U.S. Wins First First Victory in Anonymous’s War on America

(Reuters) – Six suspected leaders of the international hacking organization known as Anonymous were charged by U.S. authorities of computer crimes, dealing a major blow to the loose-knit group that has wreaked havoc on the websites of government agencies and major corporations.

Among those charged was Hector Xavier Monsegur, known as “Sabu,” who took responsibility for attacks on the websites of eBay’s PayPal, MasterCard Inc and Visa Inc between December 2010 and June 2011, according to federal prosecutors and the FBI. The attacks were in retaliation for the refusal of those companies to process donations to Wikileaks, the group that leaked confidential diplomatic cables in 2010.

The charges against Monsegur, in a case that was opened last summer, were filed in federal court in New York via a criminal information. Such a document typically means a suspect has been cooperating with the government.

“Sabu was seen as a leader … Now that Anonymous realises he was a snitch and was working on his own for the Fed, they must be thinking: ‘If we can’t trust Sabu, who can we trust?'” said Mikko Hyponnen, chief research officer at Finnish computer security company F-Secure.

“It’s probably not going to be the end of Anonymous, but it’s going to take a while for them to recover, especially from the paranoia,” Hyponnen said.

Monsegur pleaded guilty last August to 12 charges, including computer hacking and conspiracy, according to documents unsealed in New York federal court on Tuesday. He is free on a $50,000 (31,807 pound) bond. The charges carry a possible maximum prison term of 10 years.

Monsegur has also identified himself as a member of hacking groups called “Internet Feds” and “LulzSec,” the office of the Manhattan U.S. Attorney and the FBI said in a statement.

U.S. authorities also said they had arrested Jeremy Hammond in Chicago on Monday, on charges of hacking in to Strategic Forecasting Inc, or “Stratfor,” a global intelligence and research firm, in December 2011. Hammond, who was also known as “Anarchaos” and other names, identified himself as a member of “AntiSec” hacking group, authorities said.

“In publicizing the Stratfor hack, members of AntiSec reaffirmed their connection to Anonymous and other related groups, including LulzSec,” the statement said. It said members published a document with links to Stratfor data entitled: “Anonymous Lulzxmas rooting you proud” on a file-sharing website.

About 860,000 clients and subscribers of “Stratfor” had confidential information stolen, officials said.

A lawyer for Monsegur, Peggy Cross, did not immediately return a call seeking comment on the charges. Hammond’s lawyer could not immediately be identified.

U.S. authorities said the cyber attacks had affected more than 1 million people and the computer systems of foreign governments, such as Algeria, Yemen and Zimbabwe. Authorities said Monsegur and three of the charged men raided personal information about 70,000 potential contestants on Fox Television show “X-Factor.”

Anonops, which sends online messages on behalf of “Anonymous,” sent a message on Twitter following the arrests. “#Anonymous Is an idea, not a group. There is no leader, there is no head. It will survive, before, during, and after this time,” Anonops tweeted just after noon on Tuesday.

LulzSec, an underground group also known as Lulz Security, along with parent group Anonymous have taken credit for carrying out a number of hacking actions against companies and institutions including the CIA, Britain’s Serious Organized Crime Agency, Japan’s Sony Corp, Mexican government websites and the national police in Ireland.

A spokesman for Irish police said one of the suspects had been arrested and was being held in Terenure, a middle-class suburb of Dublin.

Last summer, as part of a coordinated law enforcement raid on the group, British police arrested Jake Davis, another suspected member of LulzSec who went by the nickname “Topiary.”

One of the charges announced on Tuesday was against Davis, a teenager accused of computer attacks on Sony, UK crime and health authorities, and Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspaper arm News International.

Davis is believed to have controlled the main Twitter account of Lulz Security, which the group used to publish data obtained by hacking into corporate and government networks.

LulzSec and Anonymous, loose online collectives of activists, have attracted widespread global media coverage for their stunts. LulzSec has more than 350,000 followers on Twitter.

Last month, Anonymous published a recording of a confidential call on January 17 between FBI agents and London detectives in which the law-enforcement agents discuss action they are taking against hacking. Authorities said they had arrested and charged Donncha O’Cearrbhail, 19, of Birr, Ireland of computer hacking conspiracy.

(Reporting By Basil Katz, Grant McCool; Additional Reporting by Diane Bartz, Lorraine Turner, Georgina Prodhan; editing by Mark Porter, Derek Caney and Matthew Lewis)

Source

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By Jeff Poor

On Saturday, Carbonite CEO David Friend released a statement on his company’s website declaring that Carbonite had decided to “withdraw” advertising from Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in the wake of his controversial remarks involving Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke because it will “ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse”:

Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.

However, it hasn’t done much to contribute to his company’s stock price. Since the market opened on Monday through its close today, Carbonite stock (NASDAQ:CARB) has plummeted nearly 12 percent, outpacing the drop of the NASDAQ index in that same time period by nine-and-a-half points. It was also one of the biggest decliners on the NASDAQ on Tuesday.

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(Reuters) – Gold fell 2 percent in heavy volume on Tuesday, breaching technical support as investors worried more about a possible Greek default, but some analysts said the metal looked oversold and was poised for a rebound.

Silver fell 3.5 percent, and platinum and palladium posted their largest daily declines this year, as investors grew more cautious about the global economic outlook a day after China cut its growth forecast and data showed the European Union was not likely to avoid a recession.

Bullion broke below its 200-day moving average for the first time since mid-January, tracking U.S. equities’ slide on worries Greece could miss a deadline to complete a bond swap that is part of a bailout and restructuring deal to avert a default.

Gold investors were already cautious after the precious metal tumbled 5 percent last Wednesday on dimmer near-term prospects for another round of quantitative easing from the U.S. Federal Reserve. Gold rebounded to near $1,660 an ounce but investors remained uneasy.

“People who are long gold are getting out. They don’t like what’s going on with Greece and the stock market is decisively lower. It’s a matter of raising money,” said Jonathan Jossen, COMEX gold options floor trader.

“But the bullish option flow usually tells me we could be near a bottom,” Jossen said.

Spot gold was down 2.1 percent at $1,670.41 an ounce by 2:52 PM EST (1952 GMT) , having hit a six-week low of $1,663.95.

U.S. gold futures for April delivery settled down $31.80 at $1,672.10.

Read the rest here.

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(Reuters) – Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings has quietly met with some of the largest U.S. cable companies in recent weeks to discuss adding the online movie streaming service to their cable offerings, according to sources familiar with matter.

In what would ratchet up its competition with HBO, the talks could lead to Netflix becoming available as another on-demand option for cable subscribers through their set-top boxes, according to three people familiar with the talks. If a partnership came to fruition, a cable operator might offer Netflix as an additional option added onto a subscriber’s cable bill, according to a fourth person.

Any partnership would be a major about-face for many in the traditional cable industry who had initially seen Netflix as a threat to their $100 billion-a-year business.

Hastings has strongly hinted at investor conferences in recent weeks about the possibility of Netflix one day being a cable channel rival to premium networks like Time Warner Inc’s HBO.

“It’s not in the short term, but it’s in the natural direction for us in the long term,” said Hastings, speaking at an investor conference last week. “Many (cable service providers) would like to have a competitor to HBO, and they would bid us off of HBO.”

Read the rest here.

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Here’s why I believe that the current high price of oil is not enough to derail the U.S. economic recovery.

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via Vix and More

Since the beginning of the current bull market – which bottomed at 666.79 exactly three years ago today – I have periodically been posting a table of the most significant pullbacks in the S&P 500 index since that March 2009 bottom. For the record, the current 2.6% decline over four days is barely enough to get it to qualify as one of those 16 pullbacks.

The data below incorporates intraday readings and use pullbacks from high water marks to the eventual trough as the basis for calculating the magnitude and duration of the pullbacks.

Read the rest here (and see the graph)

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By BRETT ARENDS

Be honest. When you are standing at the gas pump, refilling your car and watching the numbers spin higher and higher, don’t you wish you had some stock in Exxon or BP?

Of course you do.

Is it a good idea?

Let’s do the math.

Fuel prices are rocketing — again. Gasoline is up to $3.64 a gallon nationwide. It’s doubled in ten years and trebled in twenty.

You can blame Iran. You can blame China. You can blame quantitative easing.

But whoever you blame, the problem’s the same. Your costs are rising, but your income probably isn’t. Fuel prices have outpaced incomes for generations. Today the average worker earns enough each week to buy just 200 gallons of gas. Back in the late 1970s the figure was 300 gallons.

In the parlance of finance, you have a liability without a corresponding financial asset. A bad move. When prices rise, you either have to cut back on what you spend on fuel, or cut back elsewhere.

According to Labor Department data, gasoline makes up about 5% of consumer spending. In 2010, the most recent year for which we have data, the bill came to about $2,100.

Since then it has risen about 30%. By some crude math, that’s costing a typical household another $600 or so.

Michael Willis, chief executive of niche fund company The Willis Group, is among those who has been arguing for some time that we ought to invest where we spend. He calls it “consumption-based asset allocation.” (His firm even runs two small mutual funds, the Giant 5 Total Investment System (FIVEX) and the Giant 5 Total Index System (INDEX), based around the idea.) “If you buy it,” he says, “we really think you ought to own it.”

When it comes to energy, you can take matters into your own hands pretty easily.

Integrated oil companies are probably the easiest way for ordinary investors to play the energy sector. They are less volatile than smaller energy companies, or the companies which provide services, or lease deep-sea rigs.

The iShares S&P Global Index fund (IXC) is an exchange-traded fund, which owns foreign oil giants like Total, BP and Shell as well as the likes of Exxon and Chevron.

Read the rest here.

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via TMZ.com

PEYTON MANNINGYOU’RE CUT(First Thing in the Morning)

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Read here:

A company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A) is being called out for the lobbying dollars it spent in Washington while fighting to receive a more favorable tax treatment.

According to a report Tuesday on The Huffington Post, Berkshire company NetJets put north of $2.5 million toward lobbyists who were pushing measures to benefit a group of private jet firms. The findings followed a HuffPo analysis of lobbyist disclosure records. Thanks to one part of the legislation, the Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act, NetJets and other fractionally owned jet companies “will pay lower taxes over the next four years than they do today,” HuffPo reports. Because of the law, the federal government will miss out on around $25 million in revenue during the next three years from the jet firms who will benefit from the tax changes, the report says.

Now, NetJets is no different from hundreds, even thousands of other companies and groups that have lobbyists in the nation’s capital. In some of these cases, the lobbyists are looking for ways to help their clients pay lower taxes or otherwise gain financially through the goings-on in Congress.

What is different is that, in this particular case, a company under the control of Buffett’s Omaha-based firm is being spotlighted.

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You want to fuck with me? I just woke up son. Wanna throw down ?

DOW DOWN 204

S&P DOWN 21

NASDAQ DOWN 40

OIL DOWN $1.84

GOLD DOWN $29

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sviUaYn0UQs&feature=related 450 300]

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3j_lyTrtG0 450 300] [youtube://http://www.youtbe.com/watch?v=lbTCOxwRAWg 450 300]

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“Foreclosures and other distressed properties account for more than a third of all home sales, and data released today suggests that figure may soon grow even bigger.

Lenders in January took back nearly 91,100 distressed properties, which includes foreclosures and short sales, up 29% from the previous month, according to data released this morning by LPS Applied Analytics, which tracks mortgage performance.  In the next few months, experts say those homes will make their way back to the market to join the already high percentage of distressed homes being snatched up by buyers.

That addition of distressed properties will likely lead to further drops in home prices, says Tom Popik, research director at Campbell Surveys, a real estate research firm. Foreclosures and short sales accounted for roughly 35% of total existing home sales in January — up 16% from June, according to the National Association of Realtors. Over that period, the median home price fell 8.5% to $154,700. “Prices are going to continue to go down for a long time,” says Popik….”

Read more

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“FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Greece continues to rattle investor nerves ahead of a Thursday deadline for private investors to voluntarily offer up Greek government bonds in a debt swap that will cut the value of their holdings by more than half.

Strategists blamed jitters over the process combined with concerns over global growth prospects as spoiling investor appetite for risk on Tuesday, sending European and U.S. equities lower and undercutting the euro and other risk-oriented currencies. See Market Snapshot.

The euro EURUSD -0.77%  slipped 0.8% to trade at $1.3119 in recent action. Read more in Currencies.

“It will only become clear toward the end of the week how many investors have agreed to the ‘voluntary’ restructuring of Greek debt,” said Lutz Karpowitz, currency strategist at Commerzbank.

The Institute for International Finance, which helped negotiate the terms of the bond swap, reportedly warned in a recent memo that a so-called hard default by Greece could cause at least 1 trillion euros ($1.32 trillion) in damage to the euro-zone economy. That figure includes the need for aid for Italy and Spain to keep the crisis at bay as well as €160 billion in bank recapitalization costs, Reuters reported Tuesday. See full document as shown in the Athens News.….”

Read more

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Dr. Doom expects war….

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I say cut them off…..

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“Question for you: Which distinctly British asset class has offered the most attractive returns over the past decade? Central London property? Not even close, even if it has done rather well. UK farmland is the answer, having more than tripled in value over a decade which will otherwise not be remembered for its outsized returns (see story here). The rise in farmland values is not only a British phenomenon. All over Northern Europe and North America farmland values have responded well to higher commodity prices. Last year alone, farmland prices in the US Midwest appreciated by 22% on average (details here).

Now, if ‘rental income’ on farm land is going up as measured by higher crop prices, it is only logical that the value of the land appreciates, similar to the dynamics in the commercial property sector. However, I have long been puzzled by the fact that you find virtually no exposure to farm land in institutional portfolios despite the supremely attractive yields on offer when compared to commercial property. Pension funds happily buy office buildings, earning a return of 4-5%, maybe 6%, yet few have ventured into farmland where yields can be as high as 10% if the farm is big enough and run professionally enough.

In this month’s Absolute Return Letter we will take a closer look at agriculture. Should you be exposed to agriculture in the first place? Is it too late to buy farm land? Are there other and better ways to be exposed to agriculture? These and other questions I will address in the following.

Let’s begin with some numbers to set the stage. There are approximately 7 billion people in the world today. FAO (the food and agriculture organisation of the United Nations) expects that number to grow to approximately 8.3 billion by 2030. The average person consumes 2,780 kcal per day but the average masks a significant gap between the developed and the developing world. Whereas people in developed countries consume 3,420 kcal per day, people in developing countries consume no more than 2,630 kcal per day. By 2030 the average calorie intake is expected to have risen to 3,050 kcal per day, driven primarily by rising living standards in developing countries.

Adding these numbers up, global daily calorie consumption is approximately 19.5 trillion kcal, growing to an estimated 25.3 trillion kcal by 2030 – an increase of about 30%. An increase of that magnitude should, on its own, be quite manageable; however, things are not quite so straightforward. Here is the problem. Whereas diets in developing countries consist primarily of grains (rice, corn, wheat, etc.), diets in the wealthier parts of the world are dominated by protein, fat and sugar.

As the poor get wealthier, they will want more protein – mainly chicken, pork and beef. Converting a grain rich diet to a more protein rich diet will increaseoverall demand for grain significantly as livestock is inefficient in terms of converting grain to energy. It takes 2-3 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of chicken, about 4 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of pork and as much as 7-8 kilograms of grain to produce 1 kilogram of beef. Hence, if the average daily calorie consumption grows by 30% between now and 2030 as projected, demand for grain will grow by a multiple of that….”

Full article

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“Morgan Stanley Smith Barney is out with its latest Asset Allocation and Strategy Weekly report to its clients.

Despite improving economic conditions, the wealth management firm is sticking to its rather cautious stance on the markets.

As new challenges and opportunities appear, we continue to evaluate our risk exposure and tactical positioning. Our work suggests that many safe havens should experience less vulnerability in the likely challenging economic period ahead. As a consequence, our asset allocation models overweight global cash, market weight global bonds and alternative/absolute return investments and underweight global equities.

Here’s their latest roundup of their bearish factors that stock investors should consider:

Equities Bearish Factors

• The ongoing deleveraging in the big developed-market (DM) economies will take several years to run its course, the byproduct of which is sluggish growth for a long time.
• Europe is at risk of slipping into a “lost decade” triggered by lack of leadership and institutional flexibility at the European Central Bank and elsewhere.
• Global growth is overwhelmingly dependent on EM policymakers. Many are not as seasoned as DM policymakers.
• Sovereign debt burdens are too high in several developed countries. Hard political choices need to be made or currency values are at risk.
• US home prices, as per the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index, have not improved much from their cyclical low.
• The benchmark 10-year US Treasury yield remains near a multi-decade low. If it rises in the years ahead, it would be a headwind for expansion of P/E multiples.
• “Event risk,” such as a terrorist attack, is ever-present.

However, the firm does recognize that there are bullish forces in the market as well.  Here’s their list:

Equities Bullish Factors…”

Read more: 

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“BAC – Merrill Lynch senior economist Michelle Meyer appeared on Bloomberg TV with a cautious outlook on both housing and fiscal tightening.

In particular, she said that fiscal tightening is one of the biggest threats to U.S. economic growth, and that fiscal drag could amount to as much as 4 percent if lawmakers don’t change their current policies.

“Yes, we understand that there’s momentum right now. We’re encouraged by some of the labor market indicators, but we’re not yet convinced. And given the amount of fiscal tightening, we think there will be another uncertainty shock.”

She qualified that a 4 percent shock isn’t her team’s baseline policy—it is really something like 2 percent—but added, “There’s the possibility of even larger tightening if you don’t see policy.”

Watch her full interview below:

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4G is faster…much faster; and Apple is betting that customers will gravitate towards the product despite them not wanting to spend more on the latest 3G iPad.

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A true geek saving his own skin….

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