Blog Archive: August 2009

Former Louisiana Democrat representative, William J. Jefferson, was convicted yesterday on bribery, racketeering, money laundering, and other related crimes. (full story from the FBI here) He was found to have taken bribes from individuals and businesses to advance their interests. Some of his schemes were international, with elements in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Botswana, and the Republic of Congo. He is the same individual who was caught with $90,000 hidden in his freezer. He faces...

Twitter and LiveJournal fell prey to hackers this morning, but appear to be operational as of this post. Twitter claims that they were taken down by a DOS (denial of service) attack. A DOS attack overloads a server with excess traffic to the point that the server loses the ability to process incoming requests. DOS attacks require the concerted action of many individual computers, and often are accomplished by utilizing individual computers, often ones exploited with some sort of trojan horse ...

Three men from Beijing were sentenced over the past few days for attempting to take highly sensitive military technology back to China. The FBI caught the men who were trying to move cutting edge thermal cameras made by FLIR (full story from the FBI here). The three are going to serve between one and five years in federal prison for the attempts. The three were charged under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR). Apparently one...

  The Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud and other charges against General Electric today for misleading investors through their preparation of financial statements (See the SEC official release). Apparently GE used deceptive accounting methods to artificially increase its earnings reports. GE has neither admitted nor denied culpability, but have agreed to pay a $50 million dollar penalty to settle the charges. The fairness of this settlement is difficult to grasp consideri...

  Our current Cybersecurity Czar is fed up, and has put in her two weeks notice. Melissa E. Hathaway, the current senior cybersecurity aid to the President, a holdover from Bush, has decided to do something more productive. She notes that Obama made a riveting speech two months ago on how he was going to personally pick a Cybersecurity Czar, and make cybersecurity a national priority. However time has passed, and nothing has happened. Hathaway expressed her frustration at the President's fai...

For more background on "flash" trading, see my prior post "Not Insider Trading? Part I." Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) said earlier today that an SEC ban on flash trading was "imminent." Schumer said that in a discussion he had with Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro, she personally promised him that the ban would be forthcoming. This is part of a broader investigation into questionable trading practices such as "dark pools," anonymous trading groups, and high frequenc...

An interesting issue has developed in the law of cell phone handsets, and more generally the anti-competitive practices of large national wireless carriers. The issue stems from Apple's refusal to host a Google application in the iPhone App Store. The refusal to host the Google Voice app has not only irritated iPhone users, like myself, but has attracted the attention of the FCC.   Google Voice is a unique and useful currently web-based program in development for individuals and small busine...