After Losing Home to Foreclosure, “I Bought Myself an iPad”
July 30th, 2010Via: Bloomberg:
The more he thought about the money he was losing, the more it stressed him out. Finally, Ronzio enlisted the help of a firm called You Walk Away and did exactly that from the remaining $319,000 on his condo mortgage. When the bank foreclosed, he says he felt a sense of relief. He also had more cash. He and his fiancée took the kids to Disneyland. Ronzio, 31, gave himself a treat as well.
“I bought myself an iPad,” he says.
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
July 30th, 2010Thanks to Cryptogon readers who sent contributions in the last half of July.
Eileen $75
MW $20
MS $50
JG $100
MH $20
MW2 $25
CM $25
GE to Pay $23 Million to Settle Bribery Allegations
July 29th, 2010Mmm hmm.
Via: AFP:
US industrial titan General Electric has agreed to pay over 23 million dollars to settle allegations that it bribed Iraqi officials, a US financial watchdog said on Tuesday.
GE had been accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of being part of “a 3.6 million dollar kickback scheme with Iraqi government agencies to win contracts to supply medical equipment and water purification equipment.”
Four subsidiaries of the Connecticut-based company were accused of bribing officials at the Iraqi ministries of health and oil, trading cash, computer equipment and medical supplies to win lucrative contracts.
…
The contracts were linked to the UN’s discredited “oil-for-food” program which allowed international firms to offer services paid for from Iraqi oil revenues.
An investigation later found that Iraqi officials had siphoned off around 1.7 billion in kickbacks from the contracts.
In a statement, GE said the “conduct did not meet our standards.”
“We believe that it is in the best interests of GE and its shareholders to resolve this matter now, without admitting or denying the allegations, and put the matter behind us.”
Citigroup to Pay $75 Million to Settle SEC Subprime Case
July 29th, 2010Another one for your Pocket Lint file folder.
Via: Bloomberg:
Citigroup Inc., which got a $45 billion taxpayer bailout, will pay $75 million to settle U.S. regulatory claims that it understated investments linked to subprime mortgages as the housing crisis unfolded, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said.
New Amazon Kindle
July 29th, 2010The new wifi only Kindle for $139 looks very tempting to me. I won’t be buying any ebooks, but I have tons of documents in PDF. The problem is that I never did get used to reading for pleasure on my regular flat panel display. I think of pleasure reading as something that happens away from the computer, with no fan noise or bright screens, etc.
Is that E-Ink screen really as good as it’s hyped up to be? Also, are you happy with how the Kindle deals with PDFs?
Timing of Stock Sales by Moody’s CEO
July 29th, 2010Via: McClatchy:
The chief executive of Moody’s Investors Service sold almost $3 million in company stock this year, and $7.1 million last year, both times right before his company’s stock price fell from its peak levels, a McClatchy analysis has found.
Afghanistan: U.S. Spends $20 Billion Per Year for Air Conditioning in Tents
July 29th, 2010This astonishing statistic is mentioned in the audio feature on the page linked below.
Via: PRI:
The term we were looking for is “Forward Operating Base” or FOB. The US has many FOBs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The large ones have many tents and other structures where personnel live and work. And all of them need to be heated in the winter, and cooled in the summer. That can take a lot of fuel.
Steve Anderson is a retired Brigadier General who was General David Petraeus’s chief logistician in Iraq. He says the Pentagon should find ways to make structures at FOBs and other military compounds more energy efficient, not only to save money and be greener, but also, to save lives.
Judge Orders Life Sentence for Florida Keys Drug Smuggler — Who Worked for the U.S. State Department?
July 29th, 2010Via: Key News:
An admitted drug smuggler who carried millions of dollars in hash oil and marijuana in the keels of sailboats through the Florida Keys will spend the rest of his life in prison, a federal judge ruled Monday.
The life sentence of Juergen Heinz Williams, also known as Juergen Werthmann, was the last chapter in a bizarre trial that harkened back to the days when Keys waters teemed with “square grouper.”
Prosecutors convinced a jury in January that Williams spearheaded a conspiracy to smuggle hash oil from Jamaica into Monroe County, and then north into Canada, where it was distributed.
The same jury acquitted two co-defendants — Morgan Lynch, owner of MD Custom Cycles in Key Largo, and Howard Bornstein, a Key Largo online seafood purveyor.
A September 2009 trial for the three men ended in a hung jury, prompting a retrial that began Jan. 4.
Williams surprised prosecutors when he took the stand in the latter trial and admitted he took part in the conspiracy, even correcting government witnesses who understated the scope of his operation.
Some witnesses testified that there were a total of two or four loads of hash oil, but Williams testified that the true number was closer to seven.
One witness testified that one drug run brought in about $1 million for the conspirators, but Williams said he made closer to $5.5 million in the venture.
Williams also raised eyebrows when he admitted under oath to smuggling drugs, but did so, he testified, while acting as an operative of the U.S. State Department. He later fired his attorney, Joel DeFabio of Coral Gables, for not arguing that point before jurors.
Details of 100 Million Facebook Users Compiled, Distributed Over Bit Torrent
July 29th, 2010Via: MSNBC:
The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.
However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.
The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay.
Bowes used code to scan the 500 million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The resulting file, which allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by several thousand people.
This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.
Bowes’ actions also mean people who had set their privacy settings so their names did not appear in Facebook’s search system can now be found if they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable.
CIA and Google Fund Same Web Surveillance Startup
July 29th, 2010Via: Wired:
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its “don’t be evil” mantra.
