It was a pretty miserable weekend, weather-wise. Especially yesterday – it snowed most of the day, was windy as hell, and while the official high temp for the day was 42, it never made it higher than 38 at my house. I did manage to get the grass cut, though (wasn’t easy; it was thick and wet – and cold – but I didn’t want the lawn police after me). Then I stayed up too late last night (damn Treme), so now I’m pretty beat, and facing a day with multiple meetings. Bleh.
I’d hoped Obama would pick a woman for the Supreme Court, but he picked Elena Kagan instead. OK, OK, I know that wasn’t very nice. But you have to admit, she’s no Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Lena Horne died. Only 92, too.
Speaking of old broads, I don’t normally bother to record SNL these days, let alone actually watch it, but I made an exception this week so I could watch Betty White host it. She was great. No dried out muffin there.
GASP! A Monday morning sexist comment ? => :no: :no:
Sue P:
You don’t happen to work as a volunteer DJ out of WFMU?
http://wfmu.org/playlists/SA
Otherwise, your namesake plays some head-banging heavy stuff :ear:
David Gregory asks the most inane questions:
in a logical Spock world, the response to that last question would be:
kind of interesting thoughts:
8 Theories For Why The Stock market plunged…..
OKat:
So a denial-of-service attack would prevent any kind of trading at all?
And the actual frequency is so high with activity that nothing can get through?
Bring Sue Ann Nivens on Meet the Press.
She would slice and dice Gregory. :jason:
My heart belongs to Lena
http://hr.netlog.com/go/explore/videos/videoid=hr-205850 :gate: 🙁
More of an a-sexist remark, I think.
Kagan reminds me a lot of Donna Arzt, who was the director of the Lockerbie Trial Families Project.
web, that’s how I understand it. It’s apprently happened before in the market. And in the :tinfoil: department, when we tried to call SSA today, we found out the national system has been down this morning.
No, sexism is the correct term, because you’re using the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.
Web, it’s nice to know there are other Soupies out there. Unfortunately, DJing is not one of my occupations.
I know little about either stocks or computers but, I cannot believe that this was some random act. First there was the explanation that someone made a mistake and traded billions of shares instead of millions. How could such a trade be hard to find? I assumed that was BS.
Then there is the computer glitch story. OK. But, when has a computer glitch righted itself? It went down 1000 pts and right back up 700? How convenient. Plenty of time to make interesting and profitable trades.
And, there were the stocks that were $ 0. per share and others $100,000 per share. But not all stocks did these things.
The question probably is : Will they ever tell us what happened?
Oh, I never mentioned anything about masculine looking. I was thinking more along the lines of the “Pat” character on SNL.
And, anyway, are masculine and feminine stereotypes? Or just characteristics? If I refer to somebody as being, say, “blond,” that’s not a stereotype. If I says blonds are all dumb, then that’s a stereotype.
So if somebody looks masculine or feminine (or neither), is it sexist to say so? Might not be nice, but I don’t see it as sexist, any more than saying Kelly Tripucka was the ugliest man to ever play professional basketball is racist. Not nice, but not racist. And since Kelly Tripucka played for Notre Dame, he’s fair game.
Now, ‘Fighting Irish’? That’s a racist stereotype.
Big difference between a denial of service attack on a web site, and hacking into the trading system at the Exchange. That system is a hybrid system, with a limited amount of trading taking place electronically, and (hopefully) pretty limited (and expensive, I’d guess) access.
A DoS attack floods a server with requests coming from multiple hosts (more accurately, a DDoS – Distributed Denial of Service). In the olden days, it could be flooded with so much traffic that the server would actually crash or become vulnerable by causing an error (like a divide by zero error). There are lots of different types (SYN, ACK, and – my favorite – “SMURF” attack, to name a few).
That’s fairly easily mitigated these days, and, while an attack might be able to “flood the pipes,” and make a website unavailable, it isn’t likely to be able to cause what “Edward” the commenter described. Somebody might, conceivably, be able to flood the system with requests and make it unavailable, but I don’t think it could “flood the queue” with bogus trade offers and then flush it entirely while inserting a penny bid. Which isn’t to say somebody couldn’t have gotten access and worked some other sort of mischief.
From what I’ve read, humans just failed to intervene when the automatic stuff kicked in (and they have that option, to just say “hold on” for a minute if something doesn’t look right).
But, hey, who knows? I certainly don’t know enough about how to do all that kinda stuff. Wish I did. I’ll bet there are people who are at least theoretically capable of getting in and entering trades with bogus timestamps. Imagine, after the market closes you go in and timestamp buys for stocks that opened low and ended high, or do that whole short thing when they take a dive. I presume they have a lot of very smart IT guys auditing all that kind of stuff.
The Market Watch article is talking about a DDoS attack on the NYSE website, which, presumably, has nothing to do with the trading system.
Amy Goodman Strikes Back
thanks for the info pj.
had to head down in to the shelter this afternoon with the doggies and family. They just said on the news that we got 1/2 of our usual total number of tornadoes in a season, in one day. So far 26 tornadoes, and still counting.
Some amazing twisters out there. Will say it was darn windy. A good sized one missed us by about a mile. A little fast one was much closer, but didn’t touch down. Mr. FK filmed that one from his office building.