Housing Outlook Takes a Grim Turn
January 9th, 2008Via: AP:
Shares of Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation’s largest mortgage lender, sank to an all-time low Tuesday as a major homebuilder offered a grim outlook for the industry and the Bush administration signaled it is growing more concerned about rising mortgage defaults.
KB Home reported a mammoth loss for the fourth quarter and said there are no indications that the housing market is stabilizing. The head of Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored mortgage lender, predicted the housing market would weaken through 2009 and said a turnaround wasn’t likely until 2010.
President Bush, meanwhile, conceded, “It’s going to take awhile to work through the downturn,” and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said he is concerned about the potential for additional home defaults.
Paulson said the administration is exploring expanding a deal it brokered with mortgage lenders last fall to include relief to people who borrowed at prime, conventional rates as well as those with subprime, adjustable-rate mortgages that were due to reset.
Countrywide stock fell in morning trading after The New York Times reported about accusations that the company had fabricated letters submitted in a court case involving a foreclosure in Pennsylvania.
By early afternoon, the New York Stock Exchange temporarily halted trading of Countrywide shares before the company issued a statement denying rumors that a bankruptcy filing was imminent.
“There is no substance to the rumor that Countrywide is planning to file for bankruptcy, and we are not aware of any basis for the rumor that any of the major rating agencies are contemplating negative action relative to the company,” the statement said.
When trading resumed, the shares rebounded somewhat, but then slid again. They finished with a decline of $2.17, or 28.4 percent, to $5.47 after falling to an all-time low of $5.05 earlier in the day.
A rating analysis issued by Egan-Jones Ratings Co. suggested Countrywide “is severely challenged and might falter if it does not receive an infusion of at last $4 billion within the next couple of weeks.”
The agency said the lender will need the funding to weather a steep decline in mortgage originations and its shift to less-profitable, non-subprime lending.
Uneasy investors were hard-pressed to find reassurance elsewhere.
ACLU Rips Plan to Track Students with RFID
January 9th, 2008Via: Guardian/AP:
A tech company with ties to a school district plans to test a tracking system by putting computer chips on grade-schoolers’ backpacks, an experiment the ACLU ripped Monday as invasive and unnecessary.
The pilot program set to start next week in the Middletown school district would have about 80 children put tags containing radio frequency identification chips, or RFID chips, on their schoolbags. It would also equip two buses with global positioning systems, or GPS devices.
The school and parents will be able to track students on the bus, and the district hopes the program will improve busing efficiency, Superintendent Rosemarie Kraeger said. The devices are intended to record only when students enter and exit the bus, and the GPS would show where the bus was on it’s route.
Parents could opt out of the program, Kraeger said.
The pilot program, made by MAP Information Technology Corp., is to run for several months at the Aquidneck School, she said. The district, which serves about 2,500 students, is the company’s only client, said Deborah Rapp, the company’s director of marketing and communications.
Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, sent a letter to Kraeger and members of the school committee calling the plan “a solution in search of a problem” and saying the school district should already have procedures in place to track where its students are.
On Monday, he said the program raises enormous privacy and safety concerns.
“There’s absolutely no need to be tagging children,” he said. “We are not questioning the school district’s ability to use GPS to monitor school buses. But it’s a quantitative leap to monitor children themselves.”
Put Options Lotto on Apple: Request for Technical Analysis Opinions
January 9th, 2008WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
When Apple (AAPL) was up around $200 recently, I scoffed, chortled and thought, “How f*!@#$% ridiculous that this thing is $200.” I brought up the chart and laughed some more.
Almost in disbelief that anyone would be buying AAPL at $200, I logged into my brokerage account and swiftly bought January put options with a strike of 140. I paid .11. They closed at .50 today.
I didn’t have the capital to take the pig short properly, or the stones to buy more expensive strikes (closer to the money). But look what happened:
Daddy likes rotten AAPLes
It’s the old extreme stochastic oscillator—price/volume divergence trick.
Anyway, we’re ten days from expiration and I’m wondering if any Cryptogon technicians are playing this pig short? My puts have virtually no chance of being in the money, but that’s not the issue.
Looking at January expiration, would Cryptogon technicians sell those 140 strike puts here, or let it ride a bit longer?
Personally, letting them expire worthless would be less painful than watching them double or more after taking .50 here. But, you know what they say about a bird in the hand… And what happens to pigs.
Yep, eating soup with a knife. Neither easy, nor pretty.
GOLD $875 FRESH ALL TIME HIGH
January 8th, 2008Too much confetti, not enough exits.
Via: Forbes:
LONDON (Thomson Financial) – Gold hit a fresh all-time high above 875 usd in early London trade as a rebound in oil prices and further dollar weakness sparked a fresh round of buying.
‘Currencies and oil are the main drivers behind this at the moment,’ said Commerzbank analyst Rory McVeigh. ‘When stops were taken out at 870 usd we saw a real rush of buying. It’s held above 870 usd so we should see it consolidate now until the Americans come in later today.’
At 10.03 am, spot gold was up at 872.90 usd an ounce against 859.30 usd in late New York trades yesterday, having earlier hit a fresh all-time high of 875.80 usd.
New Power Meters in California Can Ration, or Cut Off Electricity by Remote Control
January 8th, 2008The Nanny State, for-the-children, technocratic control grid thermostat story doesn’t seem so bad, compared to the story below about the “new” new power meters that are being rolled out in California.
The state is actually making asymmetric warfare much easier for those who will eventually try to fight. There will be a window of opportunity for networked insurgents to use technologies like this to cause more damage than divisions of armed men could ever unleash by conventional means.
Put these meters into the data centers, and the long haul peering points in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Lower Manhattan and just across the river in New Jersey, where many of the Firms operate redundant infrastructure, and let’s see what happens.
I dare the f*ckers to do it.
When (not if) someone figures out how to take control of (or simply brick) these meters, it could make 9/11 look like a church social. I thought about it for thirty seconds and— [I just deleted what I wrote here.]
Remember when the fringe—disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks—warned about the problems of electronic voting systems…
And now: Remotely accessible power meters with the capability to arbitrarily regulate power output???
You couldn’t even make it up, from an asymmetric warfare perspective.
Holy shit. It’ll be like a modern, Apocalyptic mashup of the olden days with Captain Crunch and his handy 2600hz whistle, or, more recently with Adrian Lamo with his old Toshiba laptop (missing keys) and his web browser. These are the real poster children of the asymmetric revolution. The question is, will the kids who will oWn these power systems be in it for fun, or in it to win? Maybe both.
Keep flashlights and candles handy.
* chuckle *
Via: San Francisco Chronicle:
…customers would get an electricity meter than can be switched on or off remotely, without a visit from one of PG&E’s customer service trucks. During a power emergency, the devices also could ration electricity to a home rather than blacking it out entirely.
…
The meters PG&E has installed in the past year can be read remotely, without sending a PG&E employee to every customer’s home. The new ones can do that too, as well as start or stop power via remote control. They also can be programmed with software that, in the future, could allow them to control home appliances, turning off air conditioners and washing machines or changing their power levels as needed.
France: First All Electric Light Aircraft Flight
January 8th, 2008“As far as I can tell, there is no viable propulsion system on the horizon for aircraft outside of liquid fuels… You won’t see a plug-in Boeing 747 anytime soon.”
—Sandia’s Sunshine to Petrol Project Seeks Fuel from Thin Air
Nope. You won’t see a plug-in Boeing 747 anytime soon. But this reminds me of the freaks who wanted electric cars so badly (over the last couple of decades) that they couldn’t help themselves. So, at great expense, they converted conventional cars to run on electric power, and the results pretty much sucked. (I know, someone with a lead acid powered Pinto dragster is going to slap me on the face with a white glove over that last statement.)
Now that professionally engineered and built electric cars are nearly here (again), the same freaks want to take to the skies on electric power.
So, when will viable electric aircraft come into existence?
Again: Not in the foreseeable future, is my best guess. For me, “Not in the foreseeable future,” means that I can’t even theorize how it would be possible in the next twenty years, given my knowledge of power storage technologies (both current and under development). For it to happen sooner would require some kind of wildcard development/technology release from a government crypt, etc. It would be almost infinitely easier to run that existing 747 on algae juice, and, as it turns out: They are.
Still, someone had to lay claim to the first all electric light aircraft flight…
Via: Times Online:
Little noticed by the outside world, on December 23, a pilot took off from an Alpine airfield and flew for 48 minutes in the first light aircraft to be powered by electricity.
With electric cars and boats finally in action, that might sound like no big deal. But electric power has long been the impossible dream of aviation because the energy is so puny compared with the dead weight of the batteries. Sitting behind the noisy, gas-gulping beast that pulls my little plane through the sky, I often muse on what it would be like to have a smooth quiet motor turning the blades and belching no carbon into the air. That, in modest form, is exactly what the APAME, a team of French engineers at the village of Saint Pierre d’Argencon, have just achieved.
Their “Electra”, a kit-built single-seater, flew around the high Alps with a 25 horse-power electric motor and 47 kilogrammes of lithium-polymer batteries. The flight shows that non-polluting, quiet and inexpensive flying is withing reach, Anne Lavrand, the president of the APAME group, said. “This will be a real aeroplane that will have an airworthiness certificate. It’s a machine built for anyone with a pilot’s license.”
Several far richer outfits, mainly in the USA, are working on similar power packs but so far none have got off the ground. Lavrand told me that they started the project quietly 18 months ago, partly financed by donations from aerospace groups. “It’s not always a question of money. When we began, no-one believed we could do it.” Having proved that “ecological aviation” is viable, her group aims to extend the range and power of their technology, which for the moment uses a modified golf cart motor made by LCM, a British firm.
Like most aviation advances, the Electra project is not a leap but an evolutionary step. Batteries now power most radio-controlled model aircraft and some small unmanned observation “drones”. Electric motors provide the auxiliary power in some motor-gliders and experimental flying machines with ultra-long solar panel wings have been flown successfully since 1980. NASA and Boeing in the USA are working on future projects that derive electric power from hydrogen fuel cells. The French group also achieved the first electric flight by a delta-wing ultra-light aircraft last summer.
The difference with the Electra project is that electricity has been used for the first time to power an ordinary light plane, albeit a small one. This opens the way to practical, manned electric flight.
As long as batteries are needed, the performance will be low.
Germany: Chaos Computer Club Seeks Injunction on Use of Electronic Voting Machines
January 8th, 2008Via: Heise Online:
Chaos Computer Club (CCC) seeks a decision by the Hesse State Court to have voting computers prohibited for the state election on January 27, as reported by Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper today.
A voter had asked for a temporary injunction, which the newspaper claims to have a copy of, for the CCC last Friday. The CCC is of the opinion that voting computers violate three basic principles of electoral law: electoral publicity, officiality, and equality. Eight Hesse cities and communities intend to use voting computers for the upcoming state election. About 100,000 of the 4.37 million voters are to cast their votes this way. If the State Court was to permit the use of the machines for the election, the prosecuting counsel announced that there were “dozens of volunteers who would raise objections against the ballot after the election”.
Cryptogon Reader Signs Up for Hosting with BlueHost
January 8th, 2008Thanks to the owner of Fizzy for signing up for hosting with BlueHost. Cryptogon received $65 as a result.
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
January 8th, 2008Wow! Happy New Years to you guys too! Thank you all very much.
Ktulu $20
ID $25
DW $50
ES $50
AS $50
DT $20
Eileen $50
SS $20
Paralyzed Woman Put in Jail for Missing Court Hearing
January 7th, 2008Due process, what’s that?
Via: Sun Sentinel:
In the nearly 20 years since Victoria Sando was paralyzed by a suicidal ex-boss who shot her five times in a parking lot, the 55-year-old Dania Beach woman has had days when she thought life could not get any tougher.
But that was before she was rousted from bed at 5:30 a.m. last week and taken to the Broward County jail on orders of a circuit court judge who slapped Sando with a six-month sentence after she failed to show up for a hearing on a domestic battery complaint.
And in jail is where Sando remained Friday, without her motorized wheelchair, her service dog Fudge, her glasses or, as yet, any opportunity to appear in court and be represented by an attorney.
“This reminds me of a foreign country where there are no rights,” said Broward Chief Assistant Public Defender Steve Michaelson. “Without a hearing, she went directly to jail, just like in Monopoly. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.”
In a telephone interview Friday from the women’s lock-up in Pompano Beach, Sando said, “I’m pretty strong. So if this is the worst thing that happens to me in the new year, I’ll be grateful.”
Sando’s case is unusual not just because of her physical condition, according to Michaelson. Typically, when a defendant fails to appear for a civil court hearing, the judge orders the police to bring the missing person into court.
But along with her order to have Sando picked up, Judge Marina Garcia-Wood sentenced her to six months in jail. The judge added a provision that Sando could get out of jail in 60 days if she took a course on domestic violence.
In an emergency petition filed Thursday with the 4th District Appeals Court, Assistant Public Defender Sarah Sandler argued that Sando’s incarceration is unlawful. Sandler said Garcia-Wood “failed to comply with each and every requirement” of a rule of criminal procedure written to protect individuals from being sentenced to jail even before they are arrested.
“She is in jail without due process,” said Michaelson, adding that Sando was behind bars for at least three days before she even learned why she was there.
Within hours of the emergency petition filing, the 4th District sent the case to the state attorney general. The state has three days to respond to the public defender’s argument that Sando “should be released immediately.”
Research Credit: PD
