An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register:A programming blunder in its reporting software has led to Citigroup being fined $7m. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete "blue sheet" information for a remarkable 15 years -- from May 1999 to April 2014. The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on. That team quickly noticed that some branches' trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn't until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.The glitch resided in new alphanumeric branch codes that the bank had introduced in the mid-1990s. The program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes. The report adds, "But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC."

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An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register:A programming blunder in its reporting software has led to Citigroup being fined $7m. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that error [PDF] resulted in the financial regulator being sent incomplete "blue sheet" information for a remarkable 15 years -- from May 1999 to April 2014. The mistake was discovered by Citigroup itself when it was asked to send a large but precise chunk of trading data to the SEC in April 2014 and asked its technical support team to help identify which internal ID numbers they should run a request on. That team quickly noticed that some branches' trades were not being included in the automated system and alerted those above them. Four days later a patch was in place, but it wasn't until eight months later that the company received a formal report noting that the error had affected SEC reports going back more than a decade. The next month, January 2015, Citigroup fessed up to the SEC.The glitch resided in new alphanumeric branch codes that the bank had introduced in the mid-1990s. The program code filtered out any transactions that were given three-digit branch codes from 089 to 100 and used those prefixes for testing purposes. The report adds, "But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC."

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So many tree species are present in the Amazon basin that it would take 300 years to catalogue them all, scientists say.

So many tree species are present in the Amazon basin that it would take 300 years to catalogue them all, scientists say.

Fighting intensifies across Syria as air strikes hit a market place in Idlib and shells pound Homs.

Fighting intensifies across Syria as air strikes hit a market place in Idlib and shells pound Homs.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Ars Technica: Silicon Valley Business Journal reports that Google and LinkedIn have worked out a deal that will allow the two neighbors to swap a few million square feet of real estate. The deal will help give Google enough room to build its futuristic "canopy" campus. Ars Technica reports: "Google will receive all of LinkedIn's existing Mountain View territory, which consists of LinkedIn's 370,000-square-feet headquarters and almost eight acres of land LinkedIn had planned on turning into office space. LinkedIn will move a few miles across town into four office buildings currently owned by Google that come out to about 750,000 square feet of office space. LinkedIn instantly gets to double its office space while avoiding a costly 'five- to six-year' construction project, and Google gets the space and building rights it needs to build its crazy indoor/outdoor spiderweb canopy utopia. Google owns a huge chunk of land in Mountain View with many office buildings, but the buildings have all been hand-me-downs. In February 2015, Google announced plans to renovate its campus with an ambitious design featuring a large membrane covering configurable activity space. To expand, both LinkedIn and Google needed to compete for Mountain View's 2.2 million square feet of available commercial square footage. The city, fearing it would become an all-Google town, awarded the majority of the construction rights -- 1.4 million square feet -- to LinkedIn, leaving Google with nowhere to build its new headquarters. With the real estate swap, those construction rights go to Google, so the company now has all the space it asked for." Last month, Microsoft announced plans to acquired LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.

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