More Foreclosures, More Bank Failures, Big Trouble for the FDIC
August 11th, 2010Via: Yahoo Finance:
The U.S. housing market continues to send mix signals. More homes continue to enter foreclosure but the number of homeowners carrying so-called “under water mortgages,” declined in the second quarter, Zillow.com reported Monday.
21.5% of homeowners owed more on their mortgage than their home was worth in the second quarter, that’s down from 23.3% in the first quarter and 23% a year ago.
“There are a lot homes caught up in mortgage modifications,” explains Richard Suttmeier of ValuEngine.com, which he says results in a temporary stability in home prices. The key word: temporary.
“There’s waves of more foreclosures coming in the housing market because very few of the HAMP modifications are becoming permanent,” he says.
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The ‘negative feedback loop’ is going to lead to more bank failures and that leads to another problem – a lack of money in the FDIC Insurance Fund.
Cryptogon Reader Sends $20
August 11th, 2010MW sent $20. Thank you.
‘John Doe’ Who Fought FBI Spying Partially Freed From Gag Order After 6 Years
August 11th, 2010Via: Wired:
The owner of an internet service provider who mounted a high-profile court challenge to a secret FBI records demand has finally been partially released from a 6-year-old gag order that forced him to keep his role in the case a secret from even his closest friends and family. He can now identify himself and discuss the case, although he still can’t reveal what information the FBI sought.
Nicholas Merrill, 37, was president of New York-based Calyx Internet Access when he received a so-called “national security letter” from the FBI in February 2004 demanding records of one of his customers and filed a lawsuit to challenge it. His company was a combination ISP and security consultancy business that was launched in the mid-90s and had about 200 customers, Merrill said, many of them advertising agencies and non-profit groups.
Despite the fact that the FBI later dropped its demand for the records, Merrill was prohibited from telling his fiancée, friends or family members that he had received the letter or that he was embroiled in a lawsuit challenging its legitimacy. He occasionally showed up for court hearings about the case, but sat silently in the audience with other court observers. In 2007, he was prevented from publicly accepting an award for his courage from the American Civil Liberties Union, because he was not allowed to identify himself as the plaintiff in the case.
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York finally released Merrill partially from the gag order (.pdf) on July 30, which Merrill revealed publicly only on Monday.
Cars Hacked Through Wireless Tire Sensors
August 11th, 2010Via: Ars:
The tire pressure monitors built into modern cars have been shown to be insecure by researchers from Rutgers University and the University of South Carolina. The wireless sensors, compulsory in new automobiles in the US since 2008, can be used to track vehicles or feed bad data to the electronic control units (ECU), causing them to malfunction.
Earlier in the year, researchers from the University of Washington and University of California San Diego showed that the ECUs could be hacked, giving attackers the ability to be both annoying, by enabling wipers or honking the horn, and dangerous, by disabling the brakes or jamming the accelerator.
The new research shows that other systems in the vehicle are similarly insecure. The tire pressure monitors are notable because they’re wireless, allowing attacks to be made from adjacent vehicles. The researchers used equipment costing $1,500, including radio sensors and special software, to eavesdrop on, and interfere with, two different tire pressure monitoring systems.
NASA: Future Strategic Issues: Detonate Seabed Methane to “Produce Tactical/Strategic Level Tidal Waves Against Littoral Regions”
August 11th, 2010Here’s a 1999 New Zealand Herald article about the development of a tsunami bomb in the 1940s:
Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal.
An Auckland University professor seconded to the Army set off a series of underwater explosions triggering mini-tidal waves at Whangaparaoa in 1944 and 1945.
Professor Thomas Leech’s work was considered so significant that United States defence chiefs said that if the project had been completed before the end of the war it could have played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb.
Details of the tsunami bomb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Papers stamped “top secret” show the US and British military were eager for Seal to be developed in the post-war years too. They even considered sending Professor Leech to Bikini Atoll to view the US nuclear tests and see if they had any application to his work.
He did not make the visit, although a member of the US board of assessors of atomic tests, Dr Karl Compton, was sent to New Zealand.
“Dr Compton is impressed with Professor Leech’s deductions on the Seal project and is prepared to recommend to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that all technical data from the test relevant to the Seal project should be made available to the New Zealand Government for further study by Professor Leech,” said a July 1946 letter from Washington to Wellington.
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It is unclear what happened to Project Seal once the final report was forwarded to Wellington Defence Headquarters late in the 1940s.
The bomb was never tested on a full scale, and Mr Kirton doubts that Aucklanders would have noticed the trials.
“Whether it could ever be resurrected … Under some circumstances I think it could be devastating.”
Now, the material below is from 2001.
Does anyone understand how the submerged methane hydrate deposits might be weaponized to produce a tsunami?
Via: Defense Technical Information Center:
Training and Testing for Future Strategic Issues/Future Warfare [CIRCA 2025] by Dennis M. Bushnell, NASA Langley Research Center
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SOME INTERESTING POSSIBILITIES
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Detonation of offshore seabed methane hydrate deposits to produce tactical/strategic level tidal waves against littoral regions
DARPA Driving Development of Exascale Computers
August 11th, 2010Via: BBC:
Computers that can perform a quintillion calculations per second are being planned by the US military.
The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has awarded the first grants to firms it wants to build so-called exascale computers.
These will be far more powerful than current top supercomputers which manage just over one petaflop – 1000 trilliion calculations per second.
Darpa expects the first prototypes to be working by 2018.
Baby Boomers of Mass Destruction
August 11th, 2010Via: Bloomberg:
Based on the CBO’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt. This gargantuan discrepancy between our “official” debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities “unofficial” to keep them off the books and far in the future.
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How can the fiscal gap be so enormous?
Simple. We have 78 million baby boomers who, when fully retired, will collect benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid that, on average, exceed per-capita GDP. The annual costs of these entitlements will total about $4 trillion in today’s dollars. Yes, our economy will be bigger in 20 years, but not big enough to handle this size load year after year.
This is what happens when you run a massive Ponzi scheme for six decades straight, taking ever larger resources from the young and giving them to the old while promising the young their eventual turn at passing the generational buck.
Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under U.S. President Richard Nixon, coined an oft-repeated phrase: “Something that can’t go on, will stop.” True enough. Uncle Sam’s Ponzi scheme will stop. But it will stop too late.
And it will stop in a very nasty manner. The first possibility is massive benefit cuts visited on the baby boomers in retirement. The second is astronomical tax increases that leave the young with little incentive to work and save. And the third is the government simply printing vast quantities of money to cover its bills.
Berkeley: Sensor Package Models Building Interiors
August 11th, 2010Shrink it down so that it fits on the remote controlled cyborg beetle.
Uhh, yeah.
Via: ABC:
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a laser backpack that scans its surroundings and creates an instant 3D model.
It can make video games more realistic and buildings more energy efficient. They are driving to discover a model of the whole world.
“Here’s a model of two floors of Corey Hall,” says Professor Zakhor. “This is the fourth floor and this is the third floor.”
It is the first model of an existing building, generated automatically, without human intervention. It is the work of a Cal Berkeley team led by Professor Avideh Zakhor.
Grad student Nicholas Corso dons a backpack brimming with lasers and cameras. As he hikes the hall, the lasers scan everything from floor to ceiling and the cameras capture a panorama.
“The idea,” explains Professor Zakhor, “is that you wear a backpack, you walk inside the building. You’re done. You push a button and out comes this model.”
The model is textured (covered) with the photographs.
Dollar Hits 15-Year Low vs Yen After Fed Move
August 11th, 2010Via: Reuters:
The dollar fell to a 15-year low against the yen on Wednesday as steps taken by the Federal Reserve to revive a faltering U.S. economy pushed U.S. Treasury yields lower.
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The dollar dropped to 84.72 yen JPY= on trading platform EBS, after taking out option barriers at 85.00 and 84.75, in a move fuelled by U.S. two-year Treasury yields hitting a record low.
Californians’ Income Falls for First Time Since WWII
August 11th, 2010Via: Sacramento Bee:
Government statisticians have put a number on Californians’ paycheck pain last year: about $40 billion.
The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis said personal incomes of Golden State workers fell by that amount in 2009 compared with the previous year – the state’s first year-to-year decline since World War II. In the Sacramento region, income was off about $800 million.
