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Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez earned $75,000 a year working undercover for the U.S. Secret Service, informing on bank card thieves before he was arrested in 2008 for running his own multimillion-dollar card-hacking operation.
That information is according to one of Gonzalez’s best friends and convicted accomplices, Stephen Watt.
Watt pleaded guilty last year to creating a sniffer program that Gonzalez used to siphon millions of credit and debit card numbers from the TJX corporate network while he was working undercover for the government.
Watt told Threat Level that Gonzalez was paid in cash, which is generally done to protect someone’s status as a confidential informant.
The Secret Service said it would not comment on payments made to informants. Gonzalez’s attorney did not respond to a call for comment.
“It’s a significant amount of money to pay an informant but it’s not an outrageous amount to pay if the guy was working full time and delivering good results,” -
Hundreds of computer geeks, most of them students putting themselves through college, crammed into three floors of an office building in an industrial section of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, churning out code at a frenzied pace. They were creating some of the world’s most pernicious, and profitable, computer viruses.
Month: March 2010 Page 1 of 2
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The proverbial ink had yet to dry on the nation's new health care reform law Tuesday before two states — Virginia and Florida — filed lawsuits and more scrambled to put up legislative barricades between themselves and the bill requiring Americans to purchase health insurance or face stiff penalties.
The tactics, employed everywhere from Arizona to Virginia, are the strongest sign that the health care reform fight is far from over.
Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced he dropped off his challenge at the court at 12:02 p.m. ET, minutes after President Obama's signing ceremony to usher in the massive overhaul. Virginia Solicitor General E. Duncan Getchell walked the six blocks from the state attorney general's office in Richmond to the U.S. District Court to file his claim that the federal law conflicts with recently passed Virginia law saying no resident shall be required to "maintain or obtain" personal coverage.
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We always knew that Sequoia Capital and other shareholders of YouTube made out like bandits when Google bought the video site for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006. But we had always estimated their profits from the deal – until today, thanks to a newly unsealed court document in Viacom’s longstanding copyright infringement suit against Google and YouTube.
According to this filing from Viacom’s lawsuit, which alleges that YouTube had knowledge of copyright infringement, Sequoia Capital received $516 million worth of Google stock on Nov. 16, 2006, representing 31% of the total price. (We estimated $495 million and a 30% stake at the time of the sale). Sequoia invested $9 million in the company in late 2005 and early 2006 (not $11.5 million as previously reported), meaning the firm made about 57 times its investment at the time of the sale.
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At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company's partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it's no wonder that the size of the Android Market is increasing in its slipstream. While Google doesn't publicly show how many apps there are in Android Market, a Google rep this morning informed me that the store now serves approx. 30,000 apps in total.
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We understand the administration's sense of urgency on health-care reform. But what is intended as a final sprint threatens to turn into something unseemly and, more important, contrary to Democrats' promises of transparency and time for deliberation.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters Monday that she is leaning toward a parliamentary maneuver under which the House would vote on a package of changes to the Senate-approved reform bill, and the underlying Senate bill would then be "deemed" to have passed, even though the House had never voted on it. That may help some House members dodge a politically difficult decision, but it strikes us as a dodgy way to reform the health-care system. Democrats who vote for the package will be tagged with supporting the Senate bill in any event. Why not be straightforward about it? -
As more handsets have been rolled out running Google’s Android operation system, mobile users have become more familiar with the platform and more likely to consider purchasing an Android-based smartphone.
Further data from Crowd Science confirms the trend: 66% of smartphone users are aware of Android, up 6 points since the introduction of the Nexus One handset in January.
What’s more, current Android users are nearly as loyal to the operating system as iPhone owners are to theirs. iPhone owners were more likely to say their next purchase would be an Android phone than vice versa.
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One clue to why Don Rainey is a friend to entrepreneurs comes from the way he talks about the executives running the companies in which he invests.
There is pride in his words, a paternalism that reveals the Grotech Ventures general partner has more than just money in the game.
“LivingSocial is a deal we added to in 2009. It is a company full of young energetic entrepreneurs,” he says. “It is really and exciting time for that company and I am certainly very proud of them.”
It sounds like he is talking about one of his children, or one of his students.
LivingSocial, which runs social networking Web sites, raised $5 million in venture capital from Vienna-based Grotech and from Steve and Jean Case.
Rainey says the co-founders of LivingSocial — Tim O’Shaughnessy, Eddie Frederick, Aaron Batalion and Val Aleksenko — “are going from being an early success to being one of the leaders in social networking. They are helping define social commerce.” -
One job of presidents is to educate Americans about crucial national problems. On health care, Barack Obama has failed. Almost everything you think you know about health care is probably wrong or, at least, half wrong. Great simplicities and distortions have been peddled in the name of achieving “universal health coverage.” The miseducation has worsened as the debate approaches its climax.
There’s a parallel here: housing. Most Americans favor homeownership, but uncritical pro-homeownership policies (lax lending standards, puny down payments, hefty housing subsidies) helped cause the financial crisis. The same thing is happening with health care. The appeal of universal insurance — who, by the way, wants to be uninsured? — justifies half-truths and dubious policies. That the process is repeating itself suggests that our political leaders don’t learn even from proximate calamities.
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Neither recession nor gadget overload shall slow the mania surrounding the introduction of Apple's iPad mobile computer.
On Friday, the first day that buyers could pre-order the device (it arrives in stores next month), Apple racked up an estimated 91,000 sales in just the first six hours of availability, putting temporarily to rest the Internet's persistent "iPad fail" meme. Analysts predict the first-year sales could reach 5 million. -
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Thursday launched a broadband test service to help consumers clock the speed of their Internet.
Located at the site www.broadband.gov, the test is aimed at allowing consumers to compare their actual speeds with the speeds advertised by their providers.
The FCC release follows an FCC meeting in September where officials said that actual speeds were estimated to lag by as much as 50 percent during busy hours.
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The Apple iPad will be available to pre-order starting Friday, March 12. If you’re in the market for Apple’s “magical” device, here are five reasons why you should sign up early and buy on the very first day.
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One of the chief complaints of iPhone users since the debut of iPhone OS 2.0 and the apps store is the iPhone’s inability to multitask (run two or more programs simultaneously). New information suggests that iPhone OS 4.0’s biggest upgrade will be multitasking. Also, purported images of iPhone 4G have been spotted.
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Whatever the legislative fate of health reform — now in the hands of a few besieged House Democrats — the reformers have failed in their argument. Their proposal has divided Democrats while uniting Republicans, returned American politics to well-worn ideological ruts, employed legislative tactics that smack of corruption, squandered the president's public standing, lowered public regard for Congress to French revolutionary levels, sucked the oxygen from other agenda items, reengaged the abortion battle, produced freaks and prodigies of nature such as a Republican senator from Massachusetts, raised questions about the continued governability of America and caused the White House chief of staff to distance himself from the president's ambitions.
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It’s one thing to design and build software to live in the cloud from scratch. It’s something else to move existing applications over to cloud-computing platforms, which many companies need to do. This often means completely rewriting parts of the code to make it compatible with a particular provider’s infrastructure. CloudSwitch, a startup based in Burlington, MA, has designed software that could make the transition almost as simple as dragging and dropping a file from one folder to another.
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RightSide Capital Management is about to shatter the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com’s Future of Funding event last Thursday, will debut in the second half of 2010 and may give the angel funding market a much-deserved shakeup.
Partner Kevin Dick went on stage during a panel on alternative funding methods and laid out what he believes to be the future of funding. Quantity, not quality, is king in the seed stage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application – similar to applying to College – and receive a response in 2 weeks.