To understand what's going on, follow the money.  State budgets are deeply in the red and billions of $$ in settlements with banks will help ease the pain.  State regulartors that step up to the plate and initiate litigation get a disproportional share of any settlements with the banks (for example:  NY state got $50 m of the settlement with Merrill Lynch -- the other states split the remainder).   Another reason is that while the Congress and the SEC have been the focus of counter lobby pressure ($$) from the banks to moderate their approach (which has been effective), the states have felt none of this pressure.   The state regulators are therefore not beholden to the industry, all they see are legions of wronged investors and a big pot of gold.

Mr Spitzer's crusading zeal has got regulators from 40 states thinking. Traditionally, they would investigate only local problems; now they have divvied up the big Wall Street firms. Alabama is in charge of investigating Lehman Brothers. Bear Stearns is being probed by New Jersey. Texas gets J.P. Morgan Chase, California Deutsche Bank, and UBS Warburg goes to Connecticut, Arizona and Florida.  (Note:  MA got CSFB and Utah got Goldman Sachs).

3:12:00 PM    comment   

Rob Flickenger shows OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) plus promiscuous network mode can pollute a wireless network (wired, too): At the OS X Conference, we all started seeing connection refused errors, but it seemed to vary by domain, time, and network. Turns out that Mac OS X 10.2(.1) running a firewall and software in promiscuous mode (in which all network addresses can be sniffed) can pollute a network.

3:10:53 PM    comment