Personnel And User Security Supplement: Fill & Download for Free

As noted previously you can search for details about a Registered Investment Adviser firm on the Security and Exchange Commission’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure website (SEC IAPD Page on sec.gov ). It should be added, however, that for many consumers the most helpful and user-friendly document available there is that adviser’s, or advisory firm’s, Form ADV 2A (you find this on the site’s left-hand column under “Part 2” with a hyperlink of “Part 2 Brochures” for each RIA firm you search for.This document is a result of “The Brochure Rule” or Rule 204-3 under the Advisers Act, which generally requires:“…every SEC-registered investment adviser to deliver to each client or prospective client a Form ADV Part 2A (brochure) and Part 2B (brochure supplement) describing the adviser's business practices, conflicts of interest and background of the investment adviser and its advisory personnel. An adviser must deliver the brochure to a client before or at the time the adviser enters into an investment advisory contract with a client…” (You can find a great deal more detail herehttps://www.sec.gov/divisions/investment/iaregulation/memoia.htm )It is within this document you should find a straightforward plain-English overview of a firm’s fee structure. This can include many types of fees and the best firms provide you with a great deal of transparency here and will cover everything from their “investment advisory fee”, which will likely be on a scale based on the overall market value of your portfolio — to explanations of the many other types of fees you might find on the statements you receive from your custodian or third-party asset management firm.While such disclosures can help you better understand what you are paying for when you hire a registered investment adviser the overall financial services industry has a long way to go when it comes to providing both transparency and clarity. You might ask whether those two terms mean the same thing. If your idea of transparency is inundating the consumer with mountains of fine print, you also need an emphasis on what is actually important, hence clarity.A major fight is underway when it comes to a national fiduciary standard. Perform a Google search on “fiduciary standard” or “fiduciary standard debate” etc. and you will find a great deal of content on the subject.This battle is likely to go on for some time and while the politicians, regulators and lobbyists continue to debate consider investigating the role disruptive technology can play.Check out FeeX.com, it’s free and can tell you how much you are paying in fees on your investment accounts and help you find alternatives.

The VA is funded, so it should not be affected. Below is a list of affected agencies.AgricultureMore than 60 percent of the department’s staff would report to work for the first five days of a partial shutdown, but the number of employees at any given agency would vary depending on its mission and funding source, according to the Agriculture Department’s shutdown plans.At the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a mix of trust funds and user fees would allow workers to continue to inspect for pests in fruits, vegetables and birds being exported or imported. About 69 percent of employees would continue duties ranging from treatment of ticks in cattle and deer along the U.S.-Mexico border, to caring for animals at labs and research facilitiesCarried over funding and reimbursements would allow the Food Safety and Inspection Service to continue inspections of meat, poultry and egg products, lab work to identify food safety threats and emergency preparedness.About 5 percent of workers at the department’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services would be needed to keep benefits flowing to beneficiaries in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Women, Infants and Children program and the national school lunch and breakfast programs.CommerceWith continuing funds from previous appropriations, the department says it will continue to provide services from agencies including the Bureau of the Census, National Institute of Science and Technology and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.EPAThe agency will for now continue operating because it still has carried-over funds.“Prudent management requires the proper preparation for all contingencies, including the possibility that a lapse in appropriated funding could occur,” acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in an emailed statement. “EPA’s Contingency Plan for Shutdown calls for the agency to assess whether there are sufficient carryover funds to operate for a period of time in the event of a lapse in funding and a government shutdown. We have done that assessment and determined that EPA has sufficient carryover funds to operate for a limited period of time.”Financial RegulationSome, but not all, of the nation’s financial regulatory agencies would be significantly affected. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation would operate normally, as those fee-funded agencies are unaffected by the congressional appropriations process. Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau receives its funding from the Federal Reserve and will remain unaffected by a shutdown.While the Securities and Exchange Commission is also funded through fees, it is subject to the appropriations process and will reduce staffing from 4,400 employees to about 300 essential personnel to handle emergencies and continue law enforcement actions. The SEC’s filing system, EDGAR, will remain accessible, but the Commission will not accept filings, provide interpretative advice or issue no-action letters during the shutdown.The Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.S. Treasury Department will also curtail operations to just a few essential functions such as criminal investigations. Notably, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provided the IRS implementation funding through Sept. 30, 2019. Still, only 12.5 percent of IRS employees, mostly related to enforcement, will remain on the job. Representatives from those agencies did not respond to requests for more detail on which functions will remain in operation during the shutdown.Health and Human ServicesFour parts of the Department of Health and Human Services are still running on a continuation of fiscal 2018 funding and would have to initiate shutdown plans if a deal isn’t reached. That includes the FDA and the Indian Health Service, which each have budgets north of $5 billion, and smaller parts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.Homeland SecurityMost employees at the Department of Homeland Security — 212,500 or 87 percent of staff — are exempt from a lapse in government funding and will be expected to continue to report to work because most of them work in essential services like law enforcement or disaster relief. In other cases, their salaries are funded by money that is not subject to congressional appropriations.The vast majority of employees at the department’s biggest agencies — including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Transportation Security Administration — are considered essential personnel, and so continue to work even under a shutdown. Salaries at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are funded by fees paid by visa applicants and immigrant petitioners.InteriorNational parks will remain as accessible as possible “while still following all applicable laws and procedures,” an Interior spokesman said.There may be some restricted access to National Park Service areas like some public lands, trails and sites because of fewer employees on the ground. The agency said it is prioritizing keeping the most accessible and iconic areas of parks and public lands available to the public, but plans may vary at different locations.JusticeThe Justice Department will largely be up and operating as many of its functions relate to the protection of life and property, which are functions exempt from the shutdown. Altogether, about 84 percent of Justice Department employees are exempt and will be working; that’s 95,000 out of 113,000 Justice Department employees, according to a department memo put out in September of this year.So the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. attorneys, the Bureau of Prisons and department criminal activities go forward during a shutdown. The Office of Special Counsel, under special funding, also goes forward, so Robert Mueller III’s investigative team does not get furloughed.StateThe department’s contingency plan as posted on OMB does not specify operations of offices that will continue, but does say those “identified by the Bureau of Budget and Planning (BP) and the Office of U.S. Foreign Assistance (F) will continue to operate until their respective balances are insufficient to continue.”TransportationAt the Federal Aviation Administration, services including air traffic control, field inspections and security operations will continue. Indeed, most of the department’s other agencies will continue to operate with carryover funding, according to the DOT contingency plan.Shutdown Effects: Breakdown by Department and Agency

The cryptocurrency exchange is an important part of the blockchain industry, and it also plays an important role in enlivening market and promoting circulation. However, compared with ordinary wallets, the security problems of exchanges, especially centralized exchanges, are more prominent and serious. Security issues have become the primary concern of exchanges, and even the key to determining the survival of exchanges.The main reasons why exchange security issues are more prominent and more vulnerable to hacking:1. At present, centralized exchanges occupy a dominant position in the digital currency trading field, and a large number of digital assets are gathered and precipitated to the exchanges. This makes the crypto exchange like a torch burning in the dark, attracting the attention of attackers.2. Asset circulation involves many links, and many links are vulnerable to hacking.3. The exchange involves many people, and hackers can easily attack from weak links.The key points in exchange security issues:1.Anti-phishing websites and fake client softwareThe exchange should help users identify real websites and real client software by setting various anti-counterfeiting measures to avoid customers being scammed2. Infrastructure security protectionIncluding security of host (or cloud host), domain name, CDN and other underlying services, the security of network equipment, the security of operating system platform, security control of Access control, rights management, and various external interfaces, etc. This is the basis for the safe operation of the exchange3. Strict verification of user identityThe users here are not limited to real individuals, but also include machines and equipment accessed through the API interface. Appropriate identity verification schemes need to be adopted, including but not limited to biometrics, pin codes, digital certificates, hardware authentication equipment, etc., to comprehensively and deeply verify the user’s identity to prevent the user’s identity from being usurped.4.Strengthen the security audit of sensitive operations such as deposit, withdrawal, and transferDeposits, withdrawals, transfers, and other operations directly involve the transfer of assets. They are the easiest point of attack for hackers and have a high level of security risk. Therefore, sufficient security audits should be performed to eliminate possible security risks and ensure asset security.5.Strict protection of sensitive dataIn the exchange, there is a lot of data that needs to be protected. Some of these data are extremely sensitive and important, and special measures need to be taken to protect it, such as user account libraries, wallet private keys, and so on.6.Awareness and early warning of abnormal operationsThe exchange should establish a risk assessment mechanism and a security situation awareness system to monitor and analyze the security of operations in real-time. When abnormal behaviors are found, a timely alarm is issued to effectively improve the security level of the exchange.7. Improve the management system, enhance the safety awareness of employees, especially senior management, and prevent social engineering attacksSocial engineering attack is a kind of network attack that uses “social engineering”. In computer science, social engineering refers to the way of legally communicating with others to affect their psychology, to perform certain actions, or to disclose some confidential information. This is often thought of as an act of deceiving others to collect information, scam, and hack into computer systems.A sound management system is the top priority of the exchange’s security system, and it cannot be overemphasized. Because all security technologies must ultimately be implemented on people, technology systems must be deployed, managed, and maintained by people, work processes must be implemented by people, and various assets must be managed by people. Among the existing conditions, only a sound management system and sufficient security training can enhance the safety awareness of employees, especially executives, making people afraid, unwilling, and unable to make mistakes, forming a solid foundation for the security management of the exchange.Three suggestions for Centralized Exchanges:1. Actively welcome supervision, not reject it.External supervision is conducive to the improvement of the exchange’s own mechanism. It is beneficial to the healthy development of the exchange. Every formal Cryptocurrency Exchange that hopes for long-term development should welcome supervision from external parties such as the government and society. This is also the inevitable trend of digital exchanges in the future to achieve trust and regular development.2. Improve internal management mechanisms and improve technical processes.Through its own management changes and technological upgrades, the Exchange is able to realize that internal personnel is afraid, unwilling, and unable to “inside job” in terms of management systems and technical processes.3. Introduce trusted third parties for security audits.To achieve an open, fair and fair trading environment, the premise is the transparency of the data. How to break the black box mystery of the exchange? A common practice is a timely/untimely security audit of exchange data and operation logs by introducing trusted third parties. On the one hand, it allows the outside public to have sufficient right to know, and on the other hand, it can also help the exchange to discover internal security risks in a timely manner.Advantages of Decentralized ExchangesCompared with Centralized Exchanges, Decentralized Exchanges not only reduce potential threats from the inside but also increase the level of external security.First of all, it is clear that the funds of the decentralized exchange are stored in the wallet of each user, and there is no huge pool of funds like the centralized exchange, so there is no large wallet coveted by hackers, which greatly reduces the interest of hackers to launch attacks, and this eliminates security risks from the root cause.Secondly, the transparency of transactions in decentralized exchanges is unmatched by centralized exchanges. It can ensure that each transaction is a real transaction. For exchanges and market makers, it is more difficult to make bank accounts and control the market. It also reduces the risk of being harvested.Finally, decentralized exchanges are based on the blockchain matching trading mechanism, supplemented by cross-chain technology, which is easy to realize the federation between exchanges and share passenger flows. At the same time, the automatic matching mechanism can greatly expand the trading space and increase the Depth of transactions and increase transaction rate. Based on the decentralized exchange, it is expected to truly realize the seamless circulation of value on the Internet, that is, the true value Internet.Although at present, centralized exchanges are still dominant in digital transactions for users due to higher transaction efficiency and lower learning thresholds, decentralized exchanges have more vigorous vitality and have wider development space and applications Scenes.