[Quote:]

Charter Communications Inc. on Friday filed for a prearranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy to get relief from its creditors, as the nation’s fourth-largest cable operator strives to keep its head above water and still compete with phone companies and satellite TV providers.

The St. Louis-based company seeks to emerge from bankruptcy as early as the end of summer and doesn’t plan on selling any of its assets to competitors. After Chapter 11, interest costs at Charter, which has never posted a profit since going public in 1999 due to massive debt interest payments, will be cut in half to $830 million a year.

The filing restructures about $8 billion of debt at Charter, which is controlled by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, but leaves about $13 billion of debt on its books.

Charter has about 5.7 million customers. That’s about 2280 dollars of debt per customer. I don’t think they’re ever going to be able to pay off that debt.

[Quote:]

Not content with destroying the world’s economies, the banking industry is also bent on ruining us individually, it seems. Take a look at Verified By Visa. Allegedly this protects cardholders – by training them to expect a process in which there’s absolutely no way to know whether you are being phished or not. Even more astonishing is that this seen as a benefit!

Frame inline displays the VbV authentication page in
the merchant’s main window with the merchant’s
header. Therefore, VbV is seen as a natural part of the
purchase process. It is recommended that the top
frame include the merchant’s standard branding in a
short and concise manner and keep the cardholder
within the same look and feel of the checkout process.

Or, in other words

Please ensure that there is absolutely no way for your customer to know whether we are showing the form or you are. In fact, please train your customer to give their “Verified by Visa” password to anyone who asks for it.

Craziness. But it gets better – obviously not everyone is pre-enrolled in this stupid scheme, so they also allow for enrolment using the same inline scheme. Now the phishers have the opportunity to also get information that will allow them to identify themselves to the bank as you. Yes, Visa have provided a very nicely tailored and packaged identity theft scheme. But, best of all, rather like Chip and PIN, they push all blame for their failures on to the customer

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200 children in the UK, some as young as 13, have had files opened on them by the British anti-terror cops as potential terrorists — even though they have committed no crimes. The children were reported to the anti-terror squad by their teachers on the basis of school work, journals and conversations that, in the teachers’ view, indicated that the children were susceptible to extremist beliefs. The programme is only 18 months old and has already identified 200 children who should be treated as terrorism suspects. At this rate, every child in Britain should be on the watch list by, what, 2018?

[Quote:]

Stephen Mallon might be sitting on some of the most newsworthy pictures never seen.

Stephen, a New York City industrial photographer, was hired by Weeks Marine, the maritime crane company involved in the recovery of US Airways Flight 1549 from the Hudson River, to document the recovery process.

Those who have seen the pictures say he did a wonderful job. He was given unlimited access on the water, to the plane’s interior, virtually anywhere he wanted to go. He had the full cooperation and blessing of his immediate client, Weeks Marine; of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB); and of USAirways. He never signed a Work for Hire agreement, and his client had no problem with him publishing the work non-commerically—like, on his website, where he posted them.

[..]

Then he got a letter from a law firm, not sent directly but passed to him by insurance giant AIG—yup, that AIG—asserting that Stephen has no rights to his pictures, and that the pictures absolutely can’t be released to anyone, ever—not even news outlets for news purposes. AIG (through its lawyers) apparently seeks total suppression of the work, indefinitely.

Based on…what rights, explicitly? Stephen isn’t sure. Like any photographer, Stephen owns the rights to his pictures, except those rights he signed away in his contract with Weeks. AIG is US Airways’ insurer. Ultimately, they’ll be paying for the salvage operation and for a new airplane. But they weren’t Stephen’s client.

[Quote:]

Uh oh Apple — it looks like even your attorneys are dirty, thieving jailbreakers. Tipster a|e§ was poring through that iPhone biometric security patent application we posted earlier and noticed that the images show a jailbroken phone, complete with Installer.app, SMBPrefs, and the iWood Realize theme from the iSpazio repository. We’re guessing the fine folks at Kramer, Levin Naftalis & Frankel are going to have some ‘splainin to do on Monday morning — but at least they get to run apps in the background.