Federal mortgage modification plan disappointing so far

Red tape and limited savings are hampering the much-lauded $75-billion mortgage modification plan. A new round of government help may be on the way as foreclosures are expected to reach 3 million in 2010.

Atlanta

The Obama administration announced Friday that its much-lauded mortgage modification plan has had a disappointing start, helping far fewer Americans stay in their homes than originally hoped.

Intended to bolster struggling homeowners, the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has permanently helped only 66,000 homeowners out of 4 million that may be eligible.

As foreclosures are expected to rise from 2.8 million in 2009 to 3 million in 2010, analysts expect the Obama administration to modify the modification program to keep it from becoming another major political issue in a year when Democrats are facing a growing anti-spending sentiment among the voting public.

“HAMP is running into issues of too few permanent modifications, and re-default performance is expected to be poor," Barclays Capital said in a recent research note to clients.

Treasury Department officials said Friday that more than 900,000 homeowners have signed up for trial modifications and the program has yielded “measurable success.” The conversion rate from trial to permanent modification, however, is only about 15 percent.

So what's hampering HAMP?

One problem reported by the Treasury Department is that only 75 percent of homeowners are able to stay current on their new payments for a three month trial period. What’s more, the Obama administration and mortgage servicers say homeowners aren’t fully completing the needed documentation proving income and hardship.

But homeowners are blaming servicers, who get paid for successfully lowering monthly payments. One dissatisfied applicant used the Huffington Post to register his dissatisfaction – and shed some light on why the program may need to be fixed.

Calling the program a “cruel joke,” HAMP applicant Craig Vale said “you are falsely led to believe that some help may actually come your way, but in truth the banks want little to do with you or the HAMP program.”

Mr. Vale claims he’s saving less than $2 a day on his reworked mortgage, calling the entire thing a “failure.” The irony,” he adds, “is that my bank will tell uncle Sam they ‘successfully’ modified my mortgage.”

More than $1.5 billion saved

Treasury officials said that 854,000 homeowners taking part in both trial and permanent modification requests have saved more than $1.5 billion on their mortgage payments, receiving an average reduction of $516 a month.

US banks, insurance companies and carmakers, meanwhile, have received over $373 billion in taxpayer bailouts, writes the HuffPo's Shahien Nasiripour.

In his weekly Saturday address, President Obama vowed to keep up the pressure on US banks to do right by the American taxpayer, who, after all, bailed out much of the financial industry over the last 18 months.

Saying that, “We’re not going to let Wall Street take the money and run,” Obama vowed to make sure that banks can never put the US economy at risk again.

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Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 friend Facebook

NEW YORK — Users of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 video game consoles can now brag about their achievements on Facebook.

Both systems are integrating the social network this week.

Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 friend Facebook

Microsoft Corp. switched on a slew of new features for its Xbox Live online service, allowing owners of the Xbox 360 consoles to update Facebook and Twitter directly from their consoles.

The console can also stream music from the Internet radio service Last.fm.

Sony Corp., meanwhile, is letting PlayStation 3 users connect their systems to Facebook through its latest software upgrade.

Both companies have been looking to turn their consoles into entertainment hubs beyond gaming.

Switzerland to sue Google over Street View privacy

The Swiss government has lost patience with Google over what it sees as Street View's failure to ensure privacy.

The country's federal data protection commissioner, Hanspeter Thur, is now to sue Google in an attempt to force it to improve the blurring of faces and number plates. He is particularly concerned about locations such as outside hospitals, prisons or schools.

Other countries have raised similar concerns in the past, but Google has always argued that the present level of blurring is adequate, and that people are free to ask Google to remove pictures of their property.

The company says it worked hard to satisfy Switzerland's privacy requirements. "Before the launch in Switzerland, we made sure we spoke to privacy regulators and other interested groups to give them an opportunity to ask questions and raise any concerns they might have. So we were pleased when the Swiss DPA gave us the green light to launch the product, confirming our understanding that Street View is legal under Swiss law." says Peter Fleischer, the company's Global Privacy Counsel, in a blog post.

"We are disappointed that Herr Thuer has changed his position on Street View after launch, and that he has not considered sufficient our proposals for improvements to the product."

Google says it plans to defend itself in court.

Apple wins Psystar Mac clone case

A US court has ruled in favour of Apple at the close of a long-running legal battle with Mac clone maker Psystar.

Psystar was accused of violating Apple's copyright when it installed the Mac OS X operating system on Intel-based computers.

Apple took Psystar to court 18 months ago, accusing the manufacturer of infringing its copyright and breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

"Mac OS X on both Mac computers and the DVD are covered by software licence agreements that provide that the software is 'licensed, not sold, to [the user] by Apple Inc'," Apple said in court documents.

"Apple's licence agreements restricted the use of Mac OS X to Apple computers, and specifically prohibited customers from installing the operating system on non-Apple computers.

"In brief, customers were contractually precluded from utilising Mac OS X on any computer hardware system that was not an Apple computer system."

Psystar had been selling PCs with Apple's Snow Leopard pre-installed, along with software tools that let users run Mac OS on any machine.

However, a US District Court judge ruled that Psystar had infringed Apple's exclusive right to create derivative works of Mac OS X by replacing original files in Mac OS X with unauthorised software files.

"Specifically, it made three modifications: (1) replacing the Mac OS X bootloader with a different bootloader to enable an unauthorised copy of Mac OS X to run on Psystar's computers; (2) disabling and removing Apple kernel extension files; and (3) adding non-Apple kernel extensions," the judge said.

A hearing to determine the 'remedies' for the case will take place on 14 December.

Google Nips and Tucks Google Book Search Deal

Google, authors and publishers Nov. 13 narrowed the scope of their agreement to let Google sell access to millions of out-of-print books online, limiting it to include works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada. The revised deal also addresses concerns from Amazon, the Department of Justice and others that Google would have too much control over orphan works. The Open Book Alliance, formed in August with Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo to oppose the Google Book Search bid, blasted the revised settlement in a statement.

Google, authors and publishers Nov. 13 narrowed the scope of their agreement to let Google sell access to millions of out-of-print books online, limiting it to include works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada.

Financial terms of the Google Book Search deal, intended to settle a 2005 copyright suit with Author's Guild and Association of American Publishers, have not changed. Google will still pay $125 million to scan out-of-print works into its search engine and sell access to them to consumers and libraries, sharing revenue with the authors and publishers who owned the copyrights.

Amazon, the Department of Justice and others had expressed concern that Google would have too much control over orphan works under the original agreement filed in October 2008. The revised deal addresses these concerns.

The amended settlement requires the Book Rights Registry -- the group appointed to distribute digital book sales to Google, authors and publishers -- to have a court-approved trustee to represent rightsholders for orphaned works and license their works to third parties.

The trustee can grant licenses to other companies who also want to sell these books, and will oversee unclaimed money. Money that goes unclaimed for 10 years will be used to locate rights holders or granted to charities.

The revamped settlement also clarifies how Google's algorithm will work to price books it scan and sells. The algorithm used to set consumer purchase prices will simulate the prices in a competitive market, and prices for books will be established independently of each other. Moreover, the Registry cannot share pricing information with anyone but the book's rightsholder.

The new settlement also removes the non-discrimination clause that pertained to the Registry licensing of unclaimed works, enabling it to license works to other parties without ever extending the same terms to Google.

The Open Book Alliance, formed in August with Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo to oppose the Google Book Search bid, blasted the revised settlement in a statement. Calling the revision a "sleight of hand" by Google and its partners, OBA Co-chair Peter Brantley said:

None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest. By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP, and the AG are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress's role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.

While the OBA believes the revised deal won't satisfy the DOJ, it is unclear how the regulator will receive the deal. The DOJ in September said that the original deal would violate class action, copyright and antitrust law and should not be approved without changes.

Officials for Google, the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers filed their deal only minutes before the New York District Court's deadline, capping months of revisions after opponents to the deal complained that Google would have too much power and control over the digital book market.

New York District Court Judge Denny Chin will set a timeline to study the deal, which will likely include a notice period, an objection period, and a final fairness hearing in January 2010.

See the modification overviews here and a FAQ here. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan took notes during a conference call with Google and officials from the Author's Guild and AAP.

You Tube Looks To Offer Videos In High-Res

With an eye on improving the viewing experience of its users, YouTube from next week will start to support 1080p high resolution videos.

The move from YouTube is seen by many as a very significant move given the fact that it currently supports videos to the maximum of 780p only.

Commenting on the subject, Hunter Walk, Director of Product Management at You Tube, mentioned that more than half of the videos have already been re-encoded according to the new video format.

Although, there is still a limit of 10 minute maximum for a video being uploaded, the size limit will have to be increased from the existing 2GB.

Walk also said the high-resolution video had been tested with success and despite the cost of supporting huge files, the company was not worried. Most analysts believe that YouTube which is owned by Google has the capacity to foot the increased costs associated with displaying videos in full HD and it will allow YouTube to tie-up with established content providers and it may even look to offer premium content at a later stage.

It must be noted that mobile users figure amongst the biggest contributors when it came to adding content and the site experiencing a 2000% increase in mobile uploads this year.

Apple fixes Flash snafu in Snow Leopard, patches 33 bugs in Leopard

Less than two weeks after Apple launched Snow Leopard, the company today issued the new operating system's first security update. In a separate upgrade, Apple patched 33 vulnerabilities in 2007's Leopard, and about half as many in the even older Tiger.

Today's updates were the third and fourth from Apple in the last two days. Wednesday, Apple delivered security fixes for the iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as another upgrade for its QuickTime media player.

"It's another sneak attack," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security, referring to the string of updates. "Actually, it's almost what we've come to expect from Apple," he added. Unlike rival OS maker Microsoft, which releases most of its security upgrades on a pre-set monthly schedule, Apple ships its patches whenever they're ready to go out the door.

The Snow Leopard 10.6.1 update's security content consisted solely of an upgrade for Adobe's Flash Player, which was bumped to the up-to-date version 10.0.32.18.

Users and security researchers had taken Apple to task for not only shipping Snow Leopard with an outdated and vulnerable version of Flash Player, but also for silently "downgrading" once-secure editions when Macs were updated to the new operating system.

Mac OS X 10.6.1 packaged nine patches for Flash vulnerabilities, some of which could result in "arbitrary code execution," Apple-speak of a critical flaw that attackers could exploit to grab control of a Mac. According to the corresponding Adobe security advisory, six of the nine flaws could be considered critical.

Apple released the first update for Snow Leopard less than two weeks after it debuted the operating system on Aug. 28, a slightly faster pace than in 2007, when Apple took about three weeks to issue the first security update for Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard.

Adobe updated Flash Player to 10.0.32.18 in late July to plug a dozen vulnerabilities, including three inherited from flawed Microsoft development code -- obviously, those were not present in the Mac version -- and one that hackers had been exploiting for at least a week, which did apply to the Mac.

"Having to release a whole OS update just to patch one third-party component, that's a bit heavy-handed," said Storms. "Apple had to go through one whole engineering cycle to fix Flash."

As if to echo Storms' point, Apple noted that the 10.6.1 update -- which admittedly includes fixes for eight non-security issues -- tipped the scale at 75MB.

The Security Update 2009-005 for Leopard and Tiger was more traditional, patching 33 vulnerabilities in the former and 16 in the latter. Of the 33 bugs in Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, 23 were tagged with Apple's "arbitrary code execution" phrase; 14 of the 16 flaws in Tiger were pegged the same way.

Among the components patched in 2009-005 were ClamAV, the open-source antivirus scanner bundled with Apple's server software; CoreGraphics; the Apple-developed-but-open-source CUPS printing system; Launch Services; MySQL; the PHP scripting language; and SMB (Server Message Block), the file- and print-sharing protocol Macs use to access Windows-based networks.

Two of the vulnerabilities could be triggered by duping users into visiting rigged Web sites, said Apple, while a number of others, including flaws in ColorSync, CoreGraphics and ImageIO, could be exploited by attackers who serve up malformed image, PDF or PixarFilm-encoded TIFF formatted files.

Storms focused on the six patches for PHP, which updated Leopard's version of the scripting language to 5.2.10. "PHP [5.2.10] was released in June," Storms said. "Apple either needs to close this [time] loophole, or distance itself from bundling third-party and open-source components."

Apple has taken heat, from Storms as well as other security experts, for its sometimes-sluggish pace of rolling third-party updates into its operating system. It took Apple until mid-May, for example, to include Flash Player 10.0.22.87, the version Adobe released in late February, with a Leopard security upgrade.

Also included in the Mac OS 10.6.1 update were at least eight fixes for non-security bugs, Apple said in a separate support document. Among them was one that "addresses an issue in which some printer compatibility drivers might not appear properly in the Add Printer browser," said Apple. The company today pushed out an additional update that boosted the number of Hewlett-Packard printer drivers.

Both were in reaction to complaints by users that they weren't able to operate some HP printers after upgrading to Snow Leopard.

Storms said it was possible that today's updates weren't the last for the week. "They've updated the iPhone, QuickTime and OS X. A new iTunes has just come out, and it's likely there were some fixes in that, too. The only thing that's left is Safari," he said, noting that Apple's browser has been patched every month since May, each time in the first or second week of the month.

Mac OS X 10.6.1, the 2009-005 security update and the updated HP printer drivers can be downloaded from the Apple site or installed using the Mac's integrated update service.