Consumerist
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breaking
Senate Passes Credit Card Reform Bill
Hooray! 90-5, the Senate has passed the Credit Card Reform bill. The job now is to iron out the differences between it and the slightly weaker House bill, or for the House to approve the Senate bill. Either way, Obama has asked for legislators to send him a bill by Memorial Day. [Washington Post] (Photo: afagen) -
swine flu
Breaking: Texan Dies From Swine Flu
Swine flu has claimed its first US victim. Details were scant but Texas health officials said the woman lived close to the Mexican border and had other, chronic, health problems. [AP] (Photo: law_keven) -
breaking
Obama Picks CPSC Head So They Can Finally Do Their Job
Obama nominated Inez Moore Tenenbaum as Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) head and Robert Adler as commissioner. He is also also Congress for $107 million more in funding and plans on beefing up the total number of commissioners to five. [Reuters] (Photo: ashi) -
breaking
Markets Rally On Bernanke Comments, Citigroup Profits
The market began to rally today after Ben Bernanke said that accounting standards for illiquid assets need to be revised, and a leaked Citigroup memo had the CEO telling employees that the bank posting substantial earnings so far this year. What's the over/under on how long before the the MDMA wears off?
[WSJ, NYT]
Full Text of Bernake's Speech [Federal Reserve] (Photo: AGRR 4059) -
us airways
US Airways Reverses Fee, Sodas Free!
US Airways has reversed course and decided that it will no longer charge you for some soda-pop in a cup with ice. More » -
breaking
Facebook Reverts Back To Old Terms Of Service
It appears in the wake of global attention and outcry, Facebook has, as of at least 12:27 am, reverted back to the previous Terms of Service. Phew, now we can all go back to sending each other digital cupcakes without Big Brother watching us. This is a temporary move until Facebook can draft a new Terms of Service that addresses the users' concerns. CEO Zuckerberg wrote a new blog post, and Facebook spokesperson Barry Schnitt released this statement:
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unconfirmed
Comcast To Give $5 To Every Accidental Penis Viewer?
How much would someone have to pay you to have your kids watch a penis? Comcast answers that question by giving a $5 one-time discount to every subscriber in Tucson, AZ who had their cerebellum gelatinized by seeing the porno movie that accidentally cut into the Super Bowl last night, according to a rumor a reporter we know overheard in their newsroom. -
this site may harm your computer
Every Google Result Is Malicious
Either Google has a bug or the entire internet is infected because no matter what you search for in Google right now it shows up with the warning, "This site may harm your computer." Judging by the submissions to Digg, this probably started showing up around 9:46 eastern this morning. Nobody knows what's going on yet, just that it's very odd. UPDATE: And of 10:17 eastern, everything seems back to normal. You may recommence your early morning vanity searching. UPDATE: Human error. Someone typed in "/" by mistake. More info at StopBadware.com. -
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breaking
Teeny Bits Of Mercury Found In High Fructose Corn Syrup Foods
Did Jeremy Piven eat 200 lbs of ketchup a day? According to a new study, which found trace amounts of mercury in a number of high-fructose-corn-syrup laden foods like Coke, Nutri-Grain Strawberry Cereal Bars and ketchup, maybe so.
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breaking
SS Id's Heartland Credit Card Breach Suspect
The Secret Service has apparently "pinpointed" the location of a suspect in the massive Heartland credit card database breach. No surprise, it's international. [Storefrontbacktalk] -
circuit city
UPDATED: Breaking: Circuit City Closing 155 Stores
According to anonymous insider tips, Circuit City is closing 155 stores and withdrawing from 12 markets. This will be officially announced tomorrow at 8am, says our source. A scan we received of a letter distributed to CC employees helps corroborate the story. The tipsters say that store employees were told this morning. No information was provided at that time about severance pay. Employees in certain departments, like car installation, and Firedog, will likely be out of a job within 48 hours. Warranties will still be honored. UPDATE 6: Here's the complete official list of closing stores.
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breaking
TSA To Stop Being So Crazy About Liquids
Soon you might be able to take your shampoo and booze on the plane once again without trouble. The head of the TSA told WSJ's The Middle Seat Terminal blog, "I think realistically in one year we, the TSA and foreign colleagues, will be a position to relax liquids restrictions...We are within a year of having the ability to differentiate threat liquids through the screening process.” The rule relaxation is thanks to airports deploying new x-ray machines and scanners that should be able to tell the difference between a bottle of water and a bomb. Just don't expect it to happen any time before 2009.
TSA Likely to Relax Restrictions on Liquids in 2009 [The Middle Seat] (Photo: AP)
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exclusives
FDIC Sheds Qualifying Beneficary Coverage Rule
The FDIC is going to make two changes to their coverage. One affects beneficiaries and one affects trust accounts, according to a bank insider who participated in teleconference call the FDIC held banks this morning as a refresher course on FDIC coverage. The big news is that the "qualifying beneficiary" rule is gone. Here's the specifics: More » -
aig
Feds Loan AIG $85 Billion
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York will lend AIG $85 billion. Explaining the breathtaking move the Fed said, “a disorderly failure of A.I.G. could add to already significant levels of financial market fragility and lead to substantially higher borrowing costs, reduced household wealth and materially weaker economic performance.” They're not just dumping out the public purse on the counter, though. FBNY will take a 79.9% stake in the company, the collateralized loan is for two years, and is expected to be paid off by selling off assets. NYT writes, "the bailout is likely to prove controversial, because it effectively puts taxpayer money at risk while protecting bad investments made by A.I.G. and other institutions does business with." You can say that again.
Fed to Loan A.I.G. $85 Billion in Rescue [NYT] (Photo: Getty)
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Amazon.com seems to be back up. A bit slow, but functional. All in all, the site was down for 3 hours, which is very very long for a gigantic online retailer to be down these days. [Amazon]
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breaking
Amazon.com
IsWas Down!
Whoa Amazon is down. It just says, "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable." Then I tried again and the front page was there, but when I clicked through, same error message. It looks like it's been this way since at least 1:30 PM, eastern. It was broken for several Consumerist writers who tested it out.
How much money do you think they're losing every second? Well, Cnet says, "Based on last quarter's revenue of $4.13 billion, a full-scale global outage would cost Amazon more than $31,000 per minute on average." However, that won't be happening as the international Amazon sites are still up. An Oct '07 Bloomberg article says US and Canadian sales account for 55% of revenue, so based on that, they're losing roughly $17,050 per minute. The stock market seems to have taken notice; Marketwatch says, "Shares of Amazon were down 2.7% to $82.25 in early afternoon trading."
A post on an online forum for Amazon sellers says, “Engineers are actively engaged in resolving this issue and we will provide an update once the issue is resolved...We appreciate your patience during this time.”" Does anyone have a spare paperclip? Time to hit the reset button.
UPDATE: 4:04 -It's spluttering back from the dead. Pages load very slowly and clicking around may still lead to dead pages.
UPDATE: 4:31 - It's alive! A bit slow, but now once again you can buy everything in the world without leaving your house! Huzzah!
(Thanks to fivecentnickel!)
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fail
General Outage Hits GrandCentral
Google's telephone service GrandCentral has been down all morning. The service's first general outage affects all customers; any calls to GrandCentral numbers are immediately disconnected. More » -
breaking
Massive North American Blackberry Outage
Blackberry smartphones are screwed up! There's a massive outage going on in "the Americas" says RIM. More »
breaking
New York, 9:28 AM
Sun Nov 22
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