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# WikiLeaks communications infrastructure is currently under attack. Project BO move to coms channel S. Activate Reston5.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has regulated the former government-sponsored enterprises since they were seized during the financial crisis in 2008, said the figure was based on the worst of three scenarios for the economy and housing market that assumes a “deeper second recession.”

Under the best-case scenario, which would be a “stronger near-term recovery” in housing prices, the bailouts of Fannie and Freddie would reach $221 billion. The third scenario, in which housing prices continue on their current projections, would result in the combined bailouts reaching $238 billion.

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Within 36 hours of the system going live, our team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters’ secret ballots. In this post, I’ll describe what we did, how we did it, and what it means for Internet voting.

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We found a vulnerability in the way the system processes uploaded ballots. We confirmed the problem using our own test installation of the web application, and found that we could gain the same access privileges as the server application program itself, including read and write access to the encrypted ballots and database.

The problem, which geeks classify as a “shell-injection vulnerability,” has to do with the ballot upload procedure. When a voter follows the instructions and uploads a completed ballot as a PDF file, the server saves it as a temporary file and encrypts it using a command-line tool called GnuPG. Internally, the server executes the command gpg with the name of this temporary file as a parameter: gpg […] /tmp/stream,28957,0.pdf.

Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.”

The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35 percent. In the U.K., Google’s second-biggest market by revenue, it’s 28 percent.

Google, the owner of the world’s most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country’s 12.5 percent income tax. (See an interactive graphic on Google’s tax strategy here.)

The earnings wind up in island havens that levy no corporate income taxes at all. Companies that use the Double Irish arrangement avoid taxes at home and abroad as the U.S. government struggles to close a projected $1.4 trillion budget gap and European Union countries face a collective projected deficit of 868 billion euros.

Countless Companies

Google, the third-largest U.S. technology company by market capitalization, hasn’t been accused of breaking tax laws. “Google’s practices are very similar to those at countless other global companies operating across a wide range of industries,” said Jane Penner, a spokeswoman for the Mountain View, California-based company. Penner declined to address the particulars of its tax strategies.

Mount Clemens banker David Widlak was shot in the back of the head, Sheriff Mark Hackel said in a press conference.

A handgun – owned by Widlak – was found in the water near a boat launch ramp between Crocker Avenue and Shook Road in Harrison Township.

Hackel says gunshot was cause of death – not undetermined as initially reported by the county medical examiner, Dr. Daniel Spitz. But whether it was suicide or homicide is not known at this time, pending more police investigation.

“We are shocked at this latest turn of events,” the Widlak family said in a statement to The Macomb Daily. “We are now looking to law enforcement officials to conduct a complete and thorough investigation.”

The gunshot wound was to the back of the head at the base of the neck, Spitz says, and would have been fatal.

But the Oakland County medical examiner, Dr. L.J. Dragovic, who was retained by the Widlak family for a second autopsy in the case, declared Monday it was a homicide, and that Widlak was indeed shot “execution”-style. Dragovic says it was “mid-back” of the neck.

Spitz said the X-ray equipment available to him in Macomb County is not as good as Oakland County’s. In Macomb, the machine takes a series of digital photos, while the Oakland County equipment is able to provide a continuous electronic picture and a variety of angles can be viewed.

Widlak, 62, the CEO of Community Central Bank in downtown Mount Clemens had been missing until his body was found Sunday evening in a marshy area of Lake St. Clair in Harrison Township.

Widlak, of Grosse Pointe Farms, was last was seen at the Mount Clemens-based Community Central Bank Corp. administrative offices Sept. 19. His car was in the parking lot when a maintenance worker found the offices in disarray the following morning.

The Macomb County sheriff’s department released copies of 911 calls in the case on Wednesday.

In the first call Sept. 20, a bank employee described finding Community Central Bank Corp.’s offices in disarray that day. The caller says “there’s furniture turned upside down and everything.”

Authorities have said a maintenance worker at David Widlak’s offices placed the call.

The second call was placed Sunday by a duck hunter, who described finding the remains.

“Pretty sure there’s a dead body in the water over here. Floating,” the caller said.

Congress has 30 days to review the sale before the Pentagon and the weapons makers go into more detailed contract discussions with Saudi Arabia. Congress is expected to review the deal when it is back in session after the elections.

The arms package includes 84 new F-15 fighter jets and upgrades to 70 more F-15s that the Saudis already have, as well as three types of helicopters: 70 Apaches, 72 Black Hawks and 36 Little Birds. Saudi Arabia would also get versions of a satellite-guided “smart bomb” system, plus anti-ship and anti-radar missiles.

In an open letter to BC Law’s Interim Dean George Brown posted on EagleiOnline— an online student-run newspaper at BC’s law school — the anonymous dissatisfied customer said soon-to-be grads are about to enter “one of the worst job markets in the history of our profession” and an “overwhelming majority” of them can’t find jobs.

“We are discouraged, scared, and in many cases, feeling rather hopeless about our chances of ever getting to practice law,” the student wrote.

The law school student’s missive then proposed a “solution to this problem.”

The student offered to leave law school without a degree at the end of the semester in exchange for a full tuition refund — a move the erstwhile aspiring attorney says would help BC’s US News ranking because it wouldn’t have to report another graduate’s state of unemployment.

The final report of the Ad-Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense of the NASA Advisory Council was delivered to the Council this month, proposing five recommendations that suggest how the space agency should organize, acquire, investigate, prepare, and lead national and international efforts in planetary defense against near-Earth objects.

“This was a very important step in the process of the United States Government defining its role in protection of life from this occasional, but devastating natural hazard,” former astronaut Russell Schweickart told SPACE.com. “Happily, in the instance of asteroid impacts, this is a natural disaster which can be prevented…only, however, if we properly prepare and work together with other nations around the world.”

Schweickart, who served as co-chair of the task force, said the new report and its recommendations to NASA combined new information with previous studies from the past decade.

The task force met in July to discuss the need for a planetary defense office at NASA. Their final report was submitted to the space agency on Oct. 6.

The system would mirror that used when the military is called on in natural disasters like hurricanes or wildfires. A presidential order dispatches the military forces, working under the control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Under the new rules, the president would approve the use of the military’s expertise in computer-network warfare, and the Department of Homeland Security would direct the work.

Officials involved in drafting the rules said the goal was to ensure a rapid response to a cyberthreat while balancing concerns that civil liberties might be at risk should the military take over such domestic operations.

The rules were deemed essential because most of the government’s computer-network capabilities reside within the Pentagon — while most of the important targets are on domestic soil, whether within the government or in critical private operations like financial networks or a regional power grid.