Shaw Capital Management Financial News Latest financial news by Shaw Capital Management

By Laurie Segall @CNNMoneyTech August 30, 2011: 3:01 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Facebook wants you to try to hack into its site — and if you succeed, it will pay you for the details.

Facebook said this week that that it has paid out more than $40,000 under its new “bug bounty” security initiative. Launched three weeks ago, Facebook’s program invites security researchers — both the professional kind and hacker hobbyists — to send it the details of any Facebook vulnerabilities that they uncover. If the report checks out, Facebook will pay a finder’s fee of at least $500.

It’s willing to go higher for extra-impressive bug spotting.

“We’ve already paid a $5,000 bounty for one really good report,” Facebook Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan wrote in a blog post. “One person has already received more than $7,000 for six different issues flagged.”

Although the social networking has its own security team, Facebook launched its bug bounty program to tap into the collective wisdom of the site’s 750 million users.

“We hire the best and brightest, and have implemented numerous protocols,” Sullivan wrote. “We realize, though, that there are many talented and well-intentioned security experts around the world who don’t work for Facebook.”

Researchers from more than 16 countries have successfully submitted bounty bugs, Facebook said. Its public “thank you” list names dozens of contributors.

Facebook also took pains to assure bug-hunters that it won’t take any legal action against those who submit bugs, even if they were uncovered through less-than-legal routes into Facebook’s systems.

That’s often how hackers find vulnerabilities, but even those without any ill intent — so-called “white-hat hackers” — can land in hot water with companies if they tell them about their intrusion.

“We worked with several third-party groups to ensure that the language in our policy protects researchers and makes clear our intent to work with, not punish, those who report information,” Sullivan wrote.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that often weighs in on Internet-related legal issues, is a fan of that approach.

“We hope to see others follow Facebook’s lead and go even further,” the EFF wrote last year about Facebook’s security policy. “The more transparent companies are about their approaches to vulnerability disclosure — and the more they encourage users to come forward — the more often they will learn about problems that need to be fixed.”

Shaw Capital Management Headlines || Groupon’s CEO Criticized Media about IPO Plan | World Headlines

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/09/shaw-capital-management-headlines-groupons-ceo-criticized-media-about-ipo-plan/

Andrew Mason, the Chief Executive Officer of Groupon Inc, wrote a lengthy memo to his employees on Thursday, explaining the website’s daily-deal records and growth strategy of the company. He lashed at Shaw Capital Management‘s report to be “insane” and “hilarious”.

He wrote a three-page memo written with glimmers of humor and frustration. Mason claims that his company is heading towards an IPO that sources try to pin down by September. He protected the use of an accounting metric that dismissed concerns for competition of likes in Facebook and Google.

He defends that U.S. revenue jumped around 12% in August from July. A 20% slide is expected for marketing expenses. This is actually printed on a tech blog in All Things Digital. This information, Shaw Capital Management reports, is also confirmed by people close to Mason.

Mason insists that the company has kept mum over all these insane accusations, but there is a way to brush this off too. Media accused Groupon to have been buying customers through reckless marketing and that he made comments having his competitors small and unproductive.

He further explains that this method is impossible to achieve as subscribers will eventually run out. The truth is the business works harder to create competitive benefits that even the largest technology companies have difficulty in penetrating.

Analysts state that Groupon is slowing down in North America with its IPO plans dented with financial disclosures and stock market slump.

ACSOI or adjusted consolidated segment operating income is a debated measure that excludes stock-based compensation, online marketing expenditures, and other related items for acquisition. The company has dropped this in its latest IPO filing this month, as more customers signed in for email alerts.

The CEO harshly criticized reports that the company was shutting down more than ten offices in China and retrenching hundreds of employees with Tencent Holdings. He says this is really baseless and untrue as China has a different market. However, both companies are earning profits.

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/

Shaw Capital Management Headlines : As London cleans up from riots, residents fume

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/08/shaw-capital-management-headlines-as-london-cleans-up-from-riots-residents-fume201108100919931-story/

By Janet Stobart, Los Angeles Times

DATE: WED Aug 10, 2011

Londoners are angry at rioters and at authorities’ response. Some analysts say the unrest springs from Britain’s social disparity. Violence eases in the capital but flares in other cities.

• ALSO
• 
  

  

  Photos: Rioting erupts in London

  Reporting from London—They share a city, and very little else.
  But one thing united the rioters who have left a trail of shattered glass and burned-out buildings across London and the residents left to clean up the mess: anger.
  Facing a storm of criticism for remaining on vacation while his city burned, London Mayor Boris Johnson returned Tuesday to tour Clapham, a well-off south London neighborhood that was one of many stunned by three nights of hopscotching riots that left one man dead and littered theurban landscape with hundreds of damaged businesses and residences.
  The shaggy-haired conservative was greeted by crowds of furious store owners asking where police were as their livelihoods were destroyed.
  
  

  

  Photos: London riots spread
  “I felt ashamed,” he said after viewing the damage, “that people could feel such disdain for their neighborhoods.”
  Community leaders, sociologists, police and lawmakers were left groping for a meaning for the worst social unrest to hit London in a generation. The riots laid bare a phenomenon that has stirred deep unease in Britain in recent years: “yobbery,” the anti-social behavior of a generation believed to be so alienated from the norms of civilized society that pockets of some cities live in fear.
  
  

  

  But there appeared to be no social or geographical boundaries for the groups of young people who, as the riots gathered pace, used social networks to line up the next target, looting and burning their way through entire neighborhoods with the knowledge that they could outrun police in heavy riot gear.
  Some officials, including former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, a leftist commonly known as “Red Ken,” blamed the unrest on recent government budget cuts, which have hit education, social assistance and community budgets.
  
  

  

  But to many Britons, the riots were a near-anarchic crime spree that had nothing to do with politics, with hooded youths breaking into stores to help themselves to plasma TVs, clothes and even cash.
  With the ostentatious wealth of so many rubbing up against hard-hit lower-income communities, it was difficult to ignore the backdrop of social disparity that defines London. Community activist Symeon Brown works with disaffected young people in Tottenham, the north London neighborhood where the unrest began Saturday night in the wake of a police shooting that left a 29-year-old father of four dead.
  

  David Cameron concedes error in hiring aide linked to hacking
  
  

  He said the unemployment rate is high in Tottenham, but it’s more complex than that. Young people there feel distanced from and hostile to police, who they believe treat their community with heavy-handed authority, he said.

  The continuing riots are a kind of “imitation” of the Tottenham protest, “which was very much a stance against the police, who were seen as losing legitimacy in the eyes of a section of the community,” Brown said. “When that stand took place, you saw young people realize, ‘Wow, we’re actually taking a stance.’ Then they realized that they could get away with it.”

  No one has been able to profile them, he said, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them come from hostels or families where they weren’t accountable to parents; if you find an 11-year-old on the roads after midnight, you have to ask questions.”

  But people on the streets appeared to have little sympathy for the young rioters.

  Liz Pilgrim’s baby clothing shop in the upscale west London neighborhood of Ealing was trashed and looted.

  “I can only say I met with a group of feral rats. Where are their parents? We need to get the army out,” she told the BBC.

  The riots first struck districts neighboring Tottenham, but spread overnight Sunday to central Oxford Circus and southward to the multiethnic area of Brixton, which has begun to emerge from a dark past of race riots and social deprivation. By early Tuesday morning, crowds of marauders had moved to the more wealthy areas of Clapham and up to trendy Notting Hill.

  Looting mobs have mushroomed across the country, with copycat riots in Birmingham and Bristol in central England and Liverpool and Leeds in the north. Unrest flared again Tuesday night in Manchester, Leicester, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton, and a police station in the central city of Nottingham was firebombed, officials said.

  Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

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Shaw Capital Management Headlines : Fed jolts Wall Street in bid to soothe nerves | World Headlines: Shaw Capital Management

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/08/shaw-capital-management-headlines-fed-jolts-wall-street-in-bid-to-soothe-nerves4/
By Janet Stobart, Los Angeles Times

DATE: WED Aug 10, 2011

A Federal Reserve promise to keep rates low for two years sends markets fluctuating before they end the day on a positive note.

Brian H. Loo, center, Harrison Choi, left, Patrick Ahn, second from left, and Bret Barker right, work on the trading floor at TCW in downtown Los Angeles. (Katie Falkenberg/For The Times / August 10, 2011)

• ALSO
• 

  Wariness, anxiety on Main Street threaten economic recovery
• Reporting from Los Angeles and New York—
• Bret Barker jumped on the phone moments after the Federal Reserve shocked Wall Street with its vow to keep interest rates low for two more years.
• The bond trader at Los Angeles investment giant TCW Group wanted to know how the unexpected news was affecting bond values and rang up a Wall Street investment bank for a price quote on a $100-million Treasury bond trade.
• 

  Divided Fed to keep interest rates low for two year
• “He gave me three or four different quotes in the 20 seconds I was on the phone,” Barker said. “He said prices are all over the place.”
• The central bank did its best to soothe a jittery Wall Street on Tuesday, but the reaction on stock and bond trading floors from New York to Los Angeles was anything but calm. Financial markets zigzagged immediately after the Federal Reserve released its policy statement.
• On the New York Stock Exchangetrading floor at Broad and Wall streets in Lower Manhattan,brokers stood at their trading stations and craned their heads toward the nearest television or
  

  Investors dive into bank stocks
• electronic ticker in the minutes leading up to the announcement at 11:15 a.m. PDT. “Sh’s” swept across the floor as the news was about to hit.“The market is so nervous, they’re looking for any kind of direction they might be given,” said Benedict Willis, a trader with Sunrise Securities.

• The Dow Jones industrial average, which had been down as much as 205 points earlier in the session, bounced around until the bulls finally won. The blue-chip index ended the day up almost 430 points thanks to a vigorous rally in the final hour as investors scooped up stocks that had been thrashed in recent days.

• 

  Apple almost overtakes Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company
• But the closing price belied the dramatic initial gyrations and head-scratching as even veteran traders scrambled to make sense of the central bank’s move.

Fed announcements normally are finely calibrated affairs with predictable investor reactions. But in a sign of the intense volatility that gripped the securities markets, stock prices toggled from positive to negative territory more than two dozen times in the hour after the Fed news.

The Dow gained 4% to finish at 11,239.77. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index jumped 53.07 points, or 4.7%, to 1,172.53. The Nasdaq composite index rose 124.83 points, or 5.3%, to 2,482.52.

• 

  CalPERS investment portfolio hit in recent stock sell-off

After the Fed announcement, crowds of floor brokers converged at trading stations and bought stocks up on the belief that guaranteed lower rates until mid-2013 would boost the broader economy.

“Take ‘em Johnny!” shouted one trader at the Barclays Capital station as the Dow raced higher.

“Now they’re buying,” another trader answered.

The mood changed abruptly when the news hit a few minutes later that three of the Federal Reserve governors had dissented from the board’s decision.

“Boos” rang out across the floor and the Dow flipped from green to red.

“We knew they have had dissenting views,” Willis said. “At this particular time to see them come out, it was the shock to the market when we were hoping for a little more of a calming statement.”

Yet moments later the mood turned again as the indexes shifted back to green as the initial anxiety wore off.

Traders focused their attention on the Fed’s mention of other tools it could use to help the economy.

It wasn’t definitive, but “it was enough to rally the market,” said Alan Valdes, the head of trading for DME Securities.

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Shaw Capital Management Headlines : Gmail Man video mocks Google in the name of Microsoft

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/08/shaw-capital-management-headlines-gmail-man-video-mocks-google-in-the-name-of-microsoft/

1 Vote

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/07/gmail-man-microsoft-video.html

DATE: FRI July 29, 2011

A video making fun of Google’s email service, Gmail, has been posted online, and it appears it could have been produced by one of the search giant’s major rivals — Microsoft.

The video, which features a character called Gmail Man, was leaked by an attendant of Microsoft’s internal Microsoft Global Exchange sales conference, according to the website ZDNet.com, which reported about it and posted it on YouTube on Thursday.

Throughout the video, Gmail Man goes through people’s emails “just skimming,” as he says, for keywords in order to target advertising to users. Fictional users of the service question the ethics of his actions, asking whether it’s wrong to go through people’s private messages, to which he replies, “Who cares?”

“Well, sometimes when a person really loves their Gmail very, very much, the two get together,” Gmail Man says at one point, “and an ad is born.”

The video mentions Microsoft’s new cloud service, Microsoft Office 365, and shows the offices of a business named Contoso Ltd., which ZDNet says is a fictional company often used in demos for Microsoft products.

With Office 365, which the company announced last month, Microsoft is stepping into familiar territory for Google — the cloud — and competing with the search giant’s Google Apps service to offer online software to consumers and businesses.

Microsoft did not a return a call seeking information regarding its involvement in the video (or lack thereof).

RELATED:

Google Cloud Connect moves Microsoft Office files to Google Docs

Microsoft’s Office 365 to take on Google Apps in cloud software race

Microsoft talks cloud, mobile and Windows 8 at big conference in L.A.

– Salvador Rodriguez

Twitter.com/sal19

Image: A screen shot of the Gmail Man spoof video. Credit: dgrober via YouTube

Shaw Capital Management Headlines: AT A GLANCE: IMF Believes Greece Should Consider Debt Restructuring -Sources

http://shawcapitalmanagement-headlines.com/2011/04/shaw-capital-management-headlines-at-a-glance-imf-believes-greece-should-consider-debt-restructuring-sources/

1 Vote

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110416-701023.html

APRIL 16, 2011, 8:00 P.M. ET

THE EVENT: The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are holding their spring meetings in Washington from Thursday through Sunday. Finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 nations met Friday. Dow Jones Newswires coverage of the events can be found by searching the codes N/RPT and R/DC.

THE SITUATION: The International Monetary Fund believes Greece’s debt is unsustainable and has told European government and central bank officials that Athens should consider restructuring by next year, three people familiar with the situation said Saturday.

A second official familiar with the situation said a number of senior euro-zone …

THE EVENT: The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are holding their spring meetings in Washington from Thursday through Sunday. Finance ministers and central bank governors from the Group of 20 nations met Friday. Dow Jones Newswires coverage of the events can be found by searching the codes N/RPT and R/DC.
THE SITUATION: The International Monetary Fund believes Greece’s debt is unsustainable and has told European government and central bank officials that Athens should consider restructuring by next year, three people familiar with the situation said Saturday.
A second official familiar with the situation said a number of senior euro-zone …

Shaw Capital Management Headlines: World Bank Chief:’We’re One Shock Away From Full Blown Crisis’

http://imarketnews.com/node/29550

Saturday, April 16, 2011 – 18:55

By Heather Scott

WASHINGTON (MNI) – As the world’s top finance officials focused on policing global imbalances and financial supervision, the World Bank Saturday raised the alarm on rising food prices, warning that many millions more could be pushed into poverty if prices rise further.

“We are one shock away from a full blown crisis,” World Bank President Robert Zoellick said of the rising food and fuel prices and the impact on the least developed economies, warning of the vulnerability of these countries to weather or other events.

The financial crisis has shown that “prevention is better than cure. We cannot afford to forget that lesson,” Zoellick said at a briefing following a meeting of the bank’s governing Development Committee.

He called for action from rich nations saying 44 million have fallen into poverty due to food price increases over the last year, and another 10% rise could push 10 million more into poverty. The global community now must “press ahead to see real action” by the Group of 20.

Some have questioned effectiveness of the G20, but Zoellick said, “the best antidote to scepticism is action.” He referred to meetings in June of G20 agriculture ministers to address the issue.

The Development Committee said in its communique, “We are concerned about high and volatile international food prices and their impact on vulnerable populations, as well as the longer term risks they pose to growth and poverty reduction.”

Zoellick warned that food stocks are low, leaving poor nations especially vulnerable to additional shocks.

“This is the biggest threat today to the world’s poor, where we risk losing a generation.”

The communique also cautioned that recent events in the Middle East and North Africa “will have lasting social and economic impacts.”

Bahrain Finance Minister Ahmed al-Khalifa, who chaired the meeting, said the Development Committee “urged the bank to be ready to engage at an early stage conflict-afflicted countries.”

** Market News International Washington Bureau: 202-371-2121 **