Financial services giant Intuit this week informed 1.4 million small businesses using its QuickBooks Online Payroll and Intuit Online Payroll products that their payroll information will be shared with big-three consumer credit bureau Equifax starting later this year unless customers opt out by the end of this month. Krebs On Security reports: Intuit says the change is tied to an "exciting" and "free" new service that will let millions of small business employees get easy access to employment and income verification services when they wish to apply for a loan or line of credit. "In early fall 2021, your QuickBooks Online Payroll subscription will include an automated income and employment verification service powered by The Work Number from Equifax," reads the Intuit email, which includes a link to the new Terms of Service. "Your employees may need to verify their income and employment info when applying for things like loans, credit, or public aid. Before, you likely had to manually provide this info to lenders, creditors or government agencies. These verifications will be automated by The Work Number, which helps employees get faster approvals and saves you time." An Intuit spokesperson clarified that the new service is not available through QuickBooks Online or to QuickBooks Online users as a whole. Intuit's FAQ on the changes is here. "The way I read the terms, Equifax gets to proactively collect all payroll data just in case they need to share it later -- similar to how they already handle credit reporting," said Citrano, who is founder and CEO of Acquicent, a company that issues non-fungible tokens (NFTs). "And that feels like a disaster waiting to happen, especially given Equifax's history." In selling payroll data to Equifax, Intuit will be joining some of the world's largest payroll providers. For example, ADP -- the largest payroll software provider in the United States -- has long shared payroll data with Equifax. But Citrano said this move by Intuit will incorporate a large number of fairly small businesses. "ADP participates in some way already, but QuickBooks Online jumping on the bandwagon means a lot of employees of small to mid-sized businesses are going to be affected," he said. Why might small businesses want to think twice before entrusting Equifax with their payroll data? The answer is the company doesn't have a great track record of protecting that information. In 2017, Equifax had a massive data breach that exposed the personal and financial details of 145.5 million Americans. If customers do not want this new service, they must update their preferences and opt-out by July 31, 2021. Otherwise, they'll be automatically opted in. You can opt out by signing in to QuickBooks Online Payroll, navigating to Payroll Settings, selecting the pencil and unchecking the box in the Shared data section, and saving your changes.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from PC Gamer: An oversight in accounts used to test Microsoft's payment systems let one engineer swindle his way into over $10 million after selling Xbox Gift Cards for Bitcoin over two years, a new report from Bloomberg revealed this week. In order to make sure its payment systems work, Microsoft employs engineers to "simulate" purchases on its stores. But soon after joining the company in 2017, Volodymyr Kvashuk discovered that there was a flaw in the accounts used to test purchases. See, these simulated accounts are usually flagged as such by the system, and won't send you physical goods if you tried to buy, say, a new gamepad from its site. But if you tested a purchase of Xbox Gift Cards, you'd still receive a completely valid 25-digit code. Kvashuk could've easily reported this to his bosses. But with unlimited free codes at his fingertips, he chose a different option instead. At first, Kvashuk generated himself a handful of codes -- a cheeky $5 or $10 here or there. But there was the opportunity to make massive, life-changing sums of money off this exploit. He began cycling through mock profiles belonging to his colleagues to hide his tracks, automating the process with a bespoke piece of software prosecutors would later describe as "created for one purpose, and one purpose only: to automate embezzlement and allow fraud and theft on a massive scale." After acquiring these codes, Kvashuk would head to crypto marketplaces like Paxful to find prospective sellers. He'd sell them in bulk at a relative discount, which buyers would then go on to sell to folks who wanted to use the codes. Money laundering sites like ChipMixer would let him hide his trail, and the proceeds went towards facilitating an increasingly lavish lifestyle. [...] Microsoft was eventually clued in to Kvashuk's antics after noticing a sharp spike in gift card transactions, with federal agents eventually raiding his home in July 2019. In court, Kvashuk tried to argue that the mass theft was simply an experiment to increase store spending. Obviously, it didn't fly. Kvashuk was sentenced to 9 years in prison, likely deported back to his home country of Ukraine, and will be charged restitution of $8.3 million.

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday voted to expand the regulatory agency's enforcement powers, a signal of Democratic commissioners' willingness to crack down on alleged anti-competitive behavior. From a report: The Democratic-controlled commission voted 3-2 along party lines to repeal a 2015 policy statement that blocked the regulatory agency from challenging "unfair methods of competition" that don't violate existing antitrust laws. The update comes at a time when federal and state regulators are sinking their teeth into investigations of the market power of tech giants. "In practice, the 2015 statement has doubled down on the agency's long standing failure to investigate and pursue unfair methods of competition," Chair Lina Khan said at the meeting, the first under her charge.

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Amazon.com has held talks with several business-application makers about forming a "Rebel Alliance" to challenge Microsoft's commanding position in workplace productivity tools, according to a report. Bloomberg: The idea would have Amazon Web Services partner with the companies to offer a bundle of business applications sold for a single price, Insider reported, citing anonymous people familiar with the plan. Amazon has held talks with Dropbox, Salesforce's Slack, and Smartsheet, among others, Insider said. The publication reported that discussions on the alliance stretch back more than a year, though it's unclear whether they continue.

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The highly contagious Delta variant is on the rise, and countries that hoped they had seen the worst of Covid-19 are being battered again. From a report: The nightmare is returning. In Indonesia, grave diggers are working into the night, as oxygen and vaccines are in short supply. In Europe, countries are slamming their doors shut once again, with quarantines and travel bans. In Bangladesh, urban garment workers fleeing an impending lockdown are almost assuredly seeding another coronavirus surge in their impoverished home villages. And in countries like South Korea and Israel that seemed to have largely vanquished the virus, new clusters of disease have proliferated. Chinese health officials announced on Monday that they would build a giant quarantine center with up to 5,000 rooms to hold international travelers. Australia has ordered millions to stay at home. A year and a half since it began racing across the globe with exponential efficiency, the pandemic is on the rise again in vast stretches of the world, driven largely by the new variants, particularly the highly contagious Delta variant first identified in India. From Africa to Asia, countries are suffering from record Covid-19 caseloads and deaths, even as wealthier nations with high vaccination rates have let their guard down, dispensing with mask mandates and reveling in life edging back toward normalcy. Scientists believe the Delta variant may be twice as transmissible as the original coronavirus, and its potential to infect some partially vaccinated people has alarmed public health officials.

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Robinhood, the stock trading app that was subject to a record fine Wednesday, announced it intends to go public Thursday. From a report: In its filing documents, the company admits that many of its customers are furious about how it handled January's GameStop stock bonanza and that it is currently subject of at least 49 class action lawsuits related to trading restrictions it placed on the stock in January. The company also said it is under investigation by a series of regulators, state attorneys general, the SEC, and the U.S. Department of Justice in proceedings associated with the trading restrictions; the company said its CEO Vladimir Tenev has also had his cell phone seized by federal attorneys. In January, Robinhood restricted the purchase of GameStop, AMC, and other "meme" stocks because the app literally did not have enough money to comply with regulations that require a certain amount of liquidity from companies that allow for stock trading. This restriction correlated with a days-long dive in the stock prices of GameStop, which skyrocketed in January and February and led to widespread calls from lawmakers, traders, and Redditors on the WallStreetBets subreddit to investigate Robinhood. Those investigations are ongoing, according to Robinhood's S-1 filing with the SEC. In its filing, Robinhood states that the fallout from these restrictions still have the potential to be disastrous for the company. âoeWe have become aware of approximately 50 putative class actions ... relating to the Early 2021 Trading Restrictions."

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The historic journey will see her become the oldest person to ever fly to space.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two weeks ago, World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee sent an NFT of the web's original source code to the auction block with a starting bid of just $1,000. Yesterday, Sotheby's announced that the crypto asset sold for $5.4 million. The sum makes Berners-Lee's work one of the priciest NFTs of all time. The digital package included not just the source code but also a letter from Berners-Lee reflecting on the creation of the web, some original HTML documents, an SVG "poster" of thousands of lines of code, and a 30-minute visualization of the code being typed on a screen. But there's a twist. An eagle-eyed researcher pointed out on Twitter that the animation initially posted on the Sotheby's site had errors in the code, possibly introduced when the person making the video fed the Objective-C code through an app or web service to produce the typing effect in the animation. Instead of angle brackets that are present in the code (), the HTML codes for the symbols ( & lt; and & gt;) appeared instead. On the poster, which was made by a Python script created by Berners-Lee, the brackets appear correct. Presumably, they are also correct in the code itself. The code was corrected in later animations, raising questions about this particular NFT and NFTs as a whole.

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President Vladimir Putin has signed a law that obliges foreign social media giants to open offices in Russia, a document published by the government on Thursday showed, the latest move by Moscow to exert greater control over Big Tech. From a report: The Russian authorities are keen to strengthen their control of the internet and to reduce their dependence on foreign companies and countries. In particular, they have objected in the past to political opponents of the Kremlin using foreign social media platforms to organise what they say are illegal protests and to publicise politically-tinged investigations into alleged corruption. Moscow has fined firms for failing to delete content it says is illegal, slowing down the speed of Twitter as punishment, and on Wednesday opened a new case against Alphabet subsidiary Google for breaching personal data legislation.

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Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced Thursday that a group of 130 nations has agreed to a global minimum tax on corporations. From a report: If widely enacted, the GMT would effectively end the practice of global corporations seeking out low-tax jurisdictions like Ireland and the British Virgin Islands to move their headquarters to, even though their customers, operations and executives are located elsewhere. "For decades, the United States has participated in a self-defeating international tax competition, lowering our corporate tax rates only to watch other nations lower theirs in response. The result was a global race to the bottom: Who could lower their corporate rate further and faster? No nation has won this race," said Yellen in a statement on the accord. "Today's agreement by 130 countries representing more than 90 percent of global GDP is a clear sign: the race to the bottom is one step closer to coming to an end," said Yellen. "In its place, America will enter a competition that we can win; one judged on the skill of our workers and the strength of our infrastructure."

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Peeve: Someone I'm collaborating with says they'll read my email later because they're busy now. Then they say what they're doing. The point of using asynchronous tools is you don't have to care what I'm doing now, and I don't have to stop everything to do something for you.

The monarch was visiting the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute during her visit to Scotland.

Primary care company One Medical has apologized after it sent out an email that exposed hundreds of customers' email addresses. From a report: The email sent out by One Medical on Wednesday asked to "verify your email," but one email seen by TechCrunch had more than 980 email addresses copied on the email. The cause: One Medical did not use the blind carbon copy (bcc:) field to mass email its customers, which would have hidden their email addresses from each other. Several customers took to Twitter to complain, but also express sympathy for what was quickly chalked up to an obvious mistake. Some users reported varying numbers of email addresses on the email that they received.

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Follow-up on yesterday's braintrust query. Using a regular expression, I find a t.co link in a tweet, and replace it with something smaller and less distracting. Remember this is a writing environment, so the result must be as simple as possible for readers.

A "last ice area" is crucial for the survival of polar bears but is suffering from climate change.