Michael Gracie 

This scenario is now a reality.

More “Narbage” Talk about an understatement. The “slippage” the NAR refers to was a 23.4% year-over-year freefall. The term “slip” might not adequately capture the data. Plummet, plunge, nose-dive, crash, tumble or freefall might work. But “Slip?” Gee, that doesn’t quite capture the true essence of the data… – Barry Ritholtz

Sadly, the headline is somewhat amiss. Researchers have actually figured out a way to steal data from hard disks which are encrypted in full by operating systems’ resident protection schemes. In other words, I don’t believe this method would work on file/container encryption with passphrases (which happens to be my personal preference).

In the world according to the US Treasury, people will be happy to stay in their upside down homes/mortgages as long as they can refinance. They are planning a scheme that will allow said refinancing regardless of the mortgage to home value deficiency, and in return for their cooperation the lenders will be receiving what’s [...]

Bloomberg sayeth: The report censures the controls that Societe Generale, which helped create today’s derivatives markets, says keep risk at an acceptable level. It shows that compliance officers went through the motions of carrying out controls without challenging Kerviel’s explanations or probing further when he changed counterparties or canceled trades. Ha. Sack them all. Then [...]

Meanwhile, give me your kingdom, and I’ll show you yet another ad Ashkan Karbasfrooshan gave a few good reasons why most startups clinging to what seems like the one and only business model, advertising, will soon hit the skids. The guy used to be an ad salesman – fair enough. Meanwhile, Dan Frommer toots Tumblr’s [...]

Easy fix, despite the official line from PHP which says you need to recompile PHP –with-mcrypt. I’ll caveat this by stating I’m using Fedora Core 7… 1) At the terminal, su root – you are now going to yum, not ./configure, make, and make install… 2) yum install mcrypt – this will get you libmcrypt, [...]

Richard Gaylord sounds like a real estate get rich quick infomercial. The sad part is, few if any that listen to the NAR’s advice are getting rich. While Gaylord touts boldfaced lies scripted to lure ill-informed purchasers into borrowing beyond their means research from within his “organization” (which has been wrong without recourse for two [...]

Mr. Frommer says: There’s a big future in distributed storage and computing, and Amazon (AMZN) is on the leading edge. Nimble startups benefit any time they can focus more on building their companies than building their server infrastructure. I’ll add that some of the aforementioned companies suffering don’t have discernible revenue models (i.e. they are [...]

Scary. Very scary.