Goldman May Lose Millions From Ex-Worker’s Code Theft

July 7th, 2009 No comments

July 7 Bloomberg — Goldman Sachs Group Inc. may lose its investment in a proprietary trading code and millions of dollars from increased competition if software allegedly stolen by a former employee gets into the wrong hands, a prosecutor said.

Sergey Aleynikov, a 39-year-old ex-Goldman Sachs computer programmer, was arrested July 3 after arriving at Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey, U.S. officials said. Aleynikov, a citizen of America and Russia who joined the bank in 2007, is charged in a criminal complaint with stealing the trading software. Teza Technologies LLC, a Chicago-based firm co-founded by a former Citadel Investment Group LLC trader, said it suspended Aleynikov, who started there on July 2.

via Goldman May Lose Millions From Ex-Worker’s Code Theft Update3 – Bloomberg.com.

Categories: Banking Tags:

Drug trafficking & black economy

July 6th, 2009 No comments

The international drug mafia is estimated to be involved in a business whose total transactions cross $600-800 billion year—Drug Report 2009 released by United Nations Office of Drugs & Crime on June 24, 2009 (for complete text visit http://www.unodc.org) The successive governments in Pakistan provided money laundering schemes to the black economy (although these were termed as good economic measures to dig out black money). Our drug barons hardly need any international channels for money laundering because support from the State is available at home. If any drug smuggler remits dirty money in Pakistan through normal banking channels, the tax authorities cannot pose any question about its ‘source’. Millions of dollars come into the country every year from bank accounts maintained in various countries in fictitious names, but no action is taken under the law.

In the Income Tax Ordinance 2001, a special provision [section 111(4)] exists to facilitate the money launderers to remit (laundered is more appropriate term) their ill-gotten money through banking channels and surrender the foreign currency to the State Bank and get Pakistani rupees as encashment. In this way they can escape not only taxation but any criminal proceedings as well. This scheme aimed at bringing huge foreign funds to Pakistani economy has succeeded immensely during Musharraf-Shaukat era when foreign reserves of Pakistan crossed the US$ 15 billion mark. Even today, it is being exploited cleverly by the Pakistani drug syndicates and tax dodgers to launder their money through State patronage. In the presence of this law can anybody take Pakistan seriously in its so-called measures against money laundering?

More at Drug trafficking & black economy

Categories: Banking and Compliance Tags:

‘Save our CEOs’ Teaser for Michael Moore’s New Film

June 14th, 2009 No comments

‘Save our CEOs’ Teaser

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Adobe ConnectNow web conferencing from Acrobat.com

June 14th, 2009 No comments

Adobe ConnectNow is a great way to share ideas, discuss details, and complete work together — all online. Reduce travel costs, save time, and increase productivity with a web conferencing solution that’s easy to access and simple to use. It’s free, so sign up now.

It comes with

  • Screen sharing and Remote control
  • Video conferencing
  • Chat pod

via Adobe ConnectNow web conferencing from Acrobat.com.

Categories: Technology Tags: ,

Eraser

June 13th, 2009 No comments

How many of you know that when you delete a file it really doesn’t get deleted even though it does not appear on your drive. There are utilities which can recover these kind of data from your computer. Here is an open source tool which can truly erase the data.

Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows, which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns. Works with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 2003 Server and DOS.

Eraser is Free software and its source code is released under GNU General Public License.

The patterns used for overwriting are based on Peter Gutmann’s paper “Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory” and they are selected to effectively remove magnetic remnants from the hard drive.

Other methods include the one defined in the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual of the US Department of Defence and overwriting with pseudorandom data. You can also define your own overwriting methods.

via Eraser | Heidi – Internet Security and Privacy.

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FINRA Fines Three Firms Over $1.25 Million for Failing to Detect, Investigate and Report Suspicious Transactions in Penny Stocks

June 11th, 2009 No comments

Washington, DC — The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) announced today that it has fined three broker-dealers — J.P. Turner & Co., of Atlanta, Park Financial Group, Inc., of Maitland, FL, and Legent Clearing, LLC, of Omaha — for failing to implement reasonable anti-money laundering (AML) compliance programs, including the failure to detect, investigate and report instances of potentially suspicious transactions in low-priced stocks.

J.P. Turner was fined $525,000, Park Financial was fined $400,000 and Legent Clearing was fined $350,000. In addition, two individuals — Park Financial’s former CEO and AML compliance officer Gordon Charles Cantley and J.P. Turner equity trader John McFarland — were barred permanently from the securities industry. David Farber, a Park Financial equity trader, was fined $25,000 and suspended in all capacities for 30 days. S. Cheryl Bauman, J.P. Turner’s former AML compliance officer, was fined $30,000 and suspended from acting as a principal in a securities firm for 18 months, while Robert Meyer, a former J.P. Turner branch manager, was fined $5,000 and suspended as a principal for one month.

via FINRA – FINRA Fines Three Firms Over $1.25 Million for Failing to Detect, Investigate and Report Suspicious Transactions in Penny Stocks.

Global ATM Alliance – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

June 11th, 2009 No comments

The Global ATM Alliance is a joint venture of several major international banks that allows customers of the banks to use their ATM card or debit card at another bank within the Global ATM Alliance with no fees. Participating banks cover Asia, Australasia, Europe, Africa and North America.

Participating banks are:

Posted for international travelers from Wikipedia page titled Global ATM Alliance

Categories: Banking and Compliance Tags: ,

First flu pandemic in 41 yrs

June 11th, 2009 No comments

In a letter sent to its member countries, the WHO said it is officially raising its infectious diseases alert to Phase 6, its highest level, in recognition of the fact that the virus is now undergoing communitywide transmission in Australia as well as in North America. Such spread in two distinct regions of the world is the primary criterion for raising the alert level.

via Swine flu pandemic declared by World Health Organization – Los Angeles Times.

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Coca Cola and dangers of BPA

June 10th, 2009 No comments

WASHINGTON, — Environmental Working Group (EWG) today called on The Coca-Cola Company’s chairman and chief executive officer Muhtar Kent to take immediate steps to reduce children’s exposure to bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic chemical used in beverage bottles and beverage can linings.

“Along with hundreds of thousands of Environmental Working Group supporters, I was very disappointed to read reports in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Washington Post that a Coca-Cola representative joined chemical and food processing company lobbyists in a recent meeting to consider, among other things, the use of “fear tactics” to protect the market for the toxic chemical bisphenol A (BPA),” EWG’s President, Ken Cook wrote Kent.

An internal industry document obtained by journalists and EWG show that a Coca-Cola representative took part in a May 28 food and chemical industry strategy session at Washington’s exclusive Cosmos Club, during which, the document said, “Attendees suggested using fear tactics (e.g. ‘Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?’)” According to the leaked document, “Their ‘holy grail’ spokesperson would be a ‘pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA’.”

“Is this the kind of “marketing” effort that Coca-Cola stands behind when it comes to toxic chemicals that contaminate the food supply?” Cook wrote.

More at EWG…

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New in SQL Server 2005 for Developers (Part 2)

June 10th, 2009 No comments

CROSS APPLY

 

Here is another nice one (CROSS APPLY) and also note the key features here:

Create Function GetOrderDetails(@OrderId Int, @count Int)

      returns table

As

RETURN

      Select top(@count) * from [Order Details]

      Where OrderId = @OrderId

In the above example note the usage of @count in top. I just wanted to show the output of the following statement using the CROSS APPLY statement:

Select * from Orders

Inner join [Order Details] on Orders.OrderId = [order details].OrderId

Check this:

Select O.OrderId, OrderDate, ProductId, UnitPrice, Quantity from orders O

CROSS APPLY

      dbo.GetOrderDetails(O.OrderID, 3) AS D

ORDER BY

      O.OrderId Asc

 

clip_image003

This statement returns all the Orders and only the first three detail records. The APPLY clause acts like a JOIN without the ON clause. Refer to both CROSS APPLY and OUTER Apply here.

 

Event Notification and DDL Triggers

 

This function called Event Notifications is a feature that can be used by applications using SQL Server. This Event notifications executes in response to a variety of Transact-SQL data definition language (DDL) statements and SQL Trace events by sending information about these events to a Service Broker service.

A sample event will be like this:

 

CREATE EVENT NOTIFICATION log_ddl1

   ON SERVER

   FOR ALTER_TABLE

   TO SERVICE ‘//northwind.com/archiveservice’ , ‘current database’;

 

In the above example, ALTER_TABLE is a DDL statement. Refer to DDL Events for Use with Event Notifications for a complete list of DDL Events.

 

Similarly DDL Triggers are a special kind of trigger that fire in response to Data Definition Language (DDL) statements. They can be used to perform administrative tasks in the database such as auditing and regulating database operations. The old DML triggers operate on INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements, and help to enforce business rules and extend data integrity when data is modified in tables or views. DDL triggers operate on CREATE, ALTER, DROP, and other DDL statements. They are used to perform administrative tasks and enforce business rules that affect databases. They apply to all commands of a single type across a database, or across a server.

USE Northwind;

GO

IF EXISTS (SELECT * FROM sys.triggers

    WHERE parent_class = 0 AND name = ‘safety’)

DROP TRIGGER safety

ON DATABASE;

GO

CREATE TRIGGER safety

ON DATABASE

FOR DROP_SYNONYM

AS

   RAISERROR (‘You must disable Trigger “safety” to drop synonyms!’,10, 1)

   ROLLBACK

GO

DROP TRIGGER safety

ON DATABASE;

GO

 

 

 

 

 

Error Handling

 Simply anything can be handled with the TRY/CATCH:

BEGIN TRY

Select 1/0

Select Cast(‘a’ as DateTime)

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH

    SELECT

        ERROR_NUMBER() as ErrorNumber,

        ERROR_MESSAGE() as ErrorMessage;

END CATCH;

 

 

These statements will show the following errors.

clip_image004

clip_image005

 

 

And there is more information about the error also:

    SELECT

        ERROR_NUMBER() AS ErrorNumber,

        ERROR_SEVERITY() AS ErrorSeverity,

        ERROR_STATE() as ErrorState,

        ERROR_LINE () as ErrorLine,

        ERROR_PROCEDURE() as ErrorProcedure,

        ERROR_MESSAGE() as ErrorMessage;

 

 

 

 

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