cryptogon.com

Jerome O’Hara and George Perez knowingly created the programs that removed or altered key data contained in reports submitted to regulators in the United States and Europe, according to the indictment filed Wednesday in US District Court in Manhattan. Among other things, their code contained algorithms to randomly generate times for purported orders that in fact were never made.

The reports were generated on “House 17,” an IBM AS/400 server kept on the 17th floor of Madoff’s offices that had no link to the outside world, prosecutors allege. To ensure the reports appeared genuine, the server pulled partial information from a separate AS/400 that was linked to the Depository Trust Company and other third parties.

“The books and records generated by the House 17 programs for [Madoff’s] business were entirely false and fraudulent because, among other things, they purported to reflect securities transactions that, in fact, had never been executed,” prosecutors allege in the indictment.

The document goes on to claim that the programmers knew their programs were being used to falsify information being provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the European Accounting Firm, and sought to profit from their expertise. In 2006, O’Hara and Perez cashed Madoff checks worth $976,000 and $289,000 respectively.

That same year, the pair threatened to leave their jobs unless they received raises of 20 per cent. Madoff not only met their demands, he also gave them raises of $64,812 and $60,165.

They were charged with one count each of conspiracy, falsifying records of a broker-dealer and falsifying records of an investment adviser. If convicted on all counts, the programmers each face 30 years in federal prison and fines of more than $5m. O’Hara’s attorney told numerous news outlets that his client intends to plead not guilty.

O’Hara, 47, and Perez, 44, who worked at Madoff’s firm since the early 1990s, were first charged in November for their alleged role in the multi-billion-dollar fraud that spanned decades. Wednesday’s charges came after the indictment was returned by a federal grand jury.

The Transportation Security Administration is looking at installing devices in airports that home in and detect personal electronic equipment. The aim is to track how long people are stuck in security lines.

Information about wait times could then be posted on websites and in airports across the country.

“This technology will produce valuable data that can be used in a variety of ways,” TSA spokeswoman Lauren Gaches said, noting it could help prevent checkpoint snarls.

But civil-liberties experts worry that such a system enables the government to track people’s whereabouts. “It’s serious business when the government begins to get near people’s personal-communication devices,” said American Civil Liberties Union privacy expert Jay Stanley.

The TSA is in the early phases of exploring the technology, which Purdue University researchers tested for a month last year at Indianapolis International Airport. Thumbnail-size receivers near checkpoints detected serial numbers emitted by some electronic devices being carried by passengers. The receivers recorded the time when a passenger entered a security line and the time when the same passenger cleared the checkpoint, Purdue transportation engineer Darcy Bullock said. Only part of each serial number was recorded, and the numbers were quickly deleted, he said.

Some electronic devices automatically broadcast, or “chirp,” their serial number every 15-20 seconds when they are turned on. People can set their devices so they don’t broadcast. Bullock found he could detect signals from 6% to 10% of Indianapolis passengers. “We sit there and listen, capturing the unique identifier,” Bullock said.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, will make a statement to the House of Commons this afternoon, blaming Israeli intelligence for the cloning of passports belonging to British citizens. The documents were carried by an assassination team that killed Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel.

British officials said Miliband would “request” the immediate departure of an Israeli diplomat, adding that they expect the request to be honoured.

“We think they mucked around with our passports, and we believe that requires consequences,” an official said.

Miliband will announce the results of an investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) into the abuse of British passports in the assassination, which will implicate Israel.

Diplomats stressed that the foreign secretary’s remarks would be confined to the issue of passports and would not address Mabhouh’s murder: “That is for the Emirati authorities,” an official said.

However, the statement will be widely seen around the world as the first definitive allegation from a western government of Israeli responsibility for the murder.

Magnetism arises with the spinning electrons in a material, and with every electron acting as a tiny magnet with its magnetic field aligned with the axis of spin. In most atoms electrons may spin either ‘up’ or ‘down’, but when most of them spin in the same direction, the material becomes magnetic. In iron, for example, there are four more spinning in one direction than in the other.

In a more complex material, the theory is that there are river-like bands of electron clouds formed as those of the individual atoms merge together. Each band contains electrons spinning in only one direction, and the material’s magnetism is determined by the difference between the numbers of each type of band. Using the theory, scientists have predicted that iron-cobalt should be the most magnetic material.

A group of materials physicists from Twin Cities, Minnesota, led by Jian-Ping Wang have found a material comprising 16 iron atoms and two of nitrogen is approximately 18% more magnetic than the predicted limit. The findings of x-ray analysis of the compound showed that six iron atoms are clustered around each nitrogen, with two more located between the two clusters. The researchers said electrons flowing between the clusters act like they do in ordinary iron, but within the clusters, the electrons tend to be localized, and this increases the magnetism.

…

The US giant is redirecting users in mainland China to its unrestricted Hong Kong site, although Chinese firewalls mean results still come back censored.

Beijing said the decision should not affect ties with Washington.

Google threatened to leave the Chinese market completely this year after cyber attacks were traced back to China.

Google’s move effectively to shut its mainland Chinese search service, google.cn, is a major blow to China’s international image, the BBC’s Damian Grammaticas reports from Beijing.

It means one of the world’s most prominent corporations is saying it is no longer willing to co-operate in China’s censorship of the internet, our correspondent says.

The warning follows an academic research group’s discovery — subsequently confirmed by the FDA and Rotarix manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline — that the vaccine contains a pig virus called porcine circovirus 1, or PCV1. The virus is not known to cause illness in humans, and no adverse effects have been observed in children vaccinated with Rotarix, but the agency decided to err on the side of caution with the warning until more information can be obtained.

For the time being, the agency recommends that pediatricians use a competing vaccine, RotaTeq, manufactured by Merck. Preliminary tests have found no traces of PCV1 in this vaccine.

Rotavirus causes severe diarrhea and dehydration and is thought to cause more than 500,000 deaths in infants worldwide each year, primarily in low- and middle-income countries. Before the introduction of RotaTeq in the U.S. in 2006, the disease caused an estimated 50,000 hospitalizations and several dozen deaths each year. Rotarix was introduced in 2008. Most U.S. children who have been vaccinated against rotavirus as part of their normal vaccinations have received RotaTeq, the FDA said. About 1 million have received Rotarix.

The agency is now attempting to determine whether the vaccine contains intact PCV1 or simply viral fragments, as well as how it got into the vaccine. The agency said it will convene an expert advisory panel in four to six weeks to make further recommendations.

The World Health Organization and the European Medicines Agency are not expected to change current guidelines for using the drug, arguing that the benefit from the vaccine far outweighs any potential risk, according to a statement by GlaxoSmithKline.

An estimated 69 million doses of the vaccine have been administered globally. Worldwide sales of the vaccine in 2009 were $425 million, the company said, with $115 million in the U.S.

The blog analysis by Arbor Network’s Craig Labovitz follows on from his company’s Atlas Observatory Report of last October which offered a fascinating insight into how the Internet is being moulded by a small and decreasing number of super-carriers, with Google at their head.

Arbor has now provided more detail on the astounding explosion of Google’s Internet presence, which as of last summer it estimates as accounting for peak rates of 10 percent of all Internet inter-domain Internet traffic it sees travelling through its servers.

Between June 2007 and a year later, the average traffic percentage grew from around 1 percent to around 2.5 percent; by last summer the percentage was a minimum of 5 percent and growing.

The main reason was Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2007, which consumes huge volumes of video traffic, the application that almost on its own is driving capacity growth at the peer network level.