Tag: crime

Electrical frequency analysis

a forensic technique for validating audio recordings by comparing frequency changes in background mains hum in the recording with long-term high-precision historical records of mains frequency changes from a database. In effect the mains hum signal is treated as if it was a time-dependent digital watermark that can be used to identify the time at which the recording was created, and to help detect any edits in the sound recording.

Destroy police unions

The corruption and incompetence of the NYPD is staggering.

2 years ago, a police officer in a Brooklyn precinct became gravely concerned about how the public was being served. To document his concerns, he began carrying around a digital sound recorder, secretly recording his colleagues and superiors. He recorded precinct roll calls. He recorded his precinct commander and other supervisors. He recorded street encounters. He recorded small talk and stationhouse banter. In all, he surreptitiously collected 100s of hours of cops talking about their jobs. Made without the knowledge or approval of the NYPD, the tapes—made between June 1, 2008, and October 31, 2009, in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant provide an unprecedented portrait of what it’s like to work as a cop in this city. They reveal that precinct bosses threaten street cops if they don’t make their quotas of arrests and stop-and-frisks, but also tell them not to take certain robbery reports in order to manipulate crime statistics. The tapes also refer to command officers calling crime victims directly to intimidate them about their complaints.

2014-10-25: NYPD still as corrupt as ever, unsurprisingly, by the canonical expert Frank Serpico.

40 years on, my story probably seems like ancient history to most people, layered over with Hollywood legend. For me it’s not, since at the age of 78 I’m still deaf in one ear and I walk with a limp and I carry fragments of the bullet near my brain. I am also, all these years later, still persona non grata in the NYPD. Never mind that, thanks to Sidney Lumet’s direction and Al Pacino’s brilliant acting, “Serpico” ranks No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of all-time movie heroes, or that as I travel around the country and the world, police officers often tell me they were inspired to join the force after seeing the movie at an early age. In the NYPD that means little next to my 40-year-old heresy, as they see it. I still get hate mail from active and retired police officers.

2015-06-09: I don’t agree with all the proposals, but yes to killing police unions.

History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police: Ending cash bail, Overturning police bills of rights, Abolishing police unions, Crowding out the police in our communities, Disarming the police.

2014-12-22: So awkward for De Blasio to crush a union that is out of control

He is not running the city of New York. He thinks he’s running a fucking revolution

2014-12-24: Collective bargaining for government jobs is absurd, and needs to be eradicated.

If police officers were at-will employees (as I’ve been at every job I’ve ever held), none of the cops mentioned above would now be walking the streets with badges and loaded guns. Perhaps one or 2 of them deserved to be exonerated, despite how bad their cases look. Does the benefit of being scrupulously fair to those individuals justify the cost of having more abusive cops on the street?

I’d rather see 10 wrongful terminations than one person wrongfully shot and killed. Because good police officers and bad police officers pay the same union dues and are equally entitled to labor representation, police unions have pushed for arbitration procedures that skew in the opposite direction.

2015-12-04: Police unions are the worst and the ones most in need of being destroyed.

The Chicago police union has filed a motion to allow the department to erase any complaint record of police misconduct that’s older than 4 years. The union is asking for this right just as the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times have filed in court for the right to data on police misconduct complaints going back to 1967 —which the city already agreed to fork over in an earlier consent decree. It will be interesting to see how the city can forge a new early-warning system if it can’t actually track early warnings from years back.

2016-02-07: Yet more reasons:

Contracts between police and city authorities, leaked after hackers breached the website of the country’s biggest law enforcement union, contain guarantees that disciplinary records and complaints made against officers are kept secret or even destroyed.

2016-07-15: There won’t be any progress with police violence until police unions are destroyed.

Let’s take the counterfactual but very similar “In Defense of Military Unions.”

Doesn’t sound like a great idea, does it? The reason is simple: militaries and paramilitary organizations like the police are coercive instruments of state power. Since at least the 1500s, It’s been recognized as fundamentally important to stability that that coercive power remain in the hands of the state. And since the Roman republic, it’s been recognized as critically important to democracy that that power be utterly subordinate to democratic institutions.

This is why the military offers recruits only 2 options: take the terms which are offered or remain a civilian. It’s why the military severely curtails soldiers’ civil rights. Because everything we care about in our society depends on the consensual illusion that political power comes from somewhere other than the barrel of a gun.

Police are less dangerous, but not much less. Police unions create contractual relationships with the state. Those contractual relations have the force of law. And that private law supervenes on democratic attempts to create police accountability, because — in criminal matters — the management of police departments is the very authority to which the police are accountable.

In all other labor organizing, labor and management are negotiating over the usual subjects of contracts: how much is labor paid; what are the conditions of retirement or disability; how many hours are worked, and when. But the primary subject of negotiation between police unions and city governments is policing strategy and citizens’ civil rights.

It is utterly impermissible for governments to negotiate with private parties about civil rights in a way that actually supervenes on public law.

2018-01-24: The reasons to disband these corrupt organizations are mounting.

The city’s police-officers’ union is cracking down on the number of “get out of jail free” courtesy cards distributed to cops to give to family and friends. The rank and file are livid.

2021-10-13: There’s also rampant overtime fraud:

The NYPD has blown past annual budgets every year for at least 20 years, almost entirely due to overtime costs. Those extra hours also drive up the city’s pension obligations. In fiscal 2020, New York City police officers logged more overtime hours than any other big city in the US, and violent crime rates still went up.

HFT

These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.

why is the nyt so hopelessly naive? it is quite embarrassing.

“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet. It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”

shades of the mundane singularity. the goal of these clowns is to create arbitrage opportunities by spamming the system with requests.

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4% of all quote traffic in the US stock market last week.

the reason HFT compete on latency is because they can’t compete on price: the minimal price increment is $0.01 and it is illegal to go lower. thus we waste a lot of people on reducing latencies. we should remove the minimal price increment instead.
2013-06-04: Why is there all this bs with “business days” when you do any bank transactions? Are the computers only working 9-5? Why is it 2013 and we still acquiesce to ridiculous notions like bank transactions that take days instead of seconds? The banksters know how to do it for their HFT buddies but not for the real economy?

Banksters

Maybe we should let banks fail. Clearly they are not any good at this money thing either.

But one man found success by tweaking the formula, prosecutors say: Rather than trying to dupe an account holder into giving up information, he duped the bank. And instead of swindling a person, he tried to rob a country of $27m. The man worked with others to create official-looking documents that instructed Citibank to wire the money in 24 transactions to accounts that he controlled around the world. The money came from a Citibank account in New York held by the National Bank of Ethiopia, that country’s central bank. The conspirators, contacted by Citibank to verify the transactions, posed as Ethiopian bank officials and approved the transfers.

2009-06-29: Banksters take all

If the world’s biggest pop star only made $25m a year in total, something’s very, very wrong. That’s the big problem behind the zombieconomy. We don’t reward people for creating, growing, nurturing, or even remixing assets. We just reward them for allocating the same old assets.

2010-11-23: Worthless Banksters

Why on earth should finance be the biggest and most highly paid industry when it’s just a utility, like sewage or gas?

2014-05-30: Banksters

2015-06-07: Better Bankers, Better Banks

That banking involves constant reminders of money also may weaken “the pull of morality,” perhaps making some bankers more inclined to be unethical. Banker identity itself encourages dishonesty. In an experiment involving employees of a large international bank, the experimenters found evidence that when “their professional identities as bank employees [was] rendered salient to them” (they were asked questions about their professional background in the banking industry), more of them [became] dishonest, cheating in reporting the results of coin tosses so as to increase their monetary payoffs than was the case with people from various other professions — making those other professional identities salient did not increase dishonesty. The experimenters also found that bankers whose banker identity had been made salient to them — and bankers most likely to have cheated — were more apt to agree that social status was “primarily determined by financial success.”

2015-08-15: 4 ka Banksters
Not sure whether I should feel ecstatic how much we knew 4 ka ago, or depressed that we haven’t moved past: banksters are still a thing.

“But during one 30-year period — between 1890 and 1860 BC — for one community in the town of Kanesh, we know a great deal. Through a series of incredibly unlikely events, archaeologists have uncovered the comprehensive written archive of a few 100 traders who left their hometown Assur, in what is now Iraq, to set up importing businesses in Kanesh, which sat at the center of present-day Turkey and functioned as the hub of a massive global trading system that stretched from Central Asia to Europe. Kanesh’s traders sent letters back and forth with their business partners, carefully written on clay tablets and stored at home in special vaults. 10Ks of these records remain. One economist would love to have as much candid information about businesses today as we have about the dealings — and in particular, about the trading practices — of this 4000-year-old community.

“The picture that emerged of economic life is staggeringly advanced. The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation.

“It’s impossible not to see parallels with our own recent past. Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods — silver, tin, textiles — transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable (though there never seems to be agreement on who the wrongdoers are, exactly). The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than 10 years. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again.”

2017-02-12: Bankster gets robbed

It took Navinder Singh Sarao a long time to accept that he might have been scammed out of $50M. Stuck in London’s Wandsworth prison, wracked with anxiety and unable to sleep, the realization dawned on the man dubbed the “Flash Crash Trader” as slowly as spring turned to summer outside the barred window of his jail cell.

The trauma of the past few weeks had been difficult to process. On April 20, 2015, the slight, doe-eyed 36-year-old had dozed off peacefully in the same suburban bedroom he’d slept in since he was a boy. The next day he was arrested and taken to a police station, where he was charged with 22 counts of fraud and market manipulation carrying a maximum sentence of 380 years.

ESPN blood money

If your ISP doesn’t want to pay for you to watch ESPN360, there’s nothing you can do about it, short of switching to a provider that pays for it. While other companies strive for a more direct, one-to-one relationship with consumers, ESPN is doggedly pursuing the same strategy online that made it a success in the TV world: licensing pipes, not people.

this is why bway.net is my ISP. i don’t feel like subsidizing the glandular issues of slobbering morons.

Craigslist Robbery

“I came across the ad that was for a prevailing wage job for $28.50 an hour,” said Mike, who saw a Craigslist ad last week looking for workers for a road maintenance project in Monroe. He said he inquired and was e-mailed back with instructions to meet near the Bank of America in Monroe at 11:00 Tuesday. He also was told to wear certain work clothing. “Yellow vest, safety goggles, a respirator mask… and, if possible, a blue shirt”. Mike showed up along with 10 other men dressed like him, but there was no contractor and no road work to be done. He thought they had been stood up until he heard about the bank robbery and the suspect who wore the same attire.

The crowdsourced heist