The massive Wall Street rally this afternoon, and a statement in support of Citigroup’s chairman, didn’t help Citi, which closed down slightly on the day at $9.45 a share. Clearly the market is very worried about Citi’s future, and the fact that it’s trading in single digits — which means that a modest $1 decline in the share price means headlines about a 10% plunge — doesn’t help.
The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide dropped drastically today after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations allegedy engaged in spam activity was taken offline, according to security firms that monitor spam distribution online.
While its gleaming, state-of-the-art, 30-story office tower in downtown San Jose, Calif., hardly looks like the staging ground for what could be called a full-scale cyber crime offensive, security experts have found that a relatively small firm at that location is home to servers that serve as a gateway for a significant portion of the world’s junk e-mail.
The servers are operated by McColo Corp., which these experts say has emerged as a major U.S. hosting service for international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email.
From latter on in the same article….
“McColo runs a service that offers its clients quite a bit more protection from takedowns than the average Web host,” Stewart said. “If they get abuse complaints they will try to appease whoever is complaining, but the end result is usually they just end up moving their Internet addresses around.”
Collectively, these botnets appear to be responsible for sending roughly 75 percent of all spam each day, according to the latest stats from Marshal, a security company in the United Kingdom that tracks botnet activity.
I find this hard to believe. But what do I know?
When one of my vehicles was damaged I would drop it off at the motor pool. Then it would vanish into the support abyss. A few weeks-usually a few months-later I’d have a fixed vehicle or a new vehicle. Turns out one of two things happen. It gets evaluated for damage and if its below a certain threshold then my unit’s mechanics take a whack at it and fix it. If its over that threshold then it gets turned in to civilians who then take several months to fix/replace the vehicle. The excitement comes when you go to turn in the vehicle and the civilians use the subjective criteria to determine that your bent frame rail isn’t quite bent enough for them to take it, “Sorry, this doesn’t meet the criteria for us to fix.” You then spend as long as you can tolerate arguing with them about the degree of damage to a vehicle knowing full well that you don’t stand a chance of winning. The unspoken truth over here is that civilians run the show. Somehow, eventually(sometimes 6 months or more), the truck gets fixed or replaced but its a nightmare, a logistical nightmare really.
The problem with out sourcing is there is no real unity of command. Two separate parties to a contract have a lot different relationship then a bunch of people who are on the same team. No amount of rhetoric and no amount tweaking to a contract can change this fact. Cooperations that outsource core operations often run into problems for similar reasons.
Pirates caught redhanded by one of Her Majesty’s warships after trying to hijack a cargo ship off Somalia made the grave mistake of opening fire on two Royal Navy assault craft packed with commandos armed with machineguns and SA80 rifles.
In the ensuing gunfight, two Somali pirates in a Yemeni-registered fishing dhow were killed, and a third pirate, believed to be a Yemeni, suffered injuries and subsequently died. It was the first time the Royal Navy had been engaged in a fatal shoot-out on the high seas in living memory.
By the time the Royal Marines boarded the pirates’ vessel, the enemy had lost the will to fight and surrendered quietly. The Royal Navy described the boarding as “compliant”.
This is being talked up as a success. But when I look at the rubber boats that the Royal Marines assaulted the pirates in all I can think is that this is a catastrophe in the making.
The way I understand it, the Royal Marines are operating under rules of engagement that prevent them from opening fire until they are fired upon even when the enemy is obviously armed. In modern warfare, it is not a good sigh when the enemy gets off the first shot. A little better fire discipline on the part of the pirates and a couple of rocket propelled grenades and this would have turned out a lot different.
It only took a few mistakes and a couple of dead men to drive the US out of Somalia the first time. I wonder how strong a stomach the pirate fighters will have?
Oil prices plunged below $56 a barrel Wednesday as awful numbers from retailers and a dismal outlook from automakers lent yet more evidence that the U.S. and the rest of the globe will slash its energy use.
This will help a lot of hurting people around the world. You may have to look for a job, but at least you will not pay $3 gallon to get around.
But lest you get too excited by this news, one should keep in mind the following facts:
1: The longer the price stays at this level, the more dependent the world is going to get on Middle Eastern oil. At $56 a barrel, many sources of oil outside the Middle East are no longer profitable.
2: The longer oil stays at this price, the more likely Russia will suffer a catastrophic collapse in the next couple of years. Granted, Russia is going to suffer a catastrophic collapse no matter what. But I was hoping that it would take at least 10 years for Russia to fall apart.
3: The longer oil stays at this price, the more unstable the Middle East is going to be. For example, Iraq is going to have a lot harder time rebuilding itself.
4: Unless there is big break through in the search for alternative energy sources, it is unlikely that oil prices will stay this low unless the world continues to suffer an economic catastrophe. Indeed, by undercutting alternatives, the current low price of oil sets the stage for a huge price increase in the future.
The Pentagon has a new secret weapon to neutralize sites containing chemical or biological weapons: rocket balls. These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno. The makers call them “kinetic fireball incendiaries.” The Pentagon doesn’t want to talk about them, but published documents show that the fireballs have undergone tests on underground bunkers.
The ideas that some people come up with up never cease to amaze me. I have wonder how well it would really work in the field though.
Russia’s parliament announced it would rush through a constitutional amendment that could see Vladimir Putin return to the presidency within weeks.
Amid growing signs of panic in the Kremlin, the State Duma said it would meet on Friday to pass legislation that could allow Mr Putin to return to the Kremlin for 12 years.
Giving short shrift to the supposed inviolability of Russia’s 1993 constitution, all three readings of the bill will be compressed into a single sitting, rather than dragged out over several weeks or months as convention normally dictates.
Putin is a fool. If he was smart, he would let the others take the heat for Russia’s fall from grace and then ride in on his white horse. But by trying to get himself back in the hot seat now, he is going to find out how shallow his popularity really is.
When everyone loves you because you brought prosperity, you have to expect that everyone will hate you when trouble comes.
Remember the McCain–Feingold Act? Read this post from Belmont Club and ponder the strange way that justice works in this world.
Trying to keep money from talking in an election is like trying to ban guns. It only works on honest people. The goal of champaign finance laws should never have been about limiting the amount of money people could give. Instead, it should have been about creating transparency.
Instead of mandating artificial limits, McCain should have tried to fund independent real time audits. We don’t mandate a limit on how much money can be spent training an athlete to be the best. We just require that they pass a drug test.
But that is not what we got. Instead, McCain created a system that limited what honest people could do with their own money and at the same time provided little in the way of real transparency. President Bush signed that legislation into law in spite of professing to believe that parts of the law were unconstitutional.
It is tragic that the person who tried the hardest to play by the rules should suffer the most. But it also seems just that the man who helped create those rules should also suffer from them.
UBS has a $2 trillion balance sheet; Credit Suisse has another trillion on top of that. Call it $3 trillion between the two of them, which is about ten times Switzerland’s GDP of $300 billion or so. Now that’s what I call too big to save. Oh, and did I mention? At the end of 2007, Credit Suisse was levered by more than 40 times; UBS was levered by more than 64 times. A 16% fall in UBS’s assets would wipe out not only all of its equity but 100% of Swiss GDP on top.
This could be the first make-or-break economic issue to face Barack Obama: if it came to it, would Treasury bail out UBS? I’m sure it would try to get European governments to pitch in too, and the Swiss, of course, to the extent that they can. But I’m sure I’m not the only person praying that UBS never comes close enough to the edge that we have to find out.
I wish I could think that it was ridiculous to say that the US might bail out a foreign bank. But I can’t quite muster up the necessary optimism.
“Since mid-September, rapid, seismic changes in consumer behavior have created the most difficult climate we’ve ever seen. Best Buy simply can’t adjust fast enough to maintain our earnings momentum for this year,” said Brad Anderson, vice chairman and chief executive officer of Best Buy. “We’re beginning to adjust our cost structure to restore earnings momentum and still gain market share. We firmly believe that our strategy of customer centricity is of great value in driving our performance versus the industry, and that’s the strategy we plan to pursue to continue to strengthen our position in the marketplace.”
This is the kind of double speak that drives me nuts. They are unable to speak in straight forward manner even when everyone knows the truth.
Of course they will gain market share if they can keep from going bankrupt. That is because Circuit City went bankrupt already. The big question is can they avoid Circuit City’s fate?