U.S. Treasury Exchange Stabilization Fund
June 20th, 2011There are more parts at the link. (I’m almost out of bandwidth for this billing cycle, so I only watched part one.)
It’s helpful to think of U.S. Treasury as Goldman Sachs.
Via: Market Skeptics:
Two Million Construction Jobs May be Lost for Good
June 20th, 2011Via: CBS:
Some Americans are giving up entirely on the idea of owning a house – choosing instead a condo or renting an apartment.
In southern California, CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports more of those homes are being built now – but they don’t create as many construction jobs as single-family houses do.
Put on life support by the recession, housing construction in California is beginning to show a pulse. But the life blood is no longer single-family houses. There’s a new driving force: apartment and condo construction.
Hiding Surveillance and Killer Drones in Plain Sight
June 20th, 2011Via: New York Times:
Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.
The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.
Related: Festo’s Smart Bird
Man Mines Precious Metals and Gems on Midtown Manhattan Sidewalks
June 20th, 2011I happen to like stories about weird ways that people make it through this… reality.
Wow, I definitely wouldn’t have ever thought of this. He probably should have told people he lost his contact lenses or something.
Via: New York Post:
There’s gold in them thar sidewalk cracks!
A Queens man has discovered enough hidden treasure — bits of diamonds, rubies, platinum and gold — on the gritty sidewalks of Midtown’s Diamond District to make a living.
“The streets of 47th Street are literally paved with gold,” a giddy Raffi Stepanian, 43, of Whitestone told The Post last week when a reporter discovered him on all fours — armed with tweezers and a butter knife — digging through cracks in the sidewalk in a driving rainstorm.
Largest Ever Marine Corps Drill on U.S. East Coast
June 20th, 2011[???]
Via: CNN:
It’s mid-June, a perfect time to visit the beach to watch porpoises play in the surf or seagulls strut the sand — or you could watch a formation of Marine Corps warplanes darting over the shore at hundreds of miles per hour.
But don’t worry — the United States hasn’t declared war on your family’s beach house. It’s just part of a major Marine Corps exercise called Exercise Mailed Fist (translation: armored fist).
The exercise is designed to test the capability of every type of Marine Corps aircraft, including MV-22 Ospreys and F/A 18 Hornets, as well as some Navy ships and Air Force planes.
The drill will stretch from Quantico Marine Base in northern Virginia to the Navy’s Pinecastle Bombing Range in Florida.
With thousands of Marines and other service members involved, it’s the biggest such drill ever on the U.S. East Coast.
Bitcoin Flashcrash on Mt.Gox
June 19th, 2011Update: Mt.Gox User Database Stolen, Service Down
There’s ugly, there’s fugly and then there’s…
Via: Mt.Gox:
[Update – 2:06 GMT] What we know and what is being done.
It appears that someone who performs audits on our system and had read-only access to our database had their computer compromised. This allowed for someone to pull our database. The site was not compromised with a SQL injection as many are reporting, so in effect the site was not hacked.
Two months ago we migrated from MD5 hashing to freeBSD MD5 salted hashing. The unsalted user accounts in the wild are ones that haven’t been accessed in over 2 months and are considered idle. Once we are back up we will have implemented SHA-512 multi-iteration salted hashing and all users will be required to update to a new strong password.
We have been working with Google to ensure any gmail accounts associated with Mt.Gox user accounts have been locked and need to be reverified.
Mt.Gox will continue to be offline as we continue our investigation, at this time we are pushing it to 8:00am GMT.
When Mt.Gox comes back online, we will be putting all users through a new security measure to authenticate the users. This will be a mix of matching the last IP address that accessed the account, verifying their email address, account name and old password. Users will then be prompted to enter in a new strong password.
Once Mt.Gox is back online, trades 218869~222470 will be reverted.
—End Update—
Update: Compromised Account – Rollback Underway
Via: Mt.Gox:
Huge Bitcoin sell off due to a compromised account – rollback
Mark Karpeles
posted this on Jun-20 04:07
The bitcoin will be back to around 17.5$/BTC after we rollback all trades that have happened after the huge Bitcoin sale that happened on June 20th near 3:00am (JST).
Service should be back by June 20th 10:00am (JST, 01:00am GMT) with all the trades reversed and accounts available.
One account with a lot of coins was compromised and whoever stole it (using a HK based IP to login) first sold all the coins in there, to buy those again just after, and then tried to withdraw the coins. The $1000/day withdraw limit was active for this account and the hacker could only get out with $1000 worth of coins.
Apart from this no account was compromised, and nothing was lost. Due to the large impact this had on the Bitcoin market, we will rollback every trade which happened since the big sale, and ensure this account is secure before opening access again.
—End Update—
Bids were wiped out down to 0.01 on Mt.Gox just now.
Here’s a screen capture from BitcoinCharts. Look at the green arrow:
Bitcoin Flashcrash on Mt.Gox
I was trying to enter buy orders under 1 but I couldn’t get filled. Volume was definitely going off down there. It wasn’t bad prints. Traders with orders on the book far below the market definitely got filled low. People on the bitcoin subreddit are claiming to have been filled at various levels between 6 and 1.
The main reason I’m posting this is to let you know that, when the media write stories about this days from now, you don’t need to bother submitting them. Thanks! Been there, done that, didn’t get the T-shirt, or my buy orders filled.
Greece: Increasing Possibility of ‘Lehman-Style’ Event
June 19th, 2011Via: Telegraph:
UK banks have pulled billions of pounds of funding from the eurozone as fears grow about the impact of a “Lehman-style” event connected to a Greek default.
Senior sources have revealed that leading banks, including Barclays and Standard Chartered, have radically reduced the amount of unsecured lending they are prepared to make available to eurozone banks, raising the prospect of a new credit crunch for the European banking system.
Standard Chartered is understood to have withdrawn tens of billions of pounds from the eurozone inter-bank lending market in recent months and cut its overall exposure by two-thirds in the past few weeks as it has become increasingly worried about the finances of other European banks.
Barclays has also cut its exposure in recent months as senior managers have become increasingly concerned about developments among banks with large exposures to the troubled European countries Greece, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Portugal.
Related: Big Picture Gallery of Recent Riots
Federal Judge Dismisses Third Party Environmental Claims Against Transocean and BP
June 19th, 2011Via: Courthouse News Service:
Ruling in favor of Transocean and BP, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed third-party environmental claims in a giant pleading bundle in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill litigation, saying the fact that the oil flow has stopped makes those lawsuits irrelevant.
“The injunction at this stage would be useless, as not only is there no ongoing release from the well, but there is also no viable offshore facility from which any release could possibly occur,” U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier wrote. “The Macondo well is dead, and what remains of the Deepwater Horizon vessel is on the ocean floor, where it capsized and sank in 5,000 feet of water.
“Moreover, BP and the agencies comprising the Unified Area Command have been and are cleaning up the Gulf of Mexico. An injury is not redressable by a citizen suit when the injury is already being addressed.”
Eisenhower’s Worst Fears Came True: We Invent Enemies to Buy the Bombs
June 19th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain’s borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe’s “failure of political will” in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a “two-tier alliance” between those willing to wage war and those “who specialise in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks”. Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.
…
It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence on government”. A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a “military-industrial-congressional complex”.) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to “endanger our liberties and democratic processes”.
I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today’s US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.”
Russia Orders Stalin-Era Leather Coats for Putin Guards
June 18th, 2011Via: AFP:
Russia’s federal guard service, in charge of protecting President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, may soon sport black leather overcoats harking back to the era of Stalin’s purges. The elite service known by its Russian acronym FSO has launched a tender to purchase 60 leather trenchcoats on the official site for government purchases, instantly drawing tongue-in-cheek criticism from Russian bloggers.
Long leather trenchcoats are infamously associated with uniforms of Soviet NKVD secret police, worn by its low-ranking officers at the height of Stalin’s pre-war purges in the late 1930s.
The coats ordered by the FSO appear to be nearly identical to the NKVD coats, according to the tender documentation and images uploaded on the website zakupki.gov.ru last week.
Research Credit: cptmarginal
