. The FCC reportedly has taken at least tentative steps to open an inquiry into the LocationSmart debacle, although Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has called on Chairman Pai to recuse himself on the inquiry because Pai once represented Securus as an attorney. (Wyden also had some choice words for the wireless companies).

The major wireless carriers all say they do not share customer location data without customer consent or in response to a court order or subpoena. Consent. All of these carriers pointed me to their privacy policies. It could be the carriers believe these policies clearly explain that simply by using their wireless device customers have opted-in to having their real-time location data sold or given to third-party companies.

Michelle De Mooy, director of the privacy and data project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), said if the mobile giants are burying that disclosure in privacy policy legalese, that’s just not good enough.

“Even if they say, ‘Our privacy policy says we can do this,’ it violates peoples’ reasonable expectations of when and why their location data is being collected and how that’s going to be used. It’s not okay to simply point to your privacy policies and expect that to be enough.”

CHECKING THE FTC’S RECORD

When the FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality rules takes effect on June 11, 2018, broadband providers will once again be regulated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That power was briefly shared with FCC when the agency under the Obama administration passed its net neutrality rules with the assumption that it could regulate broadband providers like telecommunications companies.

When it comes to investigating companies for privacy and security violations, the FTC’s primary weapon is The FTC Act, which “prohibits unfair and deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.” According to the FTC Act, a “misrepresentation or omission is deceptive if it is material and is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances.” It also finds that an act or practice “is unfair if it causes, or is likely to cause, substantial injury that is not reasonably avoidable by consumers, and not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition.”

It’s difficult to think of a bigger violation of those principles than the current practice by the major mobile providers of sharing real-time location data on customers with third parties, without any opportunity for customers to opt-in or opt-out of such sharing.

But it’s unclear whether the FTC would take take any action against such activity, or indeed if it has any precedent to do so. The agency had the ability to go after mobile broadband providers for privacy and security violations between 2002 and 2015, and so KrebsOnSecurity asked the commission to share how many times during that period that it took enforcement actions against broadband providers.

The list I got back from them wasn’t exactly privacy or security focused. The FTC cited a case in 2003 in which it sued AOL and CompuServe over unfair billing practices. In 2009, it helped to take down 3FN, a small, shady ISP that was based in the United States but run by Russians and hosting a stupendous amount of malware, scams and illegal content (i.e. child pornography).

In 2014, the FTC alleged that AT&T Mobility deceptively advertised “unlimited” data while throttling mobile customers who used certain amounts of data (this case is still pending but a recent appeals court decision cleared the way for the FTC to continue its lawsuit).

In 2015, TracFone, the largest prepaid mobile provider in the United States, agreed to pay $40 million to the FTC for consumer refunds to settle charges that it deceived millions of consumers with regard to its “unlimited” data service.

The FTC also cited a scolding letter (PDF) that it sent to Verizon over issues related to the security of its customer routers. No action was taken by the FTC in that case.

How eager the FTC will be to police privacy practices of broadband providers may come down to the priorities of the agency’s new leaders. The Trump administration just tapped Andrew Smith as head of the FTC’s consumer protection office. Smith is a lawyer who used to represent many of the companies that the agency is already investigating.

Smith will need to recuse himself from multiple ongoing investigations his office would normally lead, including data breaches at Equifax and Facebook, thanks to his previous work on behalf of the companies. According to The Hill, Smith testified in October before the Senate Banking Committee on behalf of the credit reporting industry as the panel investigated an Equifax data breach that compromised more than 145 million people.

Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy and a former senior adviser to former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler in 2015, said the FTC doesn’t have a strong record on broadband privacy enforcement.

Sohn said the FTC’s legal framework does not require affirmative opt-in consent for browsing history and app usage, and that a provider would only have to let you opt-out — something that consumers rarely do and which companies routinely make it hard to do. More importantly, she said, while the FCC’s rules would have protected consumers before they were harmed, the FTC can only act after harm has already occurred.

“We passed privacy rules for broadband and mobile providers that would have required them to seek customer opt-in for anything that was considered sensitive,” Sohn said of her work at the FCC under the Obama administration. “The carrier had to give you clear and consistent opportunities to opt out. It was very broad, but the definition we set for personal information was far broader than what even the FTC considered sensitive.”

REPEALING THE REPEAL OF NET NEUTRALITY

So the carriers are already reneging on their promise to customers that they won’t share location data without customer consent or a court order. But where does that leave us on net neutrality? The answer is that the major wireless carriers are already doing what was expressly prohibited under the FCC’s net neutrality rules: Favoring their own content over competitors, and letting companies gain more favorable access by paying more.

Around the time of the FCC’s repeal of the net neutrality rules last year, The Wall Street Journal prognosticated about what might happen with the regulations out of the way. To do this, it looked at some of the offerings the mobile carriers pitched before the rules were drawn up.

“One example of how things could work is the mobile wireless market, where some providers already have used pricing tactics to favor certain websites and services over others,” wrote John D. McKinnon and Ryan Knutson for The Journal:

The 2015 Obama-era rules didn’t explicitly prohibit these tactics, which generally allow customers to access certain websites without having it count against their monthly data cap. Wireless carriers, which often subject their users to strict data limits, were aggressive in experimenting with such plans, also known as “zero rating.”

Deals began emerging several years ago for inexpensive plans that offer unlimited high-speed access to popular services such as Facebook or Twitter, but limited or even restricted access to the rest of the internet.

T-Mobile US Inc. in late 2013 announced that its GoSmart Mobile brand had “become the first wireless provider…to offer free access to Facebook and Facebook Messenger for all of its wireless customers, even those without monthly data service.” The GoSmart Mobile plans started at $25 a month for “unlimited talk” with no other data service. T-Mobile has since transferred the GoSmart brand to another wireless firm.

In 2014, Virgin Mobile USA, a unit of Sprint Corp. , offered a wireless plan that cost $12, but users were only allowed to access one website: either Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest. If they wanted all four, it was $10 more a month. Another $5 and they could access any online music streaming service.

Big internet providers also used zero-rating plans to favor their own content. AT&T Inc. gave paying customers unlimited usage of its own online video service DirecTV Now, while other video sites counted against monthly data caps. Verizon Communications Inc. did the same for its mobile video app, called go90.”

AT&T Mobility offers a zero-rating plan called “Sponsored Data” that allows content providers to pay up front to have streaming of that content allowed without counting against the provider’s monthly data caps.

Sohn said the FCC under the Obama administration initiated an investigation into AT&T’s Sponsored Data plan and Verizon for its go90 service, but that the inquiry was abandoned by the current FCC leadership.

There are some prospects for a Congressional repeal of this administration’s gutting of the FCC’s net neutrality rules. On May 16, the Senate approved a resolution nullifying the FCC’s rollback of the net neutrality rules. But the measure faces an uphill battle in the House.

“Right now we’re probably 30 to 40 members short of being able to bring a vote in the House,” Sohn said. “About 20 Democrats haven’t gotten on board, and we have no Republicans so far. But I think that’s going to change. If Congress repeals the net neutrality repeal, the next step would be to craft stronger rules [either at the FCC or Congress]. We have until the end of this Congress to get it done.”

The CDT’s De Mooy gives the effort to repeal the repeal of net neutrality rules slim chances of passage this year. But she said the prospects for revisiting net neutrality and consumer privacy in the next Congress look good, particularly if Democrats pick up additional seats in the House.

“It seems to be something the Democrats are taking up more now,” Demooy said. “So much depends on what happens in November. But that’s true of so many tech policy issues.”

SHOCK AND YAWN

When I first saw a Carnegie Mellon University researcher show me last week that he could look up the near-exact location of any mobile number in the United States, I sincerely believed the public would be amazed and horrified at the idea that mobile providers are sharing this real-time data with third party companies, and at the fact that those third parties in turn weren’t doing anything to prevent the abuse of their own systems.

Instead, after a brief round of coverage in several publications, the story fell out of the news cycle. A story this week in Slate.com lamented how little coverage the mainstream press has given to the LocationSmart scandal, and marvels at how much more shocked people were over the Cambridge Analytic scandal with Facebook.

“Privacy abuses and slip-ups by major tech companies have become so numerous, and the prospect of containing them seems so hopeless, that the public and much of the media have become nearly numb to them,” writes Will Oremus for Slate. “My data was hacked? So it goes. It may have been used in unauthorized ways by unspecified parties? C’est la vie.”

Oremus argues that what the LocationSmart scandal lacks is not import, nor the potential for serious harm, “but a link to some divisive political issue or societal outrage sufficient enough to generate visceral anger from people who aren’t privacy wonks.”

If you’ve read this far (bless you), don’t let breach fatigue and incessant media exposure of how little privacy we have harden into resignation. Yes, the prospects of any public debate about consumer privacy protections in the United States at the legislative level seem dim in a high-stakes mid-term election year. But supporters of net neutrality ideals can start getting involved by tweeting, calling and emailing the House lawmakers listed in red at BattleForTheNet.com.

While you’re at it, tell your lawmakers what you think about mobile providers giving or selling third-parties real-time access to customer location information, and let them know that this is no longer okay.

This is the second article in a two-part series. The first is here: Mobile Giants, Please Don’t Share the Where.

#IFTTT #Published articles #rss

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skidar · 8 years ago

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SO About Net Neutrality

I’ve been more or less going through the motions with little passion on this hellsite. E-mailing my reps, signing petitions, reblogging loud all-caps posts talking about being shut down and the world is ending and all that rot.

But I never actually looked into the researching the plans for the revisions to the net now for myself.

The thing about tumblr is that its aggressive and hyper-librel. On here its far easier to reblog and go with the flow to appease the loud typers with their huge font sizes and all-caps.

The thing is, for the most part, tumblr has a very unhealthy relationship with looking at both sides of a situation. Its fed by mass hysteria and has to be soothed by those with the time and patience to fact-check for themselves instead of blindly agreeing and following.

Those that do a lot of the shouting have a very ‘fingers-in-ears’ approach to learning from the side they disagree with and like to paint said side like a huge, terrible villain.

I’ve been kind of lax about the whole thing, mainly ‘cause I’m already addicited to the internet and some small part of my thinks my life might improve if I wasn’t on it all the time. However, that’s small minded so I started to read into the issue myself.

So be prepared for some unpopular opinions accompanied by links.

To start with, Ajit Pai is not an evil bad guy mc-dictator. He’s a chairman for the FCC, which stands for the Federal Communications Devision.

Think of the FCC as a sort of ACLU for the internet. It has rules and regulations and providers and site holders go to them to solve problems. However, it does not have unyielding power and say-all.

Say a provider does what we’re all fearing, they block you from viewing content in an effort to boost their own content. This actually happened in 2005:

“The most famous example of an ISP acting badly was a company called Madison River Communication which, in 2005, blocked ports used for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, presumably to prop up their own alternative; it remains the canonical violation of net neutrality. It was also a short-lived one: Vonage quickly complained to the FCC, which quickly obtained a consent decree that included a nominal fine and guarantee from Madison River Communications that they would not block such services again. They did not, and no other ISP has tried to do the same; the reasoning is straightforward: foreclosing a service that competes with an ISP’s own service is a clear antitrust violation. In other words, there are already regulations in place to deal with this behavior, and the limited evidence we have suggests it works.“

Thompson, Ben. “Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II.” Stratechery by Ben Thompson, 29 Nov. 2017, stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/.

The FCC ruled that yes, that behavior was bad and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen. It has only happened once in the past and the FCC made it clear that it does not support that. So, lets look into the sort of things the FCC is looking to change, in their eyes, for the better of the internet.

Despite what we’ve been reading the FCC isn’t hellbent on giving money-grubbing cable companies the keys to the internet to regulate the sites we go on. Rather, its more like a phone plan where you have different stages you can pay for in order to have different things. This is something we’re already accustomed to, data plans. Most of us have a phone with a data plan, right? And your provider probably has a variety of data plans to choose from with data caps at a certain about of gigs up to more expensive plans that offer unlimited gigs. Your access to the goods provided on your phone are not limited, you are only limited by your gig usage. Ex: my two brothers and I shared a data plan together because it was cheaper to split it that way. Through this data plan on our phones we all, collectively, had 5 gigs of data that we could use per month. Not very much huh? Well, we’re cheap. And you know what? It was fine. We used our data sparingly and hooked our phones to wifi when we could. If we went over our data we got a warning that we would have to pay $x to get an additional gig to ride out the month. We still had access to whatever we wanted: internet, spotify, netflix, youtube. We just payed for the cheapest plan that had a small data cap. Eventually we got sick of the data cap and upgraded to unlimited.

Now, you’re probably thinking: I don’t WANT to spend more to access the same stuff I LIKE the internet as it is

Well, lets keep digging.

the internet we have now already has certain data caps and exceeding it already causes our internet to move slow, especially with streaming videos, downloading huge files, etc. Our internet providers’ biggest selling point is fast download speeds and instant streaming. They offer a variety of capped data plans varying speeds for different prices. Again, we STILL have access to all the SAME content, just at varying speeds depending on our own needs and willingness to pay for certain plans.

ie: my mom skims facebook every other day and checks her e-mail on weekends. She doesn’t need high speed for that, she’s content with what she has. Now, my dad and I use the internet to create videos, stream and teleconference. We need faster internet speeds so we pay for more gigs.

That is how the internet currently is.

So what does the FCC want to change?

The FCC actually wants to rollback some of the harsher regulations that have been set in place since 2015:

“The Federal Communications Commission has announced a total repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules, a sweeping rejection of Obama-era rules meant to keep the internet a level playing field and prevent companies from charging additional fees for faster internet access. US telecoms have pledged to broadly respect net neutrality principles, however, and this ruling will give internet service providers the freedom to experiment with new pricing models and prioritization of content.”

Coren, Michael J. “Without net neutrality in Portugal, mobile internet is bundled like a cable package.” Quartz, Quartz, 30 Oct. 2017, qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-to-portugal-and-spain-to-understand/.

Now I know you read that and are jumping to THIS scary image”

Which, by the way, is fake. It’s from 2014 and it was a mock up image for fake ‘internet plans’

The phrasing is also off. What we need to think of is that cable companies are competitive. The ones with the lowest prices get the MOST customers. So say Verizon says ‘hell yes, I’m gonna charge you $45 extra bucks to let you get better streaming speeds to youtube and netflix.’ but then over there in the corner Comcast is like ‘huh, that’s a lousy deal, we’ll let you keep accessing those speeds for $15 a month!’ and then At&T is like ‘Screw that, you guys can keep those speeds for no extra cost!’ That’s business competition, and yeah, some providers aren’t available in certain areas and that price gouge can be obnoxious but we’re already dealing with that in my city where certain neighborhoods have this provider and some have a different one.

What you might be fearing is ‘well, what if they all raise their prices astronomically and don’t back down?’ Well, that’s a monopoly and those are very illegal. Remember how the FCC busted Madison River Communications? You bet your butt they’d bust a monopoly. Systematic abuse is already not tolerated and evidence suggests that its not the goal of the reform.

So what IS the goal of the reform?

The reform wants to roll back some heavy regulations that occurred over the past two years (like speed regulations, data caps, etc) to allow the internet to expand it broadband and development like it did before 2015. Sounds ok.

Personally, I really not worried about this. The more I read about it the less horrible it sounds. A lot of posts have brought it way out of proportion and yes there are some aspects about this that I really really don’t like.

I DON’T like that verizon censors tumblr posts about Net Neutrality.

I DON’T like algorithms that filter people into their own niches and don’t allow them to think for themselves (show the people what they want and they won’t complain about what they don’t see)

I’ve taken a wait-and-see approach now that I’ve read up on plans and FAQs and the various debunked rumors for the reform.

Honestly if the cable companies screw around the people will just drop them and go with the least scummiest one. Hit ‘em where hurts, in their wallet.

This ends my insanely long piece but this IS tumblr so I implore you to not just take my own research at face value. I want you to look things up for yourselves and make a well-reasoned and educated decision.

Yes I’m for an open and free internet, so is Ajit Pai, he just wants to change some things to make it better.

Some useful links:

What is said vs what is heard

https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-to-portugal-and-spain-to-understand/

Great article that breaks down Title II and Net Neutrality past and future

https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/

Myths and Facts about Title II and Net Neutrality

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db1128/DOC-347961A1.pdf

#long post #net neutrality #title 2 #title-II #ajit pai #unpopular opinion

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evanvanness · 5 years ago

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Annotations for the latest Week in Eth News

I tweeted this week:

Feels like an accurate reflection of the broader week in the Ethereum ecosystem. Just take a look at the most clicked:

“Yield farming” is the idea of figuring out how to leverage up to get the most yield, where part of the yield is usually a native token for the platform/protocol. (Please do so very cautiously...if you get leveraged up, you’re juicing returns but taking large risk of losses).

With Compound, this meant various “trades,” which changed through the week. First people were lending (and resupplying) Tether, because that had the highest rates. Then the trade switched to BAT because some whale figured out (the advantages of scale!) that it wouldn’t be hard to drive BAT rates up even higher than Tether (USDT) and all the sudden an insane amount of BAT moved to Compound. I kid you not: at the moment there is about $250m USD worth of BAT in Compound - though only 6% of supply as it gets circulated through a few times

Leveraged up? Be careful! If BAT price doubles, how many people would get liquidated?

Hint: it’s those of you who are over 50% on the borrow limit you can see from your account page on the Compound UI. Looking at exchanges, the order books are rather thin - how much would it cost a liquidator to drive all the BAT price up 2x compared to how much it could make liquidating? Or what if Brave announces a big partnership? Crypto is an adversarial environment (ahem, look at all those YouTubers with huge followings trying to sell you on the latest pump of some worthless token)

These order books are thinner than normal because....so much BAT got sucked into Compound from the exchange’s order books. So the price is now easier to push higher.

Meanwhile, Balancer started its “liquidity mining” (same thing as yield farming) before Compound, but just released its token today. And now it’s trading at $15 last I looked, or 1.5 billion USD fully diluted market cap.

Signs of a bull market? Feels like it to me.

These aren’t the only liquidity mining opportunities - and you’ll see a bunch more people do it now that this is what is bringing in users.

Back to Compound, it got listed on Coinbase Pro today and the price actually fell, as all the people who had “farmed” it got liquid, plus presumably some others as well. However, it eventually held (at time of writing) at about $280. (that’s a 2.8b USD fully diluted valuation). It had been at $380 and looking at the orderbook when it opened, it appeared that the first trade (for a tiny amount) happened at $440. We’ll see what happens when Coinbase opens it to retail.

The DeFi narrative is strong. Seems clear that there is some demand for folks wanting to own a bit of what might be the next big financial platforms.

-------

The final thing I always call out in my intro is high-level things I suggest Eth holders might read:

Matter Labs’ ZK Sync rollup is live – tiny transaction fees, withdrawals to Eth mainnet in 15 mins, 300 transactions per second (with 2000 tps coming)

Reddit announces scaling competition to move Reddit’s community points to mainnet

It seems the mysterious and massive transaction fees were from a hacked korean ponzi called GoodCycle. Various miners have handled differently: Ethermine (already paid out). Sparkpool (said it would pay out but then victim identified, unclear to me if yet resolved). f2pool (said they’d return to new address)

ETH disrupting SWIFT: why fintech VCs are missing DeFi

As always, reverse order:

Looking at ETH as a distruptor for SWIFT is a pretty interesting lens. I’ve always rolled my eyes a little at “fintech” because it seems like playing fast with regulations and then if you get a certain scale hiring lawyers and lobbyists to hopefully make your issues go away. This article argues that the real innovation is further down in the financial “stack” - Ethereum taking the place of antiquated SWIFT.

Personally I don’t think the massive mistake/hack transaction fees are a big deal, but it seems to be something that the crypto clickbait jumps on. It’s not a danger to any normal user. Just check the transaction fee before sending.

Reddit wants to put its Community Points on Eth mainnet, likely through a rollup or sidechain. Very neat - it does feel like their deadline is just a little ambitious for rollups which might make them use a sidechain, which would be a bit of a shame if they can get better trust assumptions from a rollup by waiting an extra month or two.

And speaking of rollups, ZkSync is live. Fast, cheap transfers with the data onchain and the execution offchain. Woot!

Eth1

Trinity v0.1.0-alpha.36 (Python client) – BeamSync improvements, metrics tracking (influxDB/Grafana), partial eth/65 support

Updated Eth on ARM images. Geth fast syncs a full node in 40 hours on 8GB Raspberry Pi4

Miners began bumping up the gas limit (12m now), which sparked some polemics about the tradeoff between state growth versus user fees. Higher gas limit resulted in safelow gas fees in the teens for the first time in weeks.

Speaking of yield farming ruling the week, the gas prices are back to 30 gwei despite the fact that that throughput went up 20%. My strong suspicion is that this has a lot to do with yield farming.

For the record, the max transactions per second of Ethereum right now is about 44 transactions per second. It’s an easy calc to do (12m divided by 13.1 block time divided by 21000 gas per simple eth transfer).

Of course that doesn’t include rollups, who put their data onchain to the point where they are arguably layer 1.5.

Personally I think we should make this gas limit increase “temporary” when gas prices go back down.

Eth2

Prysmatic (Go) client update – stable Onyx testnet, 80% validators community run, RAM usage optimizations

Nimbus (Nim) client update – up to spec, 10-50x processing speedup, splitting node and validator clients

SigmaPrime’s update on their Eth2 fuzzer – found some Prysmatic bugs, fuzzing Lodestar (Javascript client), Lighthouse ENR crate bug, dockerizing the fuzzer so the community can run it

Jonny Rhea’s Packetology posts (one and two) on identifying validators

Attack nets – a testnet specifically for attacks

When Sigma Prime’s fuzzer is dockerized, does “are you fuzzing any eth2 clients” become the cool new question that Eth folks ask each other, instead of “are you running any testnets?”

There’s not much more to say otherwise. This is the final slog to getting the eth2 chain launched. The final tinkering, the testnets, thinking about validator privacy and cost of attack, an attack net for white hats.

Layer2

Matter Labs’ ZK Sync rollup is live – tiny transaction fees, withdrawals to Eth mainnet in 15 mins, 300 transactions per second (with 2000 tps coming)

Minimally viable rollback in Validium/Volition

The flipside to high gas prices is layer2. It’s hard to get people to excited about layer2 when you can get onchain transactions done in a couple minutes at 1 gwei. At 30 gwei, people get more excited about layer2, and stuff is working.

Network effects are real: layer2 also becomes much better to use the more people who are using it. So there is a silver lining to higher gas prices, because it provides the incentive to push people to superior alternatives. Obviously a really fast and cheap ETH/token transfer rollup is increasingly more valuable the more people are using it.

Crypto

a GKR inside a snark to speed up SNARK proving 200x

Attacking the Diogenes setup ceremony for Eth2’s VDF

Isogenies VDFs: delay encryption

Kate polynomial commitments explainer from Dankrad Feist

Reputable List Curation from Decentralized Voting Crites, Maller, Meiklejohn and Mercer paper for construction of private TCR voting

Debut of the “crypto” section. It seemed like it was getting lost in the general.

Placement (compared to other sections) was rather random. Categorization can be somewhat arbitrary, that’s something the newsletter will hopefully constantly evolve.

This newsletter is made possible thanks to Matcha by 0x!

0x is excited to sponsor Week in Ethereum News and invite readers to try out our new DEX!

Stuff for developers

Waffle v3 with ethers v5 support

WalletConnect v1 release, now with mobile linking

ethers-rs, a port of ethers to Rust

Solidity v0.6.10. error codes and bugfix for externally calling a function that returns variables with calldata location.

Inheritance in Solidity v0.6

Sorting without comparison in Solidity

Create dynamic NFTs using oracles

Deploying with libraries on Remix IDE

Wyre’s WalletPasses allow push notifications for dapps

Bunch of neat stuff in here. I’ve said it before, ethers is increasingly the thing that people use, even while most of the eth tutorials are still using web3js.

Code security

OpenZeppelin found a bug that affected 61 Argent wallets

Bancor bug: public method allowed anyone to drain user balances. Amusingly, the white hat draining got frontrun

DeFiSaver exchange vulnerability. They white hat drained it and also got frontrun.

Database of audit reports

Check out this newsletter’s weekly job listings below the general section

A special security section to break up the “stuff for devs” since it was a little big.

The whole “white hat drainers” get frontrun theme was...well, I used the word amusing in the newsletter, but I don’t think that’s quite the right word.

Ecosystem

Reddit announces scaling competition to move Reddit’s community points to mainnet

By default, Geth will no longer accept transaction fees over 1 eth

3box on demystifying the many facets of digital identity

The death (and web3 rebirth?) of privacy

Ethereum Foundation invests in Unicef’s CryptoFund startups

Unicef’s press release didn’t mention the Ethereum Foundation (and barely mentioned Ethereum! strange) but in fact EF did provide the capital. Very strange that Unicef barely mentioned Ethereum.

And yes, I still love a good privacy essay. I’m not a privacy nut, but I do think people should have the right to at least know when our every online action action is being surveiled.

Enterprise

WEF, IADB and Colombian government project to reduce corruption in procurement

EY launches crypto tax reporting app

EY continues to push things for enterprise, and dealing with taxes is presumably just one more hurdle that they’re knocking down. Of course many enterprises also still refuse to own crypto (even on a centralized exchange), so I remain curious as to whether

the anti-corruption procurement project in Colombia suffers a similar problem: to be actually used, the Colombian government requires secret bids. So they either have to change the law to try it, or they have to integrate...something like EY’s Nightfall

DAOs and Standards

EIP2733: Transaction package

Anonymous voting using MACI and BrightID

Arguably the anonymous voting using MACI could’ve been in the crypto section, but it felt slightly more applicable here.

Application layer

$COMP was distributed and liquidity mining (“yield farming”) blew up. Compound passed Maker for #1 on DeFiPulse, and $COMP has had a fully diluted market cap over $3.5 billion

Uniswap v2 passes v1 in liquidity

Streamr’s data unions framework is live for anyone to create their own

5m KNC burned milestone

Yield farming on steroids from Synthetix, Ren, and Curve

A yield farming for normies (and the risks!) tweetstorms from Tony Sheng

this artwork is always on sale, v2 with 100% per year tax instead of 5%

My weekly what fraction of applayer section is DeFi: 5/7.

I was somewhat surprised Uniswap v2 took over this quickly. I suppose that’s a data point for “the power of frontends.”

Tokens/Business/Regulation

ETH disrupting SWIFT: why fintech VCs are missing DeFi

Nick Tomaino on the economics of Eth2

Personal token vote on Alex Masmej’s life decisons

Liechtenstein company tokenizes 1.1m USD collectable Ferrari

Opyn: hedging with calls

It does seem like the economics of Eth2 are still vastly underrated by “crypto” at large. In my view that largely reflects the skepticism that Eth2 ever launches, as Silicon Valley went very skeptical on ETH 2 years ago when they pivoted away from FFG.

New tokens from protocols valued in the billions and tokenized Ferraris. It’s starting to feel like the true beginnings of a bull market.

No general section this week; I was surprised as you, but lately the general section had been dominated by cryptography and that got its own section.

That’s it for the annotations!

Please RT this on Twitter if you enjoyed it:

https://twitter.com/evan_van_ness/status/1275551414350237702

Job Listings

Synthetix: Deep Solidity engineer, 2+ years exp & US/EU friendly timezone

Chainlink: Product Manager for Blockchain Integrations and Lead Test Engineer

0x is hiring full-stack, back-end, front-end engineers + 1 data scientist

Celer Network: Android developer

Trail of Bits is looking for masters of low-level security. Apply here.

Want your job listing here? $250 per line (~75 character limit including spaces), payable in ETH/DAI/USDC to evan.ethereum.eth. Questions? thecryptonewspodcast -at-gmail

Housekeeping

Follow me on Twitter @evan_van_ness to get the annotated edition of this newsletter on Monday or Tuesday. Plus I tweet most of what makes it into the newsletter.

Did you get forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it weekly

Permalink: https://weekinethereumnews.com/week-in-ethereum-news-june-21-2020/

Dates of Note

Upcoming dates of note (new/changes in bold):

June 24 – EIP1559 call

June 25 – Eth2 call

June 26 – Core devs call

June 29 – Swarm first public event

July 3 – Gitcoin matching grants ends (here’s my grant)

July 6-Aug 6 – HackFS Filecoin/IPFS and Ethereum hackathon

July 20 – Fork the World MetaCartel hackathon

Aug 2 – ENS grace period begins to end

Oct 2-Oct 30 – EthOnline hackathon

0 notes

bowsetter · 6 years ago

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The Daily: Twitch Gamer Tipped $70K in Crypto, Hacker Returns $100K of ETC

In this edition of The Daily, a video gamer streaming on Twitch has received crypto donations totaling over $70,000 and a hacker believed to be behind the 51 percent attack on the Ethereum Classic blockchain has reportedly returned $100,000 in ETC coins. Also, Electrum developers have issued another series of warnings about phishing attempts using the name of the popular cryptocurrency wallet.

Also read: NYC to Launch Blockchain Center, Wyoming Advances Industry-Friendly Bills

Gamer Gets $70,000 in BTC Donations

A video gamer going by the nickname “Sick_Nerd” has been tipped more than $70,000 in cryptocurrency while streaming a game of Runescape on Twitch. Most of the money was donated in several separate transfers of BTC by another user with the handle “lightpuma.”

The game played in front of a couple of thousand viewers is a version of Runescape, which is the most popular edition of the “massively multiplayer online roleplaying games” genre. It has been estimated that Runescape has over 250 million players.

On Friday, Sick_Nerd got a total of 46 crypto donations amounting to around 20 BTC worth around $73,000, at the time of writing. Other Twitch users have recorded the stream and the gamer’s reactions. Later Sick_Nerd went to Twitter to thank his mysterious benefactor.

Thank you to my mysteriously benefactor whoever you are, genuinely a life changing amount of money that I or nobody deserves but look what happened. Crazy

— Sick Nerd (@Sick_Nerd) January 11, 2019

Last year, the popular video game streaming app Twitch enabled its users to tip each other with a number of major cryptocurrencies including bitcoin core (BTC), bitcoin cash (BCH), ethereum (ETH), and litecoin (LTC). The feature was integrated with the help of a company called Streamlabs and the tips are sent through the users’ Coinbase accounts.

Exchange Receives Back $100,000 Stolen in 51% Attack

The hacker, or group of hackers, believed to be responsible for the 51 percent attack against the Ethereum Classic blockchain has reportedly returned $100,000 worth of ETC coins to the cryptocurrency exchange Gate.io, the trading platform announced in a blog post. The company said it’s trying to contact the attacker but hasn’t received any reply yet. The exchange commented:

We still don’t know the reason. If the attacker didn’t run it for profit, he might be a white hacker who wanted to remind people the risks in blockchain consensus and hashing power security.

Gate.io conducted its own analysis and concluded that the hashing power of the ETC network is still not strong enough. That means another 51 percent attack is still possible if enough hashing power is rented to launch it.

The exchange said it raised the number of ETC confirmations to 4,000 before accepting deposits and introduced measures to detect a new attack. The company urged other digital asset trading platforms supporting ethereum classic to also take steps to protect their users from blockchain reorg or rollback.

Electrum Warns About New Phishing Attempts

Following an announcement about a phishing attack in December, Electrum developers have now raised the alarm about numerous other projects attempting to clone the popular wallet. On Jan. 10, they issued a warning on Twitter stating that “there is an ongoing phishing attack against Electrum users, where rogue servers ask users to install bitcoin-stealing malware. We released version 3.3.2, which mitigates the attack.”

One of the attacks is being conducted through a fake Electrum wallet for stellar (XLM). The platform issued an alert noting that the electrum-xlm [dot] info is a Bitcoin-stealing malware. It tweeted: “There is no way to easily port wallet software from Bitcoin to Stellar, because these are completely different projects. Please do not download altcoin variants of Electrum, unless you really know what you are doing.”

When you download Electrum for any cryptocurrency that is not Bitcoin, you are downloading software that is not endorsed by us, and you are likely to download malware aimed at your bitcoin wallet. Do not expect integrity from people who promote sh*tcoins.

— Electrum (@ElectrumWallet) January 3, 2019

The Electrum dev team also warned they have nothing to do with a project called Electrum Dark: “They are using our name without our permission. Please be very careful with altcoin versions of Electrum, as they are sometimes used as a vector to install malware that targets your real Bitcoin wallet.”

The previous phishing attack was conducted through malicious servers, which when asked to broadcast a transaction through a legitimate Electrum wallet, replied with an error message directing users to download a fake ‘security update’ from an unauthorized Github repository. The unknown hackers reportedly managed to steal over 200 BTC.

What are your thoughts on today’s news tidbits? Tell us in the comments section.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Livestreamfails, Sick_Nerd (Twitter), Electrum.

Make sure you do not miss any important Bitcoin-related news! Follow our news feed any which way you prefer; via Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, RSS or email (scroll down to the bottom of this page to subscribe). We’ve got daily, weekly and quarterly summaries in newsletter form. Bitcoin never sleeps. Neither do we.

The post The Daily: Twitch Gamer Tipped $70K in Crypto, Hacker Returns $100K of ETC appeared first on Bitcoin News.

READ MORE http://bit.ly/2VMyV5D

#cryptocurrency #cryptocurrency news #bitcoin #cryptocurrency market #crypto #blockchain #best cryptocurren

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preciousmetals0 · 6 years ago

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Tesla Stock Price Insanity; Biotech Buyout Madness

Tesla Stock Price Insanity; Biotech Buyout Madness:

Are You Ready to Make A Deal?

We’re staring down the barrel of what could prove to be the most eventful week of the year … and the market is holding its breath. (But don’t hold yours. Seriously, it’s a week. You can’t hold your breath for an entire week!)

What’s so important this week? Central banks and trade war deals, that’s what.

Tomorrow, the U.S. Federal Reserve will begin its two-day policy meeting and decide the near-term fate of U.S. interest rates and monetary policy. After last week’s stellar November jobs report, no one expects any action from the Fed. However, all of Wall Street will look at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s speech for indications of the U.S. economy’s strength.

Expect Powell to indicate a holding pattern for interest rates for the foreseeable future.

Next, we have a policy meeting at the European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday. New ECB President Christine Lagarde is expected to offer more details on the EU’s outlook, which could be key, as many reports indicate the region is slipping into recession.

The ECB is also not expected to make any big changes this week. But, as with Powell, markets will closely scrutinize Lagarde’s language for insights on the bank’s policy outlook.

Finally, we have the much-anticipated phase 1 trade deal between the U.S. and China. Last week, the infamous “people familiar with the talks” indicated that a deal would be reached before the U.S. implements its next round of tariffs on Chinese goods. Those tariffs are scheduled to go into effect on December 15 — i.e., this Sunday.

The Takeaway:

OK, so it doesn’t sound all that exciting when I write it out for you. Two central bank reports (where the market isn’t looking for anything at all) and a U.S.-China phase 1 trade deal.

To be honest, the Fed and the ECB only matter if they actually say anything meaningful. Which likely won’t happen.

The trade deal, however, is a big deal. We’ve only been talking about it for the past year … of course it’s a big deal.

Checking in with the Great Stuff Trade War Cycle chart, we find that we are in the “market rallies temporarily on news” phase. This news was last week’s promise that a trade deal would be reached before December 15.

The post-news rally has faded now. The market is essentially flat today as traders wait for more information.

But I have a warning for you that you might not want to hear. You need to be prepared for President Trump to flat-out walk away from a deal this week.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer made an excellent case for this scenario this morning. According to Cramer, investors want to believe in a trade deal because it’s “rational.” It’s good for both sides, so why not do a deal?

Because China has pressed the U.S. for a deal in the media for the past week. Trump is now being publicly pushed and provoked by media coverage of China calling for tariff rollbacks, notes Cramer. This weekend, the country doubled down on the pressure, ordering all state offices to remove foreign computers and software in the next three years.

We all remember what happened the last time Trump was cornered on tariffs by China and the media. He walked away, saying he hadn’t approved any tariff rollbacks.

Trump and the U.S. weren’t dictating the narrative in the past week. And that has to be eating at the U.S. president.

This week, I predict no trade deal … and increased tariffs on $156 billion in remaining Chinese exports. That means a rotation into a market sell-off, according to the Great Stuff Trade War chart. I’ll be happy if I’m wrong, but the situation is what it is.

Good: Tesla to $4,000!

Ridiculous Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA) projections have become a “thing” in the past week. On Friday, Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas issued a “bull case” target of $500 for TSLA — with a “base case” target of $250 and a “bear case” target of $10. Yes, $10.

But if you thought Jonas’ bull case was over the top, you haven’t seen Catherine Wood’s projections. The Ark Investment Management CEO said that her “bear case” scenario for Tesla was doubling by 2024 — a roughly $700 price target.

In this bear case, Wood says she accounts for Tesla’s market share diving to 6%.

But her “bull case” scenario was a rally to $4,000 per share. In this scenario, Wood sees Tesla holding about 17% market share in the global electric vehicle market.

Now, I’m a bit of a Tesla bull, but $4,000 per share sounds ludicrous … just as ludicrous as Morgan Stanley’s bear projection of $10 per share.

Luckily for us regular bulls, the market largely ignores these extreme bullish and bearish outliers. The last thing Tesla needs right now is more hype.

Better: Running Through the Fire

It looks like PG&E Corp. (NYSE: PCG) might finally be putting the 2017 to 2018 California wildfires behind it.

The company announced today that it has reached a $13.5 billion deal with the victims of those deadly fires, clearing one of the final hurdles for emerging from bankruptcy court. PG&E initially set costs associated with the wildfires at $30 billion.

But, after reaching agreements of $11 billion with insurance claim holders, $1 billion with local governments and $13.5 billion with victims, that total is about $5 billion less than expected.

That said, PG&E isn’t out of the woods yet. The $11 billion settlement with insurance claim holders still needs a judge’s approval.

But that hasn’t dampened investor enthusiasm. PCG shares are up roughly 17% on today’s settlement news.

Best: This Is Biotech!

Last week, I told you about the red-hot biotechnology market and how buyouts and clinical trials were providing a massive boost to the sector. I hope you listened.

Today, we have no fewer than three separate biotech stocks rallying in the triple digits!

Billion-dollar deals are flying all over the biotech sector. So, why are you still holding out?

If you’re unsure of where to start, I’ve got the perfect guy to help you out!

Banyan Hill expert Jeff Yastine has the details on a $450 million biotech company that’s set to soar. And if you act quickly, you can get in on the ground floor … before the Big Pharma firms take notice and snap up this biotech darling.

Click here now for all the details!

Today’s Chart of the Week could also double as an entry for Great Stuff’s Comic Corner. What follows is the actual “Tesla Risk Reward Framework” chart that Morgan Stanley sent out to clients … I kid you not:

Now, I’m not familiar with the “snake and flashlight” technical pattern, but it’s apparently commonplace at Morgan Stanley. Remember, people actually pay for this advice. And here I am giving away better stuff … nay, Great Stuff! … free.

I showed this chart to my cat Kylo, and he was not impressed. He’s more into the laser-pointer indicator lately. He’s also really into catnip legalization. (Shhhhh! Don’t tell him it’s already legal — I’ll never hear the end of it!)

Great Stuff: A Guide to Groan-Worthy Gifts

Anyone spend the weekend roaming the post-Black Friday retail wasteland?

Hah, slackers. I got my Christmas shopping done last month … at least according to my bank statements.

Surprise: It’s Disney+ subscriptions for everybody this year! I was going to spring for Teslas, but baby Yoda sealed the deal. How can you say no to that face?

If you’re still checking names off your gift list, you may be interested in what Banyan Hill’s resident pot stock guru, Anthony Planas, chose to do for his loved ones.

Instead of yet another gift card (but then you can buy what you actually want!), Anthony decided to share the gift of keen investing.

Mooooom! Uncle Anthony’s smoking again — he gave us “stocks” for Christmas!

At the risk of becoming that uncle, Anthony shares the heartwarming story of why he gave his baby niece a dream fund of her own — a custodial investment account to jump-start her dreams, goals and ambitions.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and you can read all about it here: “Skip the Mall: The Most Valuable Gift for Any Child.”

Because nothing says Christmas morning like dividend yields. Though, if Anthony’s niece saves up for the next two decades, she might almost have enough to buy Great Stuff’s No. 1 bad gift: a Peloton bike with matching picture windows.

Finally, what holiday gift list would be complete without Anthony’s latest pot market analysis. Watch the video below:

[embedded content]

Finally (finally), don’t forget to like and follow Great Stuff on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

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goldira01 · 6 years ago