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Controversial Internet pirate and bitcoin advocate Kim Dotcom is urging everyone to invest in gold and bitcoin because the U.S. government is adding $1 trillion to its debt every year, which will never be paid. The debt will destroy the U.S. and create a global economic collapse, Dotcom argued in a tweet. 1 TRILLION DOLLARS

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• Richard Russell, an airline ground agent at Sea-Tac International Airport, stole an empty Horizon Air turboprop plane and fatally crashed into a small island on Friday night.
• Officials said Saturday that the 29-year-old was a 3.5-year Horizon Air employee and had clearance to be among aircraft, but that to their knowledge, he wasn't a licensed pilot.
• At a news conference on Saturday, officials from Alaska Airlines and Horizon said they are working with authorities to investigate what happened.
• The incident highlights one of the biggest potential perils for commercial air travel: airline or airport employees causing mayhem.

The theft of an empty turboprop plane by an airline worker at Sea-Tac International Airport who performed dangerous loops before crashing into a remote island in Puget Sound illustrated what aviation experts have long known: One of the biggest potential perils for commercial air travel is airline or airport employees causing mayhem.

Investigators are piecing together how the airline ground agent working his regular shift stole an empty Horizon Air turboprop plane, took off Friday night from Sea-Tac, and fatally crashed into the a small island after being chased by military jets that were quickly scrambled.

Officials said Saturday that the man, identified as 29-year-old Richard Russel, was a 3.5-year Horizon employee and had clearance to be among aircraft, but that to their knowledge, he wasn't a licensed pilot. He took the empty plane from a maintenance area.

Russell is presumed dead after crashing the plane into a small island.

Video of the incident shows the Horizon Air Q400 Russell stole doing large loops and other dangerous maneuvers.

The man could have caused mass destruction, Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent and transportation security expert, told the AP.

"If he had the skill set to do loops with a plane like this, he certainly had the capacity to fly it into a building and kill people on the ground," he said.

Two F-15C aircraft pursued the plane but didn't fire at it before it cashed on Ketron Island, southwest of Tacoma.

No structures were damaged in the crash, though it did spark a small wildfire.

Russell could be heard on audio recordings telling air traffic controllers that he is "just a broken guy."

'The greatest threat we have to aviation is the insider threat'

The incident points to the danger airport employees could cause.

"The greatest threat we have to aviation is the insider threat," Southers said. "Here we have an employee who was vetted to the level to have access to the aircraft and had a skill set proficient enough to take off with that plane."

Alaska Airlines said the suspect was a ground service agent employed by Horizon. Those employees direct aircraft for takeoff and gate approach and de-ice planes, as well as handle baggage.

At a news conference on Saturday, officials from Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air said they are working with authorities to investigate what happened.

"Last night's event is going to push us to learn what we can from this tragedy so that we can ensure this does not happen again at Alaska Air Group or at any other airline," said Brad Tilden, CEO of Alaska Airlines.

There was no connection to terrorism, said Ed Troyer, a spokesman for the sheriff’s department.

SEE ALSO: The man who stole a plane from Sea-Tac Airport and crashed it has reportedly been identified as 29-year-old Richard Russell

DON'T MISS: Authorities say the 29-year-old 'suicidal male' who stole a plane at Seattle-Tacoma Airport and later crashed it had full security clearance

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

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• A year ago, Oracle's massive salesforce received an email asking them to work with "integrity," setting out a long list of no-no's for salespeople.
• An Oracle insider and a former Oracle vice president explained some of the tricky things salespeople were doing to sell more cloud and make big commissions.
• It's hard to say what impact these deals had, if any, on Oracle's fast-growing cloud business, but the company did change its financial reporting in June to no longer break out cloud revenues. 
• The whole situation gives us a detailed, inside look at the enterprise software sausage factory.

In August, 2017, Oracle's massive salesforce received an email from Rich Geraffo, Oracle's executive vice president responsible for North American sales.

In it, he told the 35,000-strong sales team to essentially quit gaming the system in the way they were landing cloud sales, according to the email viewed by Business Insider.

He discussed "winning with integrity," and set out a long list of no-no's for salespeople. The items included things like only selling products and services that customers will really use, putting all terms in writing, and justifying discounts offered to customers.

Some 10 months later, in June, Oracle surprised the financial world by changing the way it reported cloud revenue, blending it into its traditional software sales, which essentially hid cloud revenue from view. Oracle didn't wait until the fiscal year ended. It made the change to the fourth quarter results, which ended in May. That meant it did not report the full year's final cloud performance, even though cloud has become critical to the company's future.  

When concerned Wall Street analysts asked if this change was an attempt to hide problems in Oracle's cloud business,  Mark Hurd, one of Oracle's CEOs, called the change a "nothing burger,"  and attributed the change to adopting new accounting standards.

However, an Oracle salesperson who's been with the company for several years told Business Insider that the change could reflect something else: that not all of the cloud revenue was from customers who were really using Oracle's cloud. 

It's not clear that there's a connection between the email from Geraffo asking salespeople to only sell products and services that customers will really use and Oracle's decision to stop reporting cloud revenue separately.

But the change in reporting does give us a reason to explore the tricks of the trade that may have helped Oracle jump start its most important new business.

'Cancel and replace'

One of the ways Oracle's sales people beefed up cloud sales — and their own commissions, which were heavily tied to how much cloud they sold — was a tried-and-true method, according to the salesperson. It involved including cloud credits on a customer's contract even if the customer didn't want the cloud product, this person said.

The customer would get discounts on the products they did want for agreeing to buy the cloud products they didn't and save money overall.

That's a common practice. By bundling in products and making them essentially free to the customer, they get to try them with little risk and will maybe sign on later for real. And Oracle isn't the only enterprise company to do this for a cloud business.

"Thousands of deals happens every week, where customers buy more than they need," the salesperson said.

But there was a second, more questionable tactic being done three and four years ago, according to the people familiar with it, which could have impacted Oracle's business in its fiscal 2018, which ended in May.

It's known as "cancel and replace," according to Craig Guarente, CEO of Palisade Compliance. Guarente is a former Oracle vice president who now works on the other side of the table, helping Oracle's customers negotiate contracts with the software giant.

"Cancel and replace" is essentially a grand bargain with customers that lets them out of paying a lot of money for a support contract on those unwanted products, if they agree to spend that money instead on Oracle's cloud even if they don't want and won't use the cloud, Guarente and the salesperson said.

Unwanted bills, unwanted products

To understand "cancel and replace," it's important to understand how Oracle makes its money.

The company makes three times more money on support contracts and on renewing licensing with existing customers than it makes on selling new products to customers.

And Oracle has become a master of locking customers into paying more and more for their support and renewals over time through tough contractual terms, Guarente said. Anything that lets them out of those contractual terms would make customers happy, but wouldn't be as good for Oracle's bottom line.

For instance, companies that want to use Oracle's database or its popular HR or financial software will get discounts on those products if they also agree to add products they don't want to their contracts, products Oracle wants them to try, and to pay for support for all the products on the contract. Support helps companies properly install and troubleshoot their software.

These are typically three-year contracts and, with discounts, it can cost them less overall to take all those products than to simply pay for the ones they want.

The second year, when the customers receive a hefty bill for support, they may tell Oracle they don't want to pay for support on products they don't use.

Oracle might tell them that if they cancel those products, their discounts are voided and the cost for just the products they want will cost them far more than to continue paying support.

The tactic of  "cancel and replace" allowed customers to cancel their long-term, expensive support contracts and replace them with ones that had them paying for "cloud credits," aka hours of usage of Oracle's cloud, even if they never planned to use the cloud.

But it's what happened after those revised contracts expired that caused the salesperson we talked to concern.

What the salespeople were doing

Both the internal salesperson and Guarente described what the salespeople were doing.

Three and four years ago, some Oracle salespeople used the situation of customers wanting to get out of their support contracts to sell customers cloud credits, the salesperson said.

At first salespeople were offering a dollar-for-dollar trade, too, Guarente said. So if a customer was paying, say, $2 million annually in support, the salesperson would allow them to convert that to $2 million in cloud credits, even if they didn't want to use the cloud. And when the three-year contract was up, they could stop paying.

Then the salespeople upped the terms. They started requiring customers to agree to $2 of cloud credits for every $1 of support revenue they cancelled and replaced, Guarente said. At the end of three years, customers could stop paying, so it was still a good deal in the long term for customers.

The problem with these deals is that this cloud revenue could go away when the contract expired, if the customers didn't really want Oracle's cloud.

Sketchy business

Internally, these were considered sketchy deals, but tempting ones, the salesperson said. "I personally know people who made $500,000 to $1 million in commissions doing this," the salesperson said. 

But, on a corporate level Oracle "hates" cancel-and-replace deals, for obvious reasons, Guarente said. 

The top execs didn't know about, and weren't condoning these cancel-and-replace deals, the salesperson said. Some sales managers frowned on the practice. But others pressured their salespeople to risk their jobs and do such deals to make their quotas, the salesperson said.

And if a salesperson didn't go along with the team's plan for making numbers, "they’ll make your life hell," said the salesperson. For instance, the manager could do everything from rejigger a territory to subject the person to a lot of nitpicking when trying to get deals approved, this person said. 

While plenty of Oracle customers have legitimately signed up for Oracle's cloud and use it, ultimately, many of these deals for unwanted cloud credits didn't entice the customers to use the cloud, both the salesperson and Guarente said. They merely allowed them to stop paying big support bills when their three-year contracts expired.

Oracle saw the light sometime last year on this practice and stopped letting those types of deals get through, both the salesperson and Guarente said. And Geraffo's email drove the point home, the salesperson said.

While some customers have since successfully negotiated an exchange of support payments for cloud credits, Guarente said, they can no longer stop paying at the end of the contract. If they don't use the cloud and want to cancel it, they'll be billed for support instead, he said.

Oracle says the practice is forbidden. "Oracle has a policy not to reduce support payments in exchange for cloud credits," a spokesperson told us.

It's unclear what impact these deals had on Oracle's financial results, if any. But a good many of those three-year contracts were coming up for renewal over the past several months, the salesperson said, meaning those customers could simply stop paying for cloud if they weren't using it.

When asked about these sales tactics, an Oracle spokesperson told us, "Our pricing is aligned with how our customers want to buy and consume cloud offerings."

The spokesperson added. "We allow our customers to bring their existing on-premise database licenses to the cloud so long as they continue to pay support for those licenses.  We call this policy 'Bring Your Own Licenses' or BYOL. When the customer chooses BYOL, they pay an incremental monthly fee for the cloud infrastructure they use to run the database. We believe virtually all of our database customers will use BYOL to migrate their database workload to the cloud.”

Oracle is not the only enterprise software company to grapple with salespeople using loopholes to make their cloud numbers. Several years ago Microsoft faced similar issues, Business Insider reported at the time.

Are you an insider at an enterprise tech company with insight to share? We want to hear it! jbort@businessinsider.com or @Julie188.

SEE ALSO: Oracle is trying an 'unusual' tactic to calm investors, according to an executive compensation expert

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

Over the past 24 hours, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash recovered by around four percent, as the crypto market added $8 billion to its valuation. On August 11, the crypto market lost more than $12 billion of its valuation as major cryptocurrencies recorded large losses. Since then, the market has slightly recovered but the momentum

The post $43 Billion Wiped Out of Crypto in 5 Days as Bitcoin Price Rebounds appeared first on CCN

Make sure you check out our previous edition here, now let’s go over what happened in crypto this week. Also, make sure you subscribe for this week’s edition of The CCN Podcast on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Google Play Music, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Price Watch: The bitcoin price is down 12% this week following a loss of 15% last week. Bitcoin had been hovering around

The post Ethereum Classic’s Comeback, Bitmain’s $18 Billion IPO, and Goldman’s Bear Tear: This Week in Crypto appeared first on CCN

While the market didn't like the SEC's bitcoin ETF delay decision, observers on social media weren't surprised at all.

Intuit has been granted a patent that describes a method whereby Bitcoin payments can be processed by using text messages. The patent was filed to the U.S. Patent Office on June 13, 2014. The application explained a system that would allow two users to complete their payments using their mobile phones. It would also include

The post Audit Giant Intuit Gains Patent for Bitcoin Transactions over Text Messages appeared first on CCN

• Followers of the stock market have been focused on Apple's ascent above $1 trillion in market value, but there's a different trillion-dollar threshold that's more important to the long-term health of the stock market.
• Whether the breaking of the $1 trillion milestone is a good or bad thing for equities depends on how one interprets the data, and both sides are laid out below.

If you follow the stock market in any capacity, you know that Apple's recent climb above $1 trillion in market value captured widespread attention. Shareholders rejoiced, analysts fawned, and pundits were quick to sing the praises of the entire tech sector.

But to hear experts tell it, there's a more important $1 trillion milestone lurking in the shadows — one that's far more integral to the future of stocks.

That would be $1 trillion in buybacks authorized this year. And while the figure may seem far-fetched at first blush, it's now the official 2018 forecast for Goldman Sachs. 

"It's not the size of the company, but the use of cash that matters," David Kostin, the firm's chief US equity strategist, wrote in a recent note to clients.

The importance of buybacks should never be underestimated. First and foremost, they're a tried and true way to boost stock prices for stockholders without them lifting a finger, because they shrink the pool of outstanding shares.

Secondly, and stemming from that mechanism, repurchases can be an invaluable safety net for stock prices — capable of engineering gains during periods devoid of other positive catalysts. When S&P 500 corporate profit growth shrunk for five straight quarters from 2015 through mid-2016, buybacks were there to pick up the slack.

Yet while the efficacy of buybacks has been undeniable over the nine-year bull market, the forecasted explosion above $1 trillion does raise some questions.

Will their stock-boosting continue to provide a backbone for the market indefinitely? Or is their record deployment a sign of reckless exuberance — the type that has historically characterized the end of market cycles, and the start of major downturns?

After all, as stocks continue to flirt with record highs, that also means it's never been more expensive to repurchase shares. To that end, this behavior is either dangerously irresponsible, or ultimately harmless, depending on your viewpoint. Let's explore both sides of the debate.

The bear case

The main argument against the type of unbridled buyback activity buoying the market right now is the level of confidence it reflects. While we normally think of sentiment from the perspective of investors, this particularly brand of exuberant spending is coming from the companies themselves.

But it still conveys the same type of euphoria that's historically gotten investors in trouble. Valuations have rarely been higher, yet corporations don't seem to be thinking twice about paying borderline record prices to boost shares.

Sure, it may seem like a harmless use of capital right now, but at some point it will reach a tipping point. The market has proven repeatedly over time that it has no problem indiscriminately punishing overextended behavior.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett seems to realize this. His firm, Berkshire Hathaway, is sitting on a record $111 million of cash — a veritable war chest that could buy back an awful lot of stock. But so far he hasn't done any repurchases, nor has he made any splashy acquisitions.

That's because the market is, in his words, "too darn expensive" right now. And it's only gotten more stretched since he made those comments earlier this year.

In order for Berkshire Hathaway to conduct buybacks, both Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger have to find the price "below Berkshire’s intrinsic value, conservatively determined." That doesn't appear likely to happen any time soon. It makes you wonder how the corporate buyback picture would look if every management team took such a prudent approach.

In the end, the world's greatest investor is wary of buybacks and overall stock valuations, to the point that he's frozen in place. And that should be food for thought for every blindly confident investor right now.

Further, as the chart below shows, Berkshire Hathaway's cash balance has been an effective proxy for market levels over history. Buffett held comparatively high levels of cash in the periods preceding the two most recent market crashes, in 1999 and 2007. That mere fact should also have traders rattled.

The bull case

Goldman stands on the other side of the aisle, firmly believing that buybacks are a positive for stocks — at least in the short to medium term. It argues that cash flow growth has been essential to the buyback explosion, suggesting that the uptick in repurchases has been a logical response to having more money on hand.

The firm also notes that, following the earnings growth explosion of the last several quarters, traditional measures of price-to-earnings (P/E) have actually declined as profits have outpaced price expansion. That, in turn, has made the market look less expensive, countering claims of overvaluation.

Lastly, and perhaps most directly pertinent to buybacks, Goldman points out that tech has only accounted for 21% of executions so far in 2018 — a portion that doesn't match the sector's massive market influence. The firm expects tech to pick up the pace through the end of the year, which means major upside for repurchases as a whole.

Bernstein makes the interesting point that while buyback announcements are hitting record highs on a dollar value basis, the picture is not so stark when you compare their values to overall market cap. The chart below shows this, and suggests conditions aren't quite as dire as they were ahead of the financial crisis.

Bernstein also takes the interesting step of calculating buyback activity, net of new equity issuance. It finds that, at 1.6%, it's the highest in 25 years.

When you consider that the US has only used what Bernstein describes as as "small proportion" of tax reform proceeds on buybacks, there's "ample ability" for the current balance to persist. In a world that's constantly facing new macro threats, the firm finds comfort in this.

"The unprecedented scale of global buybacks vs. issuance provides a very useful support for the market against macro headwinds," Mark Diver, an analyst at the firm, wrote in a client note. "It supports our view that equities can end 2018 higher."

With all of that established, hopefully you have enough information to formulate your own opinion on the buyback debate.

After all, as other market forces ebb and flow, buybacks will continue to exercise huge influence, whether anyone's paying attention to them or not.

SEE ALSO: One dirty word keeps popping up as Wall Street weighs the next market crash — and it should strike fear into the hearts of investors everywhere

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NOW WATCH: An early bitcoin investor explains what most people get wrong about the cryptocurrency

It has emerged that the “unknown person” who notified Bitcoin ABC developers of a vulnerability in Bitcoin Cash which would have resulted in the unintended split of the altcoin’s network is actually a Bitcoin Core (bitcoin’s primary software implementation) developer. In a Medium blog post, Corey Fields revealed that he was responsible for anonymously and

The post Bitcoin Cash ‘Chain-Splitting’ Bug was Detected by Bitcoin Core Dev. appeared first on CCN

It has emerged that the “unknown person” who notified Bitcoin ABC developers of a vulnerability in Bitcoin Cash which would have resulted in the unintended split of the altcoin’s network is actually a Bitcoin Core (bitcoin’s primary software implementation) developer. In a Medium blog post, Corey Fields revealed that he was responsible for anonymously and

The post Bitcoin Cash ‘Chain-Splitting’ Bug was Detected by Bitcoin Core Dev. appeared first on CCN