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The reading was especially painful since this reform sausage is stuffed with more gristle than meat. At least, that is, if you are a taxpayer hoping the bailout train is coming to a halt.

If you’re a banker, the bill is tastier. While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises.

Nuggets Gleaned

Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from days spent reading Frank’s handiwork:

— For all its heft, the bill doesn’t once mention the words “too-big-to-fail,” the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12- stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery.

It doesn’t seem to matter to many hedge fund traders and other professional investors that the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has turned in its first losing performance over the course of a decade, having fallen 23 percent from 1,469.25 at the start of 2000 to its current 1,126.20. Or that they or other investors helped create and then destroy the bubbles that left stocks worth $2.5 trillion less today than when the decade began — and that’s before adding in the effects of inflation.

A mix of investor hubris, ignorance and piles of easy money created the bubbles. New ideas about where to invest seemed foolproof and greed crowded out doubts. Many investors looking for the best returns failed to see the potential problems with an Internet business that had no sales plan, or that thousands of expensive homes bought with no down payment might end up in foreclosure.

Now, these investors who fled the last blowups risk running smack into others. The Federal Reserve is keeping borrowing costs low to help revive the economy, and that means there’s still plenty of easy money around, helping traders to inflate the price of everything from stocks to commodities such as gold.

Karsten Nohl, a 28-year-old German native, reportedly cracked the code and has published his findings to the computer and electronics hacking community. Mr. Nohl, who cites a strong interest in protecting the privacy of citizens against snooping from any party, says that his work showcases the outdated algorithms’ flaws.

At the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day conference of computer hackers that runs through Wednesday in Berlin, he revealed his accomplishments. He describes, “This shows that existing GSM security is inadequate. We are trying to push operators to adopt better security measures for mobile phone calls.”

The GSM Association, the London-based group that developed the standard and represents wireless companies, was quick to blast the publication calling Mr. Nohl’s actions illegal and counterintuitive to the desire to protect the privacy of mobile phone calls. However, they insist that the publication in no way threatens the standard’s security.

Claire Cranton, an association spokeswoman, confirmed that Mr. Nohl was the first to break the code, commenting, “[Security threats from the publication of this standard are] theoretically possible but practically unlikely. What he is doing would be illegal in Britain and the United States. To do this while supposedly being concerned about privacy is beyond me.”

Mr. Nohl attended college in the U.S. and received a PhD in computer engineering from the University of Virginia. Via a similar publication, he managed to convince the DECT Forum, a separate standards group based in Bern, to upgrade its own security algorithm, improving the protection to the standard’s 800 million customers in the process.

And while the trade group is only on yellow alert, some security experts disagree with the group’s threat analysis, as well, saying the threat could be far more serious. One expert suggested that calls may soon need to be scanned for malicious activity, much as an antivirus scanner works on a computer.

Stan Schatt, a vice president for health care and security at the technology market researcher ABI Research in New York, opines, “Organizations must now take this threat seriously and assume that within six months their organizations will be at risk unless they have adequate measures in place to secure their mobile phone calls.”

The process of cracking the algorithm involved the help of 24 members of the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, who helped generate the random combinations needed to try and reproduce the standard’s code book, so to speak. The vast log of binary combinations forms the basis of the A5/1 encryption — and how to undo it. And it’s now on torrents worldwide.

Despite that, Mr. Nohl insists that his actions aren’t illegal. He says he took great precautions to make sure his work was kept purely academic, in the public domain, and that it was not used to crack any actual digital telephone calls. He states, “We are not recommending people use this information to break the law. What we are doing is trying to goad the world’s wireless operators to use better security.”

A5/1 is a 64-bit security algorithm. Despite this particular algorithm’s run, 64-bit encryption is considered weaker by today’s standards. Today 128-bit algorithms are considered to be strong enough to protect most data. The GSM Association has devised a 128-bit successor to A5/1, dubbed A5/3, but it has failed to push the standard out across much of the industry.

The Association claims that there’s little danger of calls being intercepted as hackers would have to pick one call stream out of thousands at a cell phone tower. They say that this would take prohibitively expensive sophisticated equipment and software. Security experts disagree with this assessment — including Mr. Nohl who pointed out that there was a wealth of open source software and cheap equipment to accomplish exactly those sort of objectives.

Simon Bransfield-Garth, the chief executive of Cellcrypt, a company based in London that sells software, agrees, saying that the publications opens call interception to “any reasonable well-funded criminal organization”. He adds, “This will reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours. We expect as this further develops it will be reduced to minutes.”

National Irish Bank has written to thousands of its customers this month informing them of a “new style of banking” in which branches will not handle over-the-counter cash transactions.

The letter says branches will no longer handle cash withdrawals and lodgements, night safe lodgements and foreign currency cash. Branches will continue to lodge cheques, drafts and postal orders and issue drafts.

Customers are advised to obtain cash from “ATMs nationwide” or to seek “cash-back” on their debit cards.

Yet the reverberations from this half-baked enterprise quickly roiled the entire world. Within hours, a whole range of new, even more intrusive and draconian security procedures were imposed on travelers across the globe. Governments hastened to launch “security reviews,” and promise “tough new measures” not only to thwart terrorists but to root out nests of agitators and “radicalizers” clinging to the soft underbelly of our all-too-tolerant, too-nice-for-its-own-good Western world.

Perhaps most significantly, the non-igniting of the homemade device has “rejuvenated [the] debate … over the proper balance between security and privacy,” the New York Times informs us — while quoting several “experts” who let us know just which way this “balance” is now going to tilt. These “experts” include Bush retreads like ex-Homeland Security commissar Michael Chertoff, who now dabbles profitably in the “risk management and security consulting” industry — yet another of our great and good for whom every act of terror (real or imagined, successful or unsuccessful) means boffo box office.

The sudden insertion of Chertoff into the story gives us another example of a grim, enduring truth: the construction of “conventional wisdom” among our media and political elites is always driven, in large part or in whole, by raw, brutal self-interest. The new CW now being assembled before our eyes is a “rejuvenation” of one of the ruling tropes of the 21st century: “Liberty bad, security good.”

II.
Here is another story in the news: in an isolated rural province in Afghanistan, 10 people were killed in a raid by American-led forces. The Afghan government, installed and sustained in power by the United States, said the victims were all civilians — including eight schoolboys.

But there was no international outcry about this incident; it barely garnered a few mentions in the global press. And even these were quickly shunted aside after a NATO official denied the claims of the Afghan government, and affirmed that all those killed in the raid were evil-doers.

…

But the NATO official said the Afghans were lying. We will never know the whole truth, of course, for the story will ultimately be controlled by the very force that carried out the attack: the American-led military occupation.

But what an instructive contrast. In one story, an attack which did not happen and which killed no one shakes the entire world. In another story, ten human beings, including eight children, were slaughtered in a sneak attack by night — and the world can scarcely be bothered to notice.

The young Muslim men, who are from the Washington DC area, were arrested in Pakistan earlier this month. Pakistani police and government officials have made a series of escalating and, at times, seemingly contradictory claims about the men’s intentions. US officials have been far more cautious, but they, too, are looking at charging the men.

A Pakistani government official alleged on Saturday that the men had established contact with Taliban commanders and had planned to attack sites in Pakistan. Earlier, however, local police accused the five of intending to fight in Afghanistan after meeting militant leaders.

The men allegedly had a map of Chashma Barrage, a complex that along with nuclear power facilities houses a water reservoir and other structures, said Javed Islam, a senior police official in the Sargodha area of Punjab province where the men were arrested.

He stressed that they were not carrying a specific map of a nuclear power plant, but a map of the whole Chashma Barrage. The detained men had also exchanged emails about the area, Islam claimed. “We are also working to retrieve the deleted material in their computers,” he said.

Pakistan has an arsenal of nuclear weapons, but also has nuclear power plants for civilian purposes.

Any nuclear activity in Pakistan tends to come under US scrutiny after the main architect of its atomic weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was accused of leaking sensitive nuclear secrets. But, as militancy has spread in Pakistan, officials have repeatedly insisted that the nuclear weapons programme is secure.

A Pakistani police official, Nazir Ahmad, told the Associated Press that the force would ask the courts to charge the five men with collecting and attempting to collect material to carry out terrorist activities in the country. If convicted, the charges carry a sentence of from seven years to life in prison, he said.

Officials in Pakistan and America say they expect the suspects eventually to be deported back to the US, but charging the men in Pakistan could delay that process. The country’s legal system can be slow and opaque.

In an interview with the Associated Press on Saturday, Punjab province’s law minister, Rana Sanaullah, claimed the men had established contact with Taliban commanders. He said they planned to meet the Pakistani Taliban chief, Hakimullah Mehsud, and his deputy, Qari Hussain, in the tribal region before going on to attack sites inside Pakistan. The nuclear power plant “might have been” one of the targets, Sanaullah alleged.

FBI agents have been granted some access to the men, who are being held in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, and are looking into what potential charges they could face in the US. Possibilities include conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist group.

monday december 28 2009 11:59

The 54 year old man that was found dead on thursday in his flat on the Mayor Elsenlane in Rijswijk ( near The Hague )
appears to be a renowed nuclear physicist. The Italian engineer Antonio Ferrigno was brutally murdered.

A spokesperson of the Hague PD confirmed Ferrigno’s identity on monday.

Pacemaker

According to the Italian media he was a researcher at the patent bureau that is located in Rijswijk .
He did groundbreaking work in the technological development of the pacemaker.
Ferrigno was found at noon on thursday the 24th by members of his family, with his hands
tied and lying in a big pool of blood, according to “De Telegraaf”

Ex-wife

At the moment the detectives are looking specifically for witnesses who walked past the house of the
victim that day between 04h00 and 06h00 in the morning and who may have seen something suspicious.

According to eye witnesses the Italian got very few visitors other than his daughter and from time to time
a woman of Antillian descent ( probably his ex-wife)

…

When the rotor is manually braked, the supply current in the toroidal coils remains constant,

The Obama administration’s new plan to give a boost to small businesses reflects continued trouble in that sector, which is facing new failures even as much of the nation’s economy is stabilizing.

As credit lines have shrunk and consumers have cut back on spending, thousands of small businesses have closed their doors over the last year. The plight of struggling firms has been aggravated by the reluctance of banks to lend money, said Brian Headd, an economist at the Small Business Administration’s office of advocacy.

“While bankruptcies are up, overall, small-business closures are up even more,” Headd said.

California has been particularly hard hit. The latest data show small-business bankruptcies up 81% in the state for the 12 months ended Sept. 30, compared with the previous year. Filings nationwide were up 44%, according to the credit analysis firm Equifax Inc.

The actual number of small businesses in trouble is probably higher, experts said, because many owners file for personal bankruptcy rather than seek protection for the business.

Dennis McGoldrick, a bankruptcy lawyer in Torrance, said his clients are all stuck in similar situations — capital is hard to come by, customers are tough to attract and debt is piling up.