Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

By ADAM KLASFELD       MANHATTAN (CN) - CityTime, a program given more than $600 million to design automated payroll software for New York City employees, was "corrupted to its core," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a press conference.          Alleging that "virtually all" of the program's money was tainted by fraud, Bharara announced new charges Monday against four of eight individual defendants and one corporation listed in the indictment, charged with bilking the program from 2003 to 2010.      "In short, today we allege what many have long feared: The CityTime project was corrupted to its core by one of the largest and most brazen frauds ever committed against the City of New York," Bharara said.          Carl Bell, the chief systems engineer for CityTime's primary contractor Sc...

By Brian Montopoli Topics Congress Computer hackers broke into the Senate's public website Wednesday though they were unable to get proprietary data, the Senate acknowledged today. It was the second such attack in less than a week. Meanwhile, the CIA website was taken down Wednesday afternoon. The hacktivist group LulzSec group claimed credit. "Tango Down--cia.gov--for the lulz," it wrote on Twitter. Deputy Senate Sergeant at Arms Martina Bradford said the hackers' attempts to penetrate the Senate network failed. They were able to download some information from the public site, she said, but could not access sensitive data because they were blocked by a firewall. Over the weekend, a portion of the Senate website was hacked in what Bradford described as a similar attack. Lulz - which is best known for a recent attack on Sony - claimed credit for that attack. The attack prompted a review of Senate web security. Bradford said Senate networks have been targeted ...

By Ken Garen, CPA TechWise eBlogger on AccountingWeb.com If you are in a public accounting practice and thinking about shifting to an iPad or iPhone to run your business, you might want to think again.  These technologies are overrated for use in the accounting industry.  When working at a client’s office, accountants will have access to a computer, or they can access the client’s network or via some WIFI service using a reasonably low weight notebook or laptop and get all the access they need and have the convenience of using a keyboard as well. For accountants, the only aspects the iPad and iPhone and the mobility they provide is good for is getting emails and text messages while you are out and about.  Personally, I would recommend an android for those purposes. IDC released its own forecasts for the 2015 smartphone market   and projected that the android would secure 45.4 percent of the market. If you were traveling to areas where the weight of what you wer...

By Peter Bright,   Ars Technica When Microsoft   gave the first public demonstration of Windows 8   a week ago, the reaction from most circles was positive. The new Windows 8 user interface looks clean, attractive and thoughtful. And, in a first for a Microsoft desktop operating system, it’s finger-friendly. But one aspect of the demonstration has the legions of Windows developers deeply concerned, and with good reason: They were told that all their experience, all their knowledge and every program they have written in the past would be useless on Windows 8. Key to the new Windows 8 look and feel, and instrumental to Microsoft’s bid to make Windows a viable tablet operating system, are new-style full-screen “immersive” applications. Windows 8 will include new APIs for developing these applications, and here is where the problem lies. Having new APIs isn’t itself a concern — there’s simply never been anything like this on Windows before, so obviously the existing Wind...