Spain Requests Bailout
June 25th, 2012Via: Reuters:
Spain formally requested euro zone rescue loans on Monday to recapitalize banks that are laden with bad debts as the euro and shares fell due to investors’ skepticism that a European Union summit this week will act decisively on the bloc’s debt crisis.
Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos asked for up to 100 billion euros ($125 billion) in a letter to Euro group chairman Jean-Claude Juncker, saying the final amount of assistance would be set at a later stage.
He confirmed his intention to sign a Memorandum of Understanding for the package by July 9 and said the amount should be enough to cover all banks’ needs, plus an additional security buffer.
RBS Still Facing Crisis After ‘Software Upgrade’
June 25th, 2012Via: Guardian:
Royal Bank of Scotland is facing calls to make payments as soon as possible to customers affected by its long-running computer crisis, as it admitted NatWest branches would again be opened for extended hours on Monday.
The bank, whose NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster branches have all been hit by the problem, has unveiled a three-point plan to try to ensure consumers were not left out of pocket.
RBS first encountered problems with its computer systems on Tuesday after an upgrade of its software, and has since been struggling to resolve the issues. Customers found payments had not been made to their accounts, and many were unable to access their cash.
NatWest opened about 1,200 branches for the first time ever on a Sunday to deal with the backlog of transactions. On Monday they will be open between 8am and 7pm.
Wikipedia Is An Editorial Warzone
June 24th, 2012Via: MSNBC:
The Internet is a wonderland for sociologists, and one of the richest areas of study is Wikipedia, with its years of open collaboration and communication archived for posterity. But with collaboration comes conflict, and the “edit wars” that embroil hot Wikipedia topics are dissected in detail in a new paper by researchers in Budapest.
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Edit wars are frequently conducted between a few extremely vociferous individuals. While dozens of editors may contribute to an article over any given period of time, it is often a much smaller number of highly opinionated editors who contribute the bulk of the edits, often redoing or removing each other’s work.
Hybrid Grass Produces Cyanide Gas, Kills Herd of Cattle
June 24th, 2012The article states that Tifton 85 is a genetically modified grass, but it’s actually a hybrid:
Tifton 85 is the best of many F1 hybrids between PI 290884 from South Africa and Tifton 68, a highly digestible but cold susceptible hybrid that was released in 1983.
Via: KEYE TV:
A mysterious mass death of a herd of cattle has prompted a federal investigation in Central Texas.
Preliminary test results are blaming the deaths on the grass the cows were eating when they got sick.
The cows dropped dead several weeks ago on a ranch in Elgin, just east of Austin.
Jerry Abel opens the gate on his 80-acre ranch in Elgin, walking on a field of grass he’s been using for cattle grazing and hay for 15 years.
“This is it, a lot of leaf, it’s good, grass, tested high for protein – it should have been perfect,” said Abel.
The grass is a genetically modified form of Bermuda known as Tifton 85 which has been growing here for 15 years, feeding Abel’s 18 head of Corriente cattle. Corriente are used for team roping because of their small size and horns.
…
Dr. Gary Warner, an Elgin veterinarian who specializes in cattle, conducted the 15 necropsy. Preliminary tests revealed the Tifton 85 grass, which has been here for years, had suddenly started producing cyanide gas, poisoning the cattle.
“Coming off the drought that we had the last two years, we’re concerned it was a combination of events that led us to this,” said Warner. “The problem is, we don’t know, and there needs to be some caution exercised until we know more about the situation.”
The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia
June 23rd, 2012“Yes, they even dress like mobsters, and wear the pinky rings.”
—Unloading Toxic Waste Mortgage Backed Securities: “We Americans Were Very Clever”
Via: Rolling Stone:
The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.
In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What’s more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street’s secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves’ cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about “getting a button man to clip the capo,” on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like “pull a nickel out” or “get to the right level” or “you’re hanging out there” – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.
From Milk to Peas, a Chinese Food-Safety Mess
June 23rd, 2012Via: New York Times:
There’s mercury in the baby formula. Cabbages are sprayed with formaldehyde. Gelatin capsules for pills, tens of millions of them, are laced with chromium. Used cooking oil is scooped out of gutters for recycling, right along with the sewage.
Accounts of dubious or unsafe food in China are as mesmerizing as they are disturbing — “artificial green peas,” grilled kebabs made from cat meat, contaminated chives, chlorine showing up in soft drinks.
There have been stories of imitation soy sauce made from hair clippings, ink and paraffin being used to dress up cheap noodles, and pork buns so loaded with bacteria that they glow in the dark.
A new investigation by the Chinese magazine Caixin has found that “these publicized food safety scandals represent only a fraction of unsafe food production practices. Hundreds of chemical food additives are pumped into products that Chinese people consume every day.”
The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported Wednesday that Chinese authorities have discovered 15,000 cases of substandard food so far this year while shutting down 5,700 unlicensed food businesses.
Things are so bad that a new iPhone app was recently launched to track food scandals nationwide. The app, which sends out daily updates on the latest outrages, was reportedly downloaded more than 200,000 times in the first week.
Related:
Secret Organic Gardens for China’s Elite
China: Regime Admits 10% of Farmland Polluted with Heavy Metals
Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror
June 23rd, 2012Via: JPL / YouTube:
Team members share the challenges of Curiosity’s final minutes to landing on the surface of Mars.
Proposed HTTP Status Code for Censored Websites: 451
June 22nd, 2012Via: Guardian:
Ray Bradbury’s fiction looks set to enter the structure of the internet, after a software developer has proposed a new HTTP status code inspired by Fahrenheit 451.
Tim Bray, a fan of Bradbury’s writing, is recommending to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which governs such choices, that when access to a website is denied for legal reasons the user is given the status code 451.
There are already a host of HTTP status codes, from the common 404 Not Found to 504 Gateway Timeout. The 451 idea follows a blogpost from Terence Eden, who found that his ISP had been ordered to censor the Pirate Bay when he was given an HTTP 403 Forbidden message, meaning that “the server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfil it”. In fact, Eden writes on his blog, it was not Pirate Bay that was preventing access but the government, after Britain’s high court issued an order to ISPs to block access to the filesharing site in April, so the response was “factually incorrect”, and a new code is needed to indicate “censorship”.
The Case Against Autonomous Killing Machines
June 22nd, 2012Via: io9:
In his conversation with io9, Wallach seemed frustrated that some people see this issue as something that’s too futuristic to care about. “We’re at a potential inflection point in the development of autonomous weaponry,” he said. “That inflection point won’t last for a long period of time, and if we wait too long, other vested interests will take over that prospect.”
Android App Steals Contactless Credit Card Data
June 21st, 2012Via: SC Magazine:
A German penetration tester has posted to the Google store an Android application capable of siphoning credit card data from contactless bank cards.
The app, dubbed paycardreader, will skim card numbers and expiry dates, along with transactions and merchant IDs, and was successfully tested against a German PayPass Mastercard.
Developer Thomas Skora, senior consultant for Integralis, said it also worked with Germany’s popular GeldKarte.
The app required either an NFC-enabled (near field communications) handset, or for users to attach a near field communications transmitter to their Android phones.
Skora said the app was “only for technical demonstration” to demonstrate how data could be swiped from contactless cards.
