Liberty Reserve Barclays aiding money-laundering probe

One of the accounts belonging to seized digital money service Liberty Reserve was held by UK bank Barclays in Spain.

Liberty Reserve also had 17 bank accounts in Cyprus, papers filed by the US Department of Justice show.

The BBC understands that the bank is not accused of any wrongdoing by the authorities.

US authorities have accused Liberty Reserve of laundering more than $6bn (£4bn) in criminal cash.

"Barclays can confirm it is co-operating with the investigation, following the notification it received from the authorities," a spokesman for the bank said on Sunday.

The Barclays account was in the name of Liberty Reserve founder Arthur Budovsky, the court documents said. Mr Budovsky opened the Spanish personal account in 2009, the BBC has learned.

The DOJ has called Liberty Reserve the "largest international money-laundering prosecution in history", alleging that seven people involved in running the operation set up the digital cash service as a "criminal business venture" designed specifically to "help criminals conduct illegal transactions and launder the proceeds of their crimes".

'Transform'
Barclays' current chief executive, Antony Jenkins, has pledged to clean up the bank's image under his "Transform" programme.

Last June the bank was fined £290m by British and US regulators for attempted manipulation of Libor and Euribor interbank rates between 2005 and 2009.

The scandal led to the resignations of three Barclays senior board members, including the chief executive Bob Diamond. He was replaced by Mr Jenkins, who had been head of retail and business banking.

The tiny island of Cyprus was bailed out earlier this year, securing a loan package worth 10bn euros (£8.4bn; $13bn) from its EU partners and the International Monetary Fund.

In return, it must raise 13bn euros, largely through banking reform.

The tough conditions were imposed on the island due to the size of its bloated banking sector. Many eurozone members believed that Cyprus had become a haven for tax evasion and money laundering.

In total, the DOJ said that 45 bank accounts used by Liberty Reserve have been seized and action has been taken to take over the assets of 35 other sites that fed funds to Liberty Reserve for laundering.

Windows 8 vies with Vista, but Windows 7 gains

Oops, Windows 7 gains in May, though Windows 8 makes headway against Vista.

Pop open the champagne. Windows 8 may be on the verge of claiming installation share victory over Vista.
The latest figures from Net Applications show Windows 8 with a 4.27 percent share of PCs installed worldwide in May (up from 3.84 percent in April) versus 4.51 percent for Vista.
Vista, one of Microsoft's least popular OSes, was introduced in November of 2006.
Then again, maybe we're breaking out the champagne too soon. Windows 7 still leads by a long shot at 44.85 percent and it actually made gains in May, up from 44.72 percent in April.
And Vista was up in Steam's rankings to 7.25 percent in May from 7.06 percent in April.
Windows XP installations were down in May to 37.74 percent from 38.31 percent in April.

New advice from Google is useful if you're new to passwords, but lacks the spine to make much difference.

Google admonished its users to be more careful with passwords in a blog post on Thursday, but two security experts say that tech giant should spend more time pressuring developers and companies to do more to help their customers.

Google's tips encompass password basics: use a different password for each important service; make your password hard to guess; keep your password somewhere safe; and set a recovery option.
"For the general consumer, I think it's a fantastic start," said Alex Salazar, CEO of Stormpath, an authentication service for developers. But, he said, "everything they said here isn't news to people who understand security."
Mary Landesman, a Cisco senior security researcher with expertise in passwords, agreed. "I applaud them for trying to spread awareness. I think it was a little simplistic," she added. "One of the biggest issues that users face isn't necessarily how strong their password is, but the number of sites that are getting compromised."
On the end user side, Landesman said that Google could've advised people to choose passwords with spaces whenever possible, as explained in a famous XKCD webcomic. The problem there, she and Salazar agreed, is that not enough sites let you do that.
"Here at Cisco we came across a group of passwords in the recent WordPress brute force attempts, and a large number of them you could call reasonable and very strong," she said. "But if you're re-using that password, it doesn't matter how strong it is."
Salazar explained the problem further by explaining that when you use the same password on a well-known, highly-secure site as a smaller site with weaker security, all it takes to get your password to password to the more important site is to hack the smaller one.
"I think that consumers should be more aware about the applications they're putting their data into," he said. "This is the strongest reason why you should be using different passwords for different systems."
But they both had tough words for Google, too. In addition to educating individuals about how to choose better passwords and how to better protect them, Landesman said that Google ought to pressure developers and companies to improve their own security practices.
"I think I would've liked to have seen a call for action to the industry to do more to make it possible for users to be safe," she said.
Salazar outlined three steps that Google didn't take that it could still choose to do. First, he said, Google could pressure companies to implement systems that force people to choose passwords that are easy to remember but hard to break.
"The companies and the websites that are specifying the passwords have to enable users to do the right thing," said Landesman. "You want your password to be 12 to 14 characters, but not all sites allow that."
From the company perspective, the problem there is the engineering cost: getting existing companies to change their source code, run quality assurance tests, and deploy the code.
The second suggestion Salazar had was that Google could be a much stronger advocate for two-factor authentication, which it offers as an option for its Google accounts. "I think it would've been very valuable for them to promote their 2FA on this post," he said. "You're not seeing as wide adoption for it as there could be."
A third action that Google could take would be to publish guidelines for developers, Salazar said. Google should be "talking about why it's important to not put your own customers at risk," he said.
"We hear a lot of users are stupid and it's their fault, but users aren't stupid and it's not their fault," Landesman said. "[Password security] is tilted against the user."

Woz: Apple's tax practices are stinky

At a conference in Northern Ireland, the Apple co-founder says that public criticism of Apple's Irish financial arrangements is 
"extremely warranted."

Steve Wozniak thinks like Mitt Romney.
Well, a little. It's not that he quite believes corporations are people too. It's more that he thinks corporations should be taxed like people too.
Corporations like Apple, for example.
At a conference in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Woz told Sky News on Thursday: "Criticism of Apple's tax policies is extremely warranted, in my mind, but my explanation is rather long and difficult."
It's a pity he wasn't asked to testify before the Senate last week. Its members seemed to have all day to listen to Tim Cook.
Still, as the Telegraph reports, Woz insisted that, quite simply, corporations should be taxed on what they earn, just like real human beings.
Woz spoke of lawyers he knows who work in California, but pretend to live in Nevada to minimize their tax exposure (and, perhaps, to maximize their time with Mila, the Vegas lap dancer).
He explained that he feared corporations -- Apple included, by implication -- simply have no scruples: "For a corporation, there's no such thing as personal ethics. It's like you will do anything, any scheme you can, to maximize your profits."
Woz passionately believes that Apple's original ethos and intention was to help the little people succeed against the bigger people.

Yet time has woven a difficult tapestry. Apple has become one of the bigger people.
If corporations were taxed like ordinary people, he said, that would mean they would "pay taxes on all of their revenues or people only pay it on a tiny amount called profit and until we rectify that, the whole problem is just with us forever."
You cannot help but admire his simple logic. If ordinary working people deducted their essential life expenses (cars, Louboutins, medical marijuana) before paying tax, they would have more disposable income.
"Why do businessmen get to write off lunches and cars? If normal people did they would have more savings," he said.
But then life would be fair and it's not supposed to be. If it was, what would we have to complain about?
Woz often seems to speak with a willful idealism, yet what makes his version often different is that his idealism makes a wholesome amount of sense.
Perhaps President Obama might co-opt Apple's co-founder into his policy-making fold. I have a feeling Woz would be rather popular. Among ordinary people, that is.
Wouldn't you like to see Woz grill a bank chairman? I would.