Senior Correspondent Arnold Woodworth has yet more articles for you

I stopped checking email for a week, and now I realize I've been using it wrong for years

http://www.businessinsider.com/email-is-broken-2015-2



6 signs the selfie craze has gone too far

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/6-signs-the-selfie-craze-has-gone-too-far-2015-02-20



Firms are getting 20-somethings into stocks by making trading apps look like video games

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-from-grand-theft-auto-to-wall-street-trading-apps-woo-gamers-2015-2



blogs aren’t dying, but they are significantly declining. 2015 might be a rough year.

If you want traffic, Google’s arc makes clear to publishers, you’re going to have to pay for it.

content publishers are moving toward social and viral traffic, because they can no longer count on search to work for them. It’s this addiction to social that makes the web dumber. If you want tonnage, lower your standards.

Everyone’s spending increasingly more consumption time dicking around in apps and snacking on bite-sized social content instead of browsing websites and searching Google.

Publishers are relying more on social traffic not because Google’s squeezing them out, but because that’s where everyone went.

http://www.marco.org/2015/02/16/google-and-blogs-shit



Bitcoin will be bigger than the internet says Star Silicon Valley entrepreneur

every time we do a payment when we're not physically together, we have to trust a third party — whether it's a bank, Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, there's always a third party, I have to trust them.

Bitcoin is remarkable in that it allows me to send money to you anywhere in the world, in real time, free, without any third party.

There are a number of problems with today's currency system. It's expensive. It's unsafe. It carries huge transaction costs.

And I think that bitcoin can be the way in which these [5 Billion people outside the world credit system] can participate.

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-bitcoin-may-have-more-impact-than-the-internet-2015-2



Earlier this month, just as tax season was nearing its peak, 19 states and Intuit - the maker of TurboTax software - noticed a surge of fraudulent state-tax filings prepared with TurboTax.

In some cases, the fraudulent state and federal filings include data apparently taken from TurboTax clients' 2013 tax returns, according to state tax officials and taxpayers.

Some good Q and A here.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/fraud-alert-what-turbotax-users-need-to-know-now-2015-02-16



While it’s not uncommon for Silicon Valley companies to poach employees from the local competition, the practice of enticing talent away from automakers and suppliers is particularly damaging for the auto industry, especially since cars are becoming more software dependent. Several major auto supplier have mentioned to me that one of their biggest challenges is finding and retaining tech talent, and it’s been an issue in Detroitfor quite some time.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dougnewcomb/2015/02/20/apples-talent-poaching-is-real-threat-to-auto-industry/



It isn't worth it right now for criminals to hack cars

The problem for hackers is that our cars aren't fully networked.

Complicating matters for hackers is the fact that the operating software used by automakers is proprietary and varied.

The threat of hacked cars isn't a real concern to most drivers these days. Criminals love a big payoff, and at the moment, the payoff from hacking vehicles is simply too small.

But make no mistake: the day is coming when our vehicles will be fully networked ...... make hacking cars a far more lucrative endeavor.

http://www.businessinsider.com/it-isnt-worth-it-right-now-for-criminals-to-hack-cars-2015-2



HUGE SPY PROGRAM EXPOSED: NSA has hidden software in hard drives around the world

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-russian-researchers-expose-breakthrough-us-spying-program-2015-2



Moscow-Based Security Firm Reveals What May Be The Biggest NSA "Backdoor Exploit" Ever

spies made a technological breakthrough by figuring out how to lodge malicious software in the obscure code called firmware that launches every time a computer is turned on.

Disk drive firmware is viewed by spies and cybersecurity experts as the second-most valuable real estate on a PC for a hacker, second only to the BIOS code invoked automatically as a computer boots up.

The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.

That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-16/moscow-based-security-firm-reveals-what-may-be-biggest-nsa-backdoor-exploit-ever