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Notice given as required by law, some info was unredacted

FRANKFORT, Ky. (WTVQ) On September 8, 2021, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet (EEC) discovered original un-redacted mining permit applications containing some mine owners and controllers personal information was available for public inspection at Department for Natural Resources field offices and on an EEC hosted and public-facing website.

Under federal law (30 C.F.R. 773.6), EEC is required to make permit information such as the owners and controllers identifying information available for public inspection.

Although internal EEC policy and procedures require redaction of certain personal information (including SSNs) before permit information is made publicly available, some un-redacted permit materials have been available: since sometime in 2015 at public reading rooms located at DNR field offices, and 2) since January 16, 2021 on a public, internet-accessible database maintained by EEC. As a result, individuals or software programs may have accessed permit information.

On September 8, 2021, EEC discovered the security issue, and immediately disabled access to the files. After investigation, EEC was unable to determine whether personal information was accessed or downloaded during either the time in which it was available in EECs regional offices or when it was hosted on the EECs website.

In order to meet its obligations under federal and state law and prevent this issue from reoccurring, EEC has implemented further staff training, and reviewed and appropriately removed the subject materials such that documents containing sensitive personal information are no longer publicly accessible. Sensitive personal information will be redacted prior to providing those documents in response to an open records request.

EEC does not have any information indicating that any personal information has been misused. However, out of an abundance of caution, given that the files were hosted for an extended period of time, EEC initiated the personal information security breach protocols as required by Kentucky law, which includes notifying impacted individuals through personal communication and by notifying local, regional and statewide media, including broadcast media.

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Agency suffered data breach in September on mining permit applications - ABC 36 News - WTVQ

The company is also something of a regulatory guinea pig: Upstart was the first business to receive a no-action letter from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The letter essentially said the bureau had no plans to take any regulatory action against the company in return for detailed information about its loans and operations.

Though the bureau didnt recreate Upstarts results on its own, it said the company had approved 27 percent more applicants than the traditional model, while the average interest rates they paid were 16 percent lower. For example, near prime customers with FICO scores from 620 to 660 were approved about twice as frequently, according to company data. Younger and lower-income applicants also fared better.

Upstart, which also agreed to be monitored by two advocacy groups and an independent auditor, takes into account more than 1,000 data points inside and outside a consumers credit report. It has tweaked its modeling at times it no longer uses the average incoming SAT and ACT scores of a borrowers college but includes the persons college, area of study and employment history. (Nurses rank well, for example, because theyre rarely unemployed, Mr. Girouard said.) The amount that borrowers are asking for may also be a factor: If they are seeking more than Upstarts algorithms believe is appropriate, that may work against them.

Other companies work in a similar way, although the methods and data they use vary.

TomoCredit, for example, will issue a Mastercard credit card to applicants even those with no credit score after receiving permission to peer at their financial accounts; it analyzes more than 50,000 data points, such as monthly income and spending patterns, savings accounts and stock portfolios. Within two minutes, consumers are approved for anywhere from $100 to $10,000 in credit, to be paid off weekly. On-time payments help build users traditional credit files and scores.

Zest AI, a Los Angeles company that already works with banks, auto lenders and credit unions, is also working with Freddie Mac, which recently began using the companys tools to evaluate people who may not fit squarely inside traditional scoring models.

Jay Budzik, Zest AIs chief technology officer, said the company went deep into applicants credit reports, and might incorporate information from a loan application, such as the mileage or potential resale value of a used car. It can also look at consumers checking accounts.

How frequently are they getting close to zero? Mr. Budzik said. Those things are helpful in creating an additional data point on a consumer that is not in the credit report.

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No Credit Score? No Problem! Just Hand Over More Data. - The New York Times

Palantir Technologies (NYSE:PLTR) has been a volatile and polarizing investment since its direct listing last September. The bulls claimed its data-mining platforms would continue to grow as it signed more government and enterprise contracts.

The bears pointed out that Palantir was too heavily dependent on government clients, its enterprise business faced too many competitors, it was deeply unprofitable, and its stock was too expensive.

Palantir's stock price has experienced some wild swings over the past year, but it has still more than doubled since its first trade at $10 per share.

Image source: Getty Images.

Today, Palantir is valued at $41.3 billion, or 27 times this year's sales. The bears will argue that the high price-to-sales (P/S) ratio will limit its upside, especially as rising interest rates and inflation make many high-growth tech stocks less attractive.

But let's look beyond the near-term noise and see if Palantir can still generate big multibagger gains, or even become a trillion-dollar stock, over the next two decades.

Palantir expects to grow its revenue by at least 30% annually between fiscal 2021 and 2025. That forecast implies its revenue will rise from its target of $1.5 billion this year to at least $4.3 billion in 2025.

The company expects that growth to be driven by its new and expanded contracts with government agencies, as well as the growth of its Foundry platform for large commercial customers. The accelerating growth of its commercial business over the past year, which notably outpaced the growth of its government business last quarter, supports that thesis.

Palantir hasn't provided any longer-term targets beyond 2025. But based on the growth trajectory of other big data companies like Salesforce (NYSE:CRM), its annual revenue increase could potentially decelerate and stabilize at about 20% over the following 10 years.

If it hits its target for 2025, then continues to grow its revenue at an average rate of 20% over the following 10 years, it could generate nearly $27 billion in revenue in 2035.

If Palantir's revenue growth then slows down to 15% per year, which would be more comparable to Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) current rate, it could generate over $53 billion in revenue in 2040.

Assuming the company is still valued at over 20 times sales, its market cap could surpass $1 trillion. But most tech giants that grow their revenue 15% to 25% annually aren't valued at more than 20 times sales.

Microsoft, which is expected to generate 17% sales growth this year, trades at 13 times that estimate. Salesforce, which is expected to generate 24% sales growth this year, trades at just 11 times this year's sales.

Therefore, Palantir's market cap could potentially hit $1 trillion by 2040, but it seems highly unlikely. Instead, it will likely be closer to $500 billion (which would still be a 12-bagger gain from its current valuation) if its stock is trading at a more reasonable P/S ratio of 10.

Instead of focusing on Palantir's path toward joining the 12-zero club, investors should focus on its ability to generate sustainable growth.

The company has gained a firm foothold with the U.S. government, but it still faces competition from internally developed systems. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for example, has been developing its own platform to replace Palantir's Falcon. If other agencies follow ICE's lead, the company's dream of becoming the "default operating system for data across the U.S. government" could abruptly end.

Palantir is making solid progress in the commercial market, but its Foundry platform still faces plenty of indirect competitors like C3.ai, Salesforce's Tableau, and Glue from Amazon Web Services.

The company likely believes its reputation as a battle-hardened platform for the U.S. military and government agencies will attract more enterprise customers. But there's no guarantee that this appeal will last for decades or fend off newer, hungrier, and more disruptive players in the data-mining market.

I still believe Palantir's stock is a promising long-term investment on the secular growth of the data-mining and analytics market. However, there's a lot of growth already baked into the stock, and its high valuations could limit its near-term and long-term potential. Palantir probably won't hit a trillion-dollar valuation within the next two decades, but it could still outperform the market and generate impressive multibagger gains.

This article represents the opinion of the writer, who may disagree with the official recommendation position of a Motley Fool premium advisory service. Were motley! Questioning an investing thesis -- even one of our own -- helps us all think critically about investing and make decisions that help us become smarter, happier, and richer.

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Will Palantir Be a Trillion-Dollar Stock by 2040? - The Motley Fool

It takes a special business to capitalise on remote work trends and cryptocurrencys emergence. Data centre and cloud computing play DC Two is tracking to do exactly that.

DC Two (ASX:DC2) is a vertically integrated data centre, cloud and software business which last quarter generated a quarter-on-quarter recurring revenue increase of 20% to $568,264 impressive growth by any measure.

But management believes theres potential for exponential growth in the business, as it moves closer to securing lucrative Tier III accreditation for its flagship Bibra Lake data centre in WA, and simultaneously explores a modular space attracting attention from crypto mining plays locally and abroad.

There really is a few different aspects of this business that we are particularly excited about, DC Two executive director Blake Burton told Stockhead.

Over the last year weve been building out that data centre at Bibra Lake to get it to a point of Tier III accreditation from the Uptime Institute.

At the same time, weve got the DC Two regional modular data centre side of the business, which is growing and attracting interest from overseas because it allows us to provide energy in an ESG-friendly way.

Its clearly an exciting time for DC2 as it grows from its small business roots to something much larger.

We were all thinking it. The world of digital infrastructure is governed by an organisation called the Uptime Institute which measures facilities across the world using a tier system.

Its a measurement which allows customers to better understand the level of facility theyre using for their data. Tier III is the second-highest certification achievable.

Tier III is really important to us, because it will allow us to access contracts with a lot of government enterprises and medium-sized businesses, Burton said.

Tier III basically means that the way your data centre is built allows it to keep your services online for at least 99.982% of the time its all about keeping your data and services online.

Smaller data centres cant do that, which bigger customers view as a risk to their business. Tier III certification will allow us to actually start targeting the medium- and larger-sized businesses that our current facilities dont allow us to.

The Bibra Lake facility has already received ISO27001 certification an internationally recognised security management standard regarded as best practice for information security management systems.

Grouping Tier III and ISO27001 is a very good thing when it comes to attracting new business. Which is timely, since a $2.5 million capital raise announced in September flagged the expansion of DC2s sales team.

Business growth you love to see it. The data storage industry appears to be going exactly the same way.

The whole world has experienced changes with COVID theres been that big shift from having everything stored on a server at the office to people connecting remotely, Burton said.

People are now working from home, theyre connecting remotely to an email server or the program they use, and to facilitate that remote connection you need the data centres and cloud platforms.

People have really started to see this shift from the physical to the virtual over the last few years, and we feel it highlights the importance of this industry and what were looking to do.

At first glance this subhead may look like a list of 2021 investment buzzwords, but in DC Twos case its a real factor driving interest and growth in the companys modular offerings.

DC Twos regional modular facilities are containerised data centres which are placed on renewable energy sites, tapping the power generated onsite to run the data centre equipment.

The first of these is located in WAs Midwest, where the company recently won contracts worth more than $1.7 million and is expanding capacity to around 2 megawatts by the end of 2021.

DC Two is also delivering a modular data centre in Victoria next year, in addition to its data centre project in Western Melbourne.

What were doing mostly at the moment with modular is hosting digital currency mining equipment, Burton said.

Weve got people coming from overseas, where theres been a big clamp down in terms of crypto mining, and were able to offer it in an ESG way with renewable energy.

At the moment weve got the Midwest, which is a wind farm, were working on a site in Victoria, which is biogas, and theres another site in Collie under a non-binding MOU which is a solar farm.

We place customer equipment on these renewable energy sites, and were able to offer really cheap power to them that they cant get in the metro area. In some cases, we actually also sell crypto mining equipment to the customer.

Having built itself primarily in WA in the early stages of the business, DC Two is also looking at the east coast post Tier III accreditation at Bibra Lake.

The company currently has a Northern Territory cloud platform in operation, with Victoria potentially the next point of call according to Burton.

Our next push is going to be over east, he said.

Victoria is a really interesting state for us, because were already working on modular there.

Now we can potentially look at running our own cloud platform and services over there as well.

Thats likely shaping as our first relatively big investment outside of Western Australia.

This article was developed in collaboration with DC Two, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.

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