Malware that exploits holes in popular applications is being delivered by big ad delivery platforms including those run by Yahoo, Fox, and Google, according to Prague-based antivirus firm Avast.
Viruses and other malware were found to be lurking in ads last year on high-profile sites like The New York Times and conservative news aggregator Drudge Report.com, and this year on Drudge, TechCrunch and WhitePages.com. The practice has been dubbed “malvertising.”
Now, researchers at Avast are pointing fingers at some large ad delivery platforms including Yahoo’s Yield Manager and Fox Audience Network’s Fimserve.com, which together cover more than 50 percent of online ads, and to a much smaller degree Google’s DoubleClick. In addition, some of the malicious ads ended up on Yahoo and Google sites, Avast claims.
Google™ Adsense™ is not mentioned, just DoubleClick, though there are ties between the two, since Google™ owns Double Click, and the worst offenders honors go to Yahoo and Fox.
In any case, please keep your spyware and virus filters up to date.
Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.
Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
I don’t know why it takes a comedian to tell the truth
Following the passage of (admittedly tepid) healthcare reform, the Republicans are now saying that they won’t cooperate with the Democrats.
Of course, there was exactly 0% cooperation before, so we should not worry.
In any case, Bill Maher (at about 2:55 on the vid) says it with his characteristic aplomb:
New Rule: You can’t use the statement “there will be no cooperation for the rest of the year” as a threat if there was no cooperation in the first half of the year. Here’s a word the president should take out of his teleprompter: bipartisanship. People only care about that in theory, not in practice. The best thing that’s happened this year is when President Obama finally realized this and said, “Kiss my black ass, we’re going it alone, George W. Bush style.”
Two months ago, conservative Fred Barnes wrote, “The health care bill is dead with not the slightest prospect of resurrection.” Well, if it’s dead, you just got your ass kicked by a zombie named Nancy Pelosi. Seriously, the last time a Democrat showed balls like that John Edwards’ girlfriend was filming it. Make all the botox jokes and she-shops-too-much jokes you want, but this is the biggest political victory a woman has ever achieved in America. Yes, Nancy Pelosi likes nice clothes. So does Sarah Palin. The difference is Nancy Pelosi pays for hers.
This should be the policy on financial reform too.
The Democrats should break out the parts that they can demagogue, and dare the Republicans to vote against. Make the Republicans vote against the sound bites, just like the Republicans did to the Democrats.
It appears that if you press, STOP, STOP, PLAY, you can skip trailers, the Blu-Ray ads, the FBI warning, and the rest of the crap that they put in front of you being able to watch your flick..
Generally we do PPV, as opposed to renting, but I will try it next we rent a DVD.
It also makes it clear just how unethical, and possibly illegal, these actions were.
Goldman Sachs deliberately crippled products that they created, and then took out insurance policies against them, “naked” Credit Default Swaps (CDS), even though they did not own what they were insuring, and made lots of money when the US government bailed out AIG, so that AIG could pay off the policies.
And Timothy “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, our Treasury Secretary, still has not backed down from his position that the “naked” CDS is essential for “price discovery.”
This would not make sense. While the Scud is mobile, and hard to detect when it is deployed, it is a liquid fueled missile that uses caustic fuels and oxidizers (Kerosene or UDMH as fuel and RFNA as an oxidizer) that requires a significant amount of infrastructure to maintain and keep at ready status.
Having something like this, as opposed to smaller solid fueled rockets that can be stored and maintained without a fixed base and fueling location, is akin to painting a big target on whatever facilities are used to maintain the missiles.
Honestly, I think that this something ginned up by Netanyahyu for either domestic political consumption, or as a way to push back against Obama on the housing units in Jerusalem.
I would note that the entire Jerusalem problem is one of Netanyahu’s own making. He has a history of doing this to Democratic presidents, so I do not buy that the timing of the construction permit announcement was just a “bureaucratic oversight” either.
In a study due out March 15, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. examined how efficiently 33 nations that account for 90 percent of worldwide defense expenditures perform a range of functions. The study looked at how these militaries go about doing certain tasks in three key areas: personnel, maintenance and weapon buying.
…………
“The United States and Australia are the lowest performing countries with regard to equipment output for every dollar spent,” McKinsey concludes.
Brazil had the greatest efficiency of the countries surveyed.
The Soviet Union spent themselves to destruction on huge amounts of military hardware, and it appears that the good old USA is spending itself to destruction on tiny amounts of military hardware.
General Stanley McChrystal is now saying that Dick Cheney’s model for the army,* with contractors galore, simply does not work:
The U.S. commander in Afghanistan said April 16 that the military is wasting money by employing too many private contractors to do jobs better done by soldiers or local Afghans.
“We have created in ourselves a dependency on contractors that is greater than it ought to be,” General Stanley McChrystal told an audience of French officers and military experts at France’s defense university in Paris. Related Topics
“I think we’ve gone too far. I think that the use of contractors was done with good intentions so that we could limit the number of military. I think in some cases we thought it would save money. I think it doesn’t save money.”
This is the right thing to say, but it’s a tough thing to say, since lucrative consulting gigs follow general officers who play the game, and now McChrystal will have to work for a living after retiring.
Of course, it’s going to take years to rebuild the capabilities that Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II privatized and moved out of the Pentagon.
*In one of his worst miscalculations in a lifetime of abject failure, Cheney did this as Secretary of Defense under Bush I, where he decided to privatize everything in sight that was not a “primary military function.”
The oil and currency numbers are really about the Goldman Sachs enforcement action by the SEC, which raised concerns about the economy, and this uncertainty has pushed oil down, and the dollar up, on a concern about demand and demands for safe havens respectively.
Gary Jackson, the former president of the mercenary firm Blackwater*, the former general counsel, executive vice-president, and two other formerly employees on for crimes related to gun-running.
Here’s hoping that someone in this group sings to the prosecutors, and maybe takes Eric Prince down, and maybe he’ll sing to prosecutors.
Of course, if he has dirt, it will be on Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld, and nothing will happen, because Obama and Holder don’t want to look back.
This is not true. It was Paulson & Co. Inc., run by John Paulson, the protagonist of the book The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History, about his fabulously successful shorting of the subprime market.
My guess is that he’s going to seem a Paulson, no relation to the former Treasury Secretary, will find his star dimmed a bit, particularly since the SEC has made it clear that he is under investigation as well.
I guess he sounds a bit less like a brave hero now.
So, Allee Bautsch, a fundraiser for Bobby Jindal, the Governor, and Village Idiot, of Louisiana gets mugged in New Orleans, and “source close to Bautsch tells Yahoo! News that they were politically motivated.”
Note that official sources have made no such claims, but a conservative blogger seems to have put words in the mouth of a NOPD spokesman.
In any case, the Times Picayune has some decent coverage which appears to make it clear that no political epithets were involved, it was a bunch of drunken assholes.
As an FYI to those living under rocks in the past year, the pic is not of Ms. Bautsch,* but of Ashley Todd.
*Whose name, for some reason, I keep spelling Bat-sh%$.
The SEC has charged Goldman Sachs and one of its VPs with, “defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the U.S. housing market was beginning to falter.”
It sounds to me like they assembled a particularly crappy CDO at the request of a hedge fund, most likely the now infamous Magentar:
The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to investors vital information about the CDO, in particular the role that a major hedge fund played in the portfolio selection process and the fact that the hedge fund had taken a short position against the CDO.
“The product was new and complex but the deception and conflicts are old and simple,” said Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement. “Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party.”
So it sounds like Goldman Sachs assembled CDOs, a form of mortgage backed security, at the request and to the specifications of the hedge fund Magetar, which demanded that the CDOs that it funded be as crappy as possible so that it could win on bets against high rated tranches.
This was apparently fairly common knowledge on the street, and Goldman did it anyway, and then sold the instruments as being “rock solid”. Oopsie
Background, and links to Pro Publica‘s and This American Life‘s stories on Magnetar’s, “burn down your neighbor’s house for the insurance money,” investment strategy are here.
There are two potential outcomes:
A tepid settlement followed by an inconsequential fine.
That the string is being pulled, and a whole lot of stuff comes unraveled.
I hope for the latter, but I expect the former.
*Alas, I cannot claim credit for the bon mot describing Goldman Sachs as a, “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This was coined by the great Matt Taibbi, in his article on the massive criminal conspiracy investment firm, The Great American Bubble Machine.
Full complaint and embedded PDF of the filing are after break:
Washington, D.C., April 16, 2010 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Goldman, Sachs & Co. and one of its vice presidents for defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the U.S. housing market was beginning to falter. Additional Materials
The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to investors vital information about the CDO, in particular the role that a major hedge fund played in the portfolio selection process and the fact that the hedge fund had taken a short position against the CDO.
“The product was new and complex but the deception and conflicts are old and simple,” said Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement. “Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party.”
Kenneth Lench, Chief of the SEC’s Structured and New Products Unit, added, “The SEC continues to investigate the practices of investment banks and others involved in the securitization of complex financial products tied to the U.S. housing market as it was beginning to show signs of distress.”
The SEC alleges that one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Paulson & Co., paid Goldman Sachs to structure a transaction in which Paulson & Co. could take short positions against mortgage securities chosen by Paulson & Co. based on a belief that the securities would experience credit events.
According to the SEC’s complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the marketing materials for the CDO known as ABACUS 2007-AC1 (ABACUS) all represented that the RMBS portfolio underlying the CDO was selected by ACA Management LLC (ACA), a third party with expertise in analyzing credit risk in RMBS. The SEC alleges that undisclosed in the marketing materials and unbeknownst to investors, the Paulson & Co. hedge fund, which was poised to benefit if the RMBS defaulted, played a significant role in selecting which RMBS should make up the portfolio.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that after participating in the portfolio selection, Paulson & Co. effectively shorted the RMBS portfolio it helped select by entering into credit default swaps (CDS) with Goldman Sachs to buy protection on specific layers of the ABACUS capital structure. Given that financial short interest, Paulson & Co. had an economic incentive to select RMBS that it expected to experience credit events in the near future. Goldman Sachs did not disclose Paulson & Co.’s short position or its role in the collateral selection process in the term sheet, flip book, offering memorandum, or other marketing materials provided to investors.
The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs Vice President Fabrice Tourre was principally responsible for ABACUS 2007-AC1. Tourre structured the transaction, prepared the marketing materials, and communicated directly with investors. Tourre allegedly knew of Paulson & Co.’s undisclosed short interest and role in the collateral selection process. In addition, he misled ACA into believing that Paulson & Co. invested approximately $200 million in the equity of ABACUS, indicating that Paulson & Co.’s interests in the collateral selection process were closely aligned with ACA’s interests. In reality, however, their interests were sharply conflicting.
According to the SEC’s complaint, the deal closed on April 26, 2007, and Paulson & Co. paid Goldman Sachs approximately $15 million for structuring and marketing ABACUS. By Oct. 24, 2007, 83 percent of the RMBS in the ABACUS portfolio had been downgraded and 17 percent were on negative watch. By Jan. 29, 2008, 99 percent of the portfolio had been downgraded.
Investors in the liabilities of ABACUS are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion.
The SEC’s complaint charges Goldman Sachs and Tourre with violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Exchange Act Rule 10b-5. The Commission seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement of profits, prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.
# # #
For more information about this enforcement action, contact:
Lorin L. Reisner Deputy Director, SEC Enforcement Division (202) 551-4787
Kenneth R. Lench Chief, Structured and New Products Unit, SEC Enforcement Division (202) 551-4938
Reid A. Muoio Deputy Chief, Structured and New Products Unit, SEC Enforcement Division (202) 551-4488
In case you were living under a rock, this is why he left so quickly from his position managing the bailouts of GM and Chrysler:
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo confirmed his office is investigating former Obama administration auto industry advisor Steven Rattner, in a growing probe into illegal kickbacks involving the state pension fund.
Rattner, who helped craft the federal rescues of General Motors and Chrysler, left the Obama administration abruptly last year. This morning, the private equity firm he co-founded, Quadrangle Partners, agreed to pay $7 million to settle allegations it made illegal payments to a New York state official and a political consultant in exchange for millions of dollars in pension investments.
But the settlement specifically excludes Rattner, who Cuomo says is no longer with the firm and remains under investigation. What’s more, Quadrangle issued a scathing statement against its co-founder.
“We wholly disavow the conduct engaged in by Steve Rattner,” the statmement says. “That conduct was inappropriate, wrong and unethical.”
This is a guy who operated a corporate “chop shop,” and we are surprised to discover that he is a dirt bag.
This “experience” thing, which justified, Rattner, Geithner, Summers, etc. is highly overrated.
Ethics first, allegiance to the American public second, and only then consider experience.
Of course, the actual rule is still months away, but my guess is that John Aravosis’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Give donor boycott has finally developed critical mass, and the fund raisers are beginning to notice.
So, now we know, that, if absolutely backed into a corner, Barack Obama is willing to take the most timid steps for LGBT civil rights.
Well, so much for a recovery in employment, initial unemployment claims rose by 24,000 to 484,000, with the 4-week moving average rising by 7,5000 to 457,750, and continuing claims rose by 73,000 to 4.64 million.
On Monday, I had a regular appointment with our doctor, and mentioned that I had a tick bite on the prior Tuesday, and that since I had Lyme disease before (1992), and actually ended up in the hospital with Lyme Carditis.
Since the standard test would show positive, it tests for the antibody whether or not I had it, so the Dr. S. prescribed a prophylactic antibiotic regime.
The standard drug for this is something in the Tetracycline family, most commonly Doxycycline, which he prescribed, and I filled at the CVS near our house.
It’s a mile away, and open 24 hours, but we have never been too satisfied with the service.
In this case, they filled the prescription in ½ hour while I got some blood tests, and filled it, no muss, no fuss ……… Or so it seemed.
The instructions on the label called for taking the pills at least two hours after, or one hour before, eating; i.e. on an empty stomach.
It should be taken with a full glass of water, after food, and patients should be upright for at least 30 minutes after administration to prevent irritation of the esophagus and stomach. Failure to take food prior to ingesting Doxycycline may induce vomiting.
Take doxycycline with food or following a meal. If you have taken doxycycline on an empty stomach before and gotten away with it, the next time may be different. Doxycycline induced nausea is quite unpleasant and more serious stomach irritation can occur.
Also, no note on the label not to take it before bed, nor to avoid sunlight and UV, though Dr. S. told me that last part.
I’ve been wondering who the hell has been doing the flaming sword dance in my stomach for the past few days.
So, Allee Bautsch, a fundraiser for Bobby Jindal, the Governor,