MasterCard and visa had been taken down by a group of volunteers operating a botnet operation, fascinating, disturbing.
http://verbophobia.blyon.com/mastercard-ddos/
Archive for the ‘In The News’ Category
Croudsourced botnets
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010How fast is Google realtime anyway
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009The much talked Google realtime search release arrived here today, so i was apt to test it.
i created a tweet “How fast is Google real time anyway? http://bit.ly/66Z5Cj” and voila! not 2 minutes later and i was at the head of the Google search results, this is awesome!
so i was wondering, is it possible to takeover the fire hose?
in theory, you can create a tweet-storm, by connecting a few twitter and facebook accounts with retweets and status updates, the realtime fire hose will deliver this directly to Google allowing for an instant astro-turfing of topics.
i created a new account and posted a tweet,this time on the Copenhagen climate convention, and waited, nothing happened,
i then retweeted it from my real twitter account and got the immediate Google take
i played with it just a little bit, but it seems possible to create a trend or take over a topic using such a combination.
leaving the conspiring theme aside, the interface is really cool and useful, only thing is that in a normal search, the “latest results” appears “somewhere in the middle” in a messy kind of way:
all and all, this is a really nice feature.
Barons.co.il
Sunday, September 13th, 2009check out my friend’s recipes blog at http://Barons.co.il/matkonim
good luck Erez! 
Stocks for the long run – really?
Saturday, July 11th, 2009Prof. Jeremy Siegel gets a pretty tough criticism by Jason Zweig, WSJ,
My take from the article is this cool site, EH.net, added to my research favorites.
Using one of the many options on site, I found out that the annualized inflation rate (in the US) from my inception (;)) to date was 4.06, much higher than the target rate of about 2% makes you wonder, isn’t it?
Hyperinflation movie – Beware
Monday, June 29th, 2009So this movie is circulating the blogosphere
With respect to the people appearing in this movie,
This movie was written by Jonathan Lebed
have you Wikipedia Jonathan Lebed?
having done so, and to cut a long story short: as a minor the guy was prosecuted by the SEC for running penny stocks in internet chat rooms and settled for some 285K.
He is currently an active trader and sells his advice through a newsletter.
Let me state the following :
The movie sounds like a hard sale push talk.
You would not accept such a hard sale conversation from the ordinary salesman.
Note the scary music, loud towards the end to make the message stick.
Most respected persona in the movie are shown via clips taken from the networks.
I would look further into the material before jumping to conclusions.
I am long gold though.
Too big to fail – Google
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009This post is a work in progress and reflects my current thoughts and fillings about the great Google experience.
Let me clarify up front: i do not think that Google is evil despite what Krugman says. Granted, I would never choose a motto that emphasize what not to do, in a way, Warren buffet strives to achieve the same effect by asking his CEO’s to imagine their decisions on the front page of their community newspaper which has a much stronger effect, though not quite catchy as a motto.
No. this started as a feeling that all is not well in the happy place, services quirked, there were blackout periods and i even got some JavaScript errors(oh, the horror!), in main web pages (such as the search front page),I was starting to think that Google had recruited just a little bit too much newbies and let them get on production code just a little too fast.
Then I heard Eric Schmidt at this podcast and it left me excited but also extremely concerned, Google does store all this data…
this feeling did not crystallized to anything specifically until i stumbled upon this little (extremely technical) article by Nicholas Nassim Taleb(the Black Swan, not an excellent book, but a very good point) and then it hit me : Google is not evil, it is simply too big to fail.
Let me elaborate, Contrary to other software giants like Microsoft(Bad Bad), Oracle and even Internet Giants like Yahoo and Amazon, Google second motto is to crawl and index ALL the data that is out there, not just your surfing and shopping habits, simply everything, your cellphone location and direction (Latitude), through your search history, shopping behavior, media habits, investment preferences,mails, meetings,documents, health,images,social network connections. If its online it will be indexed, if not Google will go to great lengths to get it online.
In the podcast (minute 29), the moderator (Edward Felten) asks Eric “to what extent do this privacy issues limit your ability to get new business.. i might say I’m a little scared of all the information that Google has about me..personally I’m not so worried but if Google fell into evil hands i would be pretty concerned to what happened to all that data” to which Eric promptly answers “We have a rule of don’t be evil” then he elaborate: the entire Google business is based upon trust, if Google will fail to honor this contract, the business will go elsewhere immediately.
While that’s just plain wrong, users are bound to Google services and will find it extremely difficult to migrate to competitors, Google will suffer tremendously from such a scandal.
But here is the case, Eric refers to Google as a single entity while in fact Google is the sum of all it’s workers, datacenters, code, bugs and users. as Nassim Explains simply in the article, a rogue trader can take down a bank, a malfunctioning machine can take down a software service (Gmail was down numerous times lately) and a rogue employee can take down a company.
Later that month Simon Johnson coined the phrase “Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist” in his article at the Atlantic, which summed things up pretty neatly.
Google is a wonderful organization, which invest heavily in wonderful innovations that will benefit all mankind, it holds though, ever increasing hidden risks, that can and will affect all of its users.
For the latest funny bug, check out this link in ie8 (the Firefox version is less buggie but still have some weird behavior) now scroll down as much as you can, really, now go back up, i get a big wide white gap. I was not looking or bugs just stumble upon it.
A PPIP thought.
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009
A short few questions, having read this long, long article along with its accompanying missives:
How PPIP capital gains/losses will be Taxed?
Isn’t all that activity the plan will create will boost government income from taxes?
Aren’t banks gonna have some additional fee revenue on these transactions?
How are these parameters change the picture, (well not the Big picture) the PPIP one.
hasn’t anyone googled the funny name only to find out the Canadians (once again) are already there? setting the acronym for the down to earth, all important “Provincial Parental Insurance Plan ” of Canada.
Presidents Obama’s interview
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009So I’m reading the President’s interview in the sunday times with David Leonhardt
here are some thoughts:
The President is talking about democratizing the markets which shares the benefits but also the pains – not believable, or very wise in the current climate:
“THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that some of the democratization of finance is actually beneficial if properly regulated. So the fact that large numbers of people could participate in the equity markets in ways that they could not previously — and for much lower costs than they used to be able to participate — I think is important.
Now, the fact that we had such poor regulation means — in some of these markets, particularly around the securitized mortgages — means that the pain has been democratized as well. And that’s a problem.”
tighter regulation is mentioned 3 times along the piece. The President also argues that tight regulation can enable the existence of financial supermarkets. (“see, the Canadians do it”):
“THE PRESIDENT: You know, I’ve looked at the evidence so far that indicates that other countries that have not seen some of the problems in their financial markets that we have nevertheless don’t separate between investment banks and commercial banks, for example. They have a “supermarket” model that they’ve got strong regulation of.
Like Canada?
THE PRESIDENT: Canada being a good example. (2) And they’ve actually done a good job in managing through what was a pretty risky period in the financial markets.”
…
“But when it comes to something like investment banking versus commercial banking, the experience in a country like Canada would indicate that good, strong regulation that focuses less on the legal form of the institution and more on the functions that they’re carrying out is probably the right approach to take.”
even competent regulation will do…
A big chunk of the discussion goes to the educational reform issues.
the interview moves to the big reform on Health-care, here it is interesting to see how previous years discussion about the dilemmas at the beginning of life (abortions pro/con) is now shifting towards dilemmas regarding the end of life:
(talking about expensive therapy for the chronically ill aged people)…
“And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.
THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.” (wow, didn’t know that, really, eskimos faced the same issue i guess.)
The President suggests to form a non-political independent group to advise on this issue.
moving out of the recession: the President makes a bold argument that now is the time to promote important reforms despite the resistance from various lobbies.
Closure : the President is confident in the decisions he and his team are making.
God Bless America.
Thanks Barry for the homework.