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Foreclosure rates are continuing to climb. Nevada and California have posted the highest foreclosures, based on per capita and total, respectively. Other statistics show that in Detroit, there is one foreclosure for every 51 households.
Such a startling number is five times the national average. In times like these, many people resort to asking the obvious question: can I simply give my home back to the bank? Such a return is called a "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure." While it sounds like an excellent get-out-of-debt-free card, most banks have a tendency to say, "No give backs!"
If you do have equity in your house, it would be wise to list the property and go for the quick sale. Across the country, houses are being listed well below market price and many are not selling. Depending on your situation, you may have a "long winded" quick sale.
This is the case for a California couple who listed their home $100,000 below appraisal price. They then lowered it three times to $200,000 below appraisal. Six months later, they are still waiting for their first bite.
Before you say all of your farewells to the neighborhood, look into a "Deed in Lieu Foreclosure." And though a lender will most likely decline if the property is worth less than what is owed, it's worth a shot.
In terms of the technicalities, there must be a total consideration equal to or exceeding the fair market value of the property being returned to the lender when any settlement agreement is entered into to. Again, most lenders are not interested in a property that is worth less than what is owed-or if more is owed on the property than the actual fair market value of it.
A "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure" can be slightly beneficial on a credit report, depending on your point of view. The status of the loan will be closed and the "deed" will be identified. Compared to the credit score torpedo of a foreclosure, a "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure" is less damaging than a foreclosure to credit reports.
One major upside to the whole process is that it will be over sooner than later. It will be done and dealt with and the foreclosure will be behind you. Your credit report will have fewer late payments listed. With all of this in mind, it will easier for you to bounce back from this trying experience.
If a foreclosure is all but inevitable, giving the house back to the bank is an idea that should definitely be considered. The house is practically out of your hands anyways; why not place yourself in a better position to recover emotionally and financially. The idea is to make the damage as minimal as possible.
Two Advantages Are:
1)You are released from some, if not all, of the debt of your defaulted loan.
2)You avoid the public scrutiny involving newspaper listings, legal notices posted on your front door for all to see, an intimidating court appearance and a formal sheriff eviction.
The Down Side Of Foreclosure
Giving your house back to the bank to effectively stop the foreclosure process is a means to an unfortunate end.
1099C Cancellation of Debt
Here is some fine print for you. If you borrow money from a lender for a home and you give that home back as a "Deed in lieu of a Foreclosure," the lender may cancel some or all of your debt. If that occurs, you may have to claim that amount as income for tax purposes.
When you initially borrowed the money from the lender, you were obligated to claim the given amount as income because you agreed to pay that amount back.
However, you are no longer contractually bound to repay the amount and the original loan sum is reportable as you are no longer making payments. The lender is also obligated to report the forgiven loan amount to both you and the IRS in what is called a 1099C form, or a Cancellation of Debt.
Here's a straightforward illustration of a situation involving a 1099C. You borrow $15,000 from a lender and you default after paying $5,000. If your lender cannot collect the remaining $10,000 from you and it is cancelled, it becomes your taxable income.
There is an exception to every rule. Cancellation of debt income is not always taxable.
Debts forgiven due to bankruptcy are not considered taxable income to the financial circumstances.
Also, you cannot deduct the loss if from the foreclosure or sale or sale of your property you lose money.
A "Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure" will not save your home but it will help you move on and rebuild your life. It's not the end of the world; rather, it's both an end and a new beginning. And the "deed" is less damaging than a foreclosure to your credit report.


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Sugar skulls are a traditional folk art from Southern Mexico and are an integral part of Dias De La Muertos or "Day of the Dead" celebrations. Sugar skulls are exactly what the name implies: skull-shaped sugar made from a granulated white sugar mixture that is pressed into special skull molds. The sugar mixture is allowed to dry and then the sugar skull is decorated with icing, feathers, colored foil and more. While the ingredients of sugar skulls are edible the skulls are generally decorated with non-edible items and used only for decorative purposes.
Sugar was first introduced to the Americas before "Mexico" even existed as a country. The original Spanish settlers quickly discovered that the conditions in the "New World" were perfect for growing sugar. Mexican sugar sculpture dates back to the 17th century when Italian missionaries visited the Americas. Mexicans during that time period had very little money, but had learned from the Catholic friars how to make decorations out of a plentiful resource; sugar. As Spanish Catholic beliefs began to mix with native Mesoamerican beliefs, the Mexicans started making sugar skulls as part of their Dias de los Muertos festivities. These decorated memorials have become more and more creative and extravagant over time. The designs are usually whimsical and brightly colored with stripes, dots, and swirls of icing to enhance the features of the skulls. They are meant to be festive, not morbid or scary.
Sugar Skulls
2 cups granulated sugar
3 tablespoons corn starch
1 egg white
Add the water and mix with your fingers until all the sugar mixture is moistened. Once the mixture is about the texture of "moist beach sand" it is ready to mold. You may need a bit of extra water if so just add a few drops at a time. If it is a really humid day, you may choose to try this project on another day!
Once the sugar is evenly moist, pack it into the molds. We used a "medium-sized" mold which yielded 4 skulls. Make sure to pack the mold very firmly. It was surprising how much sugar dough was needed to pack each mold tightly. Scrape the mold with a straight edge (use the back of a butter knife), then pack again. Check the mold to make sure all the indentations are smoothly filled. Lay a small square of cardboard cut to fit the mold on top of the molded skull and invert onto the cardboard. Gently lift the mold away from the sugar skull and place the sugar skull in a warm, dry space for at least 8 hours to dry. This time will vary depending on room temperature and humidity.
click here for recipe).
Use icing bags and pipe icing and decorate as desired. We named the skulls before we started and relayed memories about the dearly departed we were celebrating as we decorated our skulls. Set the skulls aside to allow the icing to fully dry.
~Research and article written by Sonny Romeo for AP World History project

subset: commoncrawl


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As my girlfriend who owns an outdoor clothing store in Minnesota says, "there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing". Dressed appropriately, it is possible to be comfortable in even the most frigid temperatures, but this wisdom is lost on my kids. They are not alone in their aversion to outerwear. I crunched on frosty grass and slipped on icy sidewalks while walking our dog this morning, but middle school and high school students biked by, hatless and gloveless. Cotton sweatshirts with an occasional hood pulled up over a bike helmet was their only defense against the chilly weather. I did not spot a single puffy jacket and one boy was even wearing shorts. This cold snap has been with us for a week. Ample time to shiver and experience cold numb fingers and ears, which would seem to be enough to motivate kids to dig those winter clothes out of the back of the closet.
When I was growing up in a sparsely populated Midwestern suburb, in winter the 20 minute drive to the grocery store was a potential brush with death. At any moment the car might slide off the slippery road into a snow drift, and it could be hours before any one stumbled upon us. We never left the house without boots, snow pants, extra blankets and provisions, less we risk frostbite or worse. The recent cold temperatures here in Palo Alto activate these well honed survival instincts in me, so I pile on the layers and am comfortably warm and dry. My kids' response to my pleas to layer is that the weather will warm up in a few hours, and then they'll be overheated and have to lug the jacket around, which is, apparently, a terrible fate. Also, the crinkly sound of raingear is intolerably annoying.
Friday night my daughter attended her first middle school dance, billed as semi-formal. After asking around, we determined that meant wear anything except athletic attire or flannel. Since it was a bone chilling 25 degrees out, my daughter agreed to wear a skirt, dressy sweater, tights and flats. I was in favor of her ski jacket over that ensemble, but that was vetoed. As I dropped her off, I saw girls running through the rain and wind in spaghetti strapped white eyelet dresses and sandals. No sweaters or tights in sight. My heart sank, her first dance and I gave her bad advice on clothing! I think she has almost forgiven me.
My kids also spend more time being cold than I ever did because they play soccer in November, swim at outdoor meets in December, and try out for little league in January. This scheduling of outdoor sports throughout the winter months denies the fact that, even in balmy Northern California, we are regularly subjected to rain, frost and wind. In addition, elementary students depend only on outdoor over hangs for shelter due to the lack of indoor gyms for rainy day recreation. And, at lunch time in inclement weather, middle schoolers sit on cold tile floors in drafty school hallways. Because our kids are expected to just put up with being uncomfortable and cold, they do not learn that there are alternatives!
My kids' inability to exercise proper judgment regarding winter clothing does make me worry about their ability to survive and adjust to a place with real weather. On the other hand, they were aghast at my recent misstep. On Saturday, I was huddled under blankets at Greer Park watching the AYSO soccer tournament all day. With the wind whipping off the Bay, I sat in the sun for warmth. I was chilled to the bone, so applying sunscreen did not occur to me, and my kids were horrified to see my sunburned face that night. At least I can take some comfort in knowing my California kids won't ever forget to lather on the sunscreen, no matter the weather!


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Fifty-nine senior and mid-level government officials in Angola have completed an UNCTAD training course on productive capacities and poverty reduction.
The course took place from 29 April to 3 May at Angola's Ministry of Commerce, in Luanda, as part of the UNCTAD TrainForTrade programme. Twenty-two of the graduates were women.
The workshop was formally titled Productive Capacities and Poverty Reduction in Least Developed Countries: The Case of Angola. The main institutions represented were Angola's ministries of commerce, industry, agriculture, finance, energy, and petroleum; the Angola National Investment Agency; the European Commission; and the national secretariat of the Southern African Development Community. Among those completing the course were eight national directors of the Ministry of Commerce.
The workshop built upon a seminar on productive capacities and poverty reduction that was held in 2009 as part of TrainForTrade's project for Angola. The project was financed by the European Commission from 2007 to 2011. The recent workshop was prepared and delivered in the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed between UNCTAD and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office in Angola in December 2012, and took place with the collaboration of UNCTAD's Division for Africa, Least Developed Countries and Special Programmes (ALDC). The workshop was delivered by Rolf Traeger, Economic Affairs Officer at ALDC.
The Angolan Minister of Commerce, Rosa Escórcio Pacavira de Matos, presided over the opening ceremony, which was attended by more than 100 representatives of public and private institutions. Samuel Harbor, Country Director of UNDP Angola, and Josep Puig, General Coordinator for Cooperación Española, also took part in the ceremony.
On completion of the workshop, participants requested UNCTAD to develop and deliver additional courses on productive capacities and poverty reduction.
The workshop received wide media coverage. This included a report on the evening news bulletin of Televisão Pública de Angola, the national television channel, as well as several articles in Jornal de Angola, the country's biggest daily newspaper.


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At the end of November, 2003, SEspider began posting a series of comics, using Halo action figures (and Photoshop, quite nicely); he'd been mentioning these on Xbox.com's Halo forum, but on January 16, pointed them out on OUR forum. Their original home (and one that will continue to be updated) is on Geocities... but bandwidth can be tight on Geocities, and these are great, so we gave him a home here, as well. These are updated sporadically; there'll certainly be a front-page mention when a new one goes live. SEspider is happy to receive new ideas for side stories; email them to him with a subject line of 'Halo Comic'.
UPDATE: SESpider put up a request for help on November 21, 2004. Read it here.
UPDATE: SESpider began redoing early pages on August 15, 2006. We'll swap them in as we see them.
All images are Copyright 2003-present of Richard T. White Jr.


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- This article is about the king of the Southern Kingdom. For the king of the Northern Kingdom, see Ahaziah of Israel.
King Ahaziah (Hebrew אחזיהו המלך held by YHWH) (906-vr. 886-r. 885-d. 884 BC according to Ussher,[1] or 863-vr. 842-r. 841-d. 841 BC according to Thiele[2]) was the sixth king of the Southern Kingdom of Israel.[3] He succeeded his father Jehoram and in fact served a year as viceroy under Jehoram before his one-year lone reign. He is remembered very little, and mainly on account of King Jehu, who killed him and his uncle Jehoram of Israel in the same engagement, and his mother Athaliah, who counseled him to do evil deeds and ultimately served a bloody reign of her own.[4]
He was the youngest of Jehoram's sons by Athaliah,[5][6] and also had a sister named Jehosheba. Through his mother, the rulers of the House of Omri were in fact his uncles to three different degrees.
The Chronicler and the author of I and II Kings give two widely different ages for him: the Chronicler says that he was 42 when he began to reign[7] while the author of the Kings books says that he was 22[8] Ussher accepted the younger age, and Larry Pierce holds that the greater age is most likely a handwriting mistake by an unnamed scribe—one of the very few mistakes to be found in Bible manuscripts, and a subject of much controversy.[9]
Ahaziah married Zibia of Beersheba, probably in the year that his father made him viceroy. By her he had a son named Joash in the year of his lone reign.
Viceroyship and Brief Reign
In the last year of his reign, Ahaziah's father Jehoram made him viceroy while suffering from a gastrointestinal disease[10] A year later, Jehoram died and Ahaziah succeeded him. His brief reign is remarkable only for his remaining under the influence of his mother Athaliah, who had introduced Baalism to the Southern Kingdom and continued to promote it.
His last battle was at Ramoth-gilead, where he fought at the side of his uncle Jehoram of Israel.[4][6][11] This other Jehoram was wounded in battle against King Hazael of Syria, and the allied kings had no choice but to lift their siege. Jehoram retired to Jezreel to recover, and Ahaziah stayed by his side.[4][12]
Soon afterward, Jehu appeared at the head of a company. Jehoram and Ahaziah prepared their chariots and rode out to meet Jehu. Jehu essentially declared war. Jehoram turned and fled, and said to Ahaziah that they had been tricked. Nor did Jehoram live long, because Jehu killed him with an arrow shot to the back.
Here the two accounts of Ahaziah's death[5] differ slightly. The author of Kings states that Ahaziah fled the scene, and Jehu pursued him and wounded him fatally on the way to Gur; Ahaziah fled as far as Megiddo and died there, and his servants then brought him back to Jerusalem for burial.[6][13] The Chronicler says that Ahaziah tried to hide out in Samaria, but was arrested, brought before Jehu, and executed,[4] whereupon Jehu gave him a decent burial on account of his grandfather Jehoshaphat. The Chronicler also states that Jehu executed several of Ahaziah's cousins who were with him.[14]
In any event, Ahaziah's mother Athaliah took over the throne[5] and began a six-year reign marred by much bloodshed.[4]
- ↑ James Ussher, The Annals of the World, Larry Pierce, ed., Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2003 (ISBN 0890513600), pghh. 503, 511, 532-5
- ↑ Leon J. Wood, A Survey of Israel's History, rev. ed. David O'Brien, Grand Rapids, MI: Academie Books, 1986 (ISBN 031034770X), p. 294
- ↑ II_Chronicles 22:1-10
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Konig, George. Ahaziah. AboutBibleProphecy.com, 2007. Retrieved June 15, 2007.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Authors unknown. "Entry for Ahaziah." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Columbia University Press, 2007. Retrieved June 15, 2007.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Authors unknown. "Entry for Ahaziah." WebBible Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 15, 2007.
- ↑ II_Chronicles 22:2
- ↑ II_Kings 8:26 .
- ↑ Pierce, Larry. "Ussher's Time Line for the Divided Kingdom." Trinity Review, 170, April 1999. Retrieved June 4, 2007, from Answers in Genesis. Requires PDF reader or plug-in.
- ↑ II_Kings 9:29 .
- ↑ II_Kings 8:25-29
- ↑ II_Kings 8:28-29
- ↑ II_Kings 9:27-29
- ↑ II_Chronicles 22:7-10
See also


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I just took a trip to the Valley for the first time. I've had a lot to say about it from the perspective of an entrepreneur (see on Greenhorn Connect here and at OnStartups here). I also noticed quite a few things that have nothing to do with startups that I found culturally interesting.
1) Everyone is nice
Boston can be a cold place, and no I'm not talking about the weather. In general, you just don't find people being friendly walking down the street, and you definitely don't see it on the road.
One event really tipified this for me: I had just made it out of a parking garage before close. Because of this I didn't have time to set my GPS before hitting the road. There was no where to park so I pulled off blocking a driveway. As I was engrossed in entering my destination address into my Garmin, an SUV started honking at me; they needed in the driveway. I of course complied.
What happened next shocked me. The woman parked her car, got out and walked over to where I had pulled off slightly up the street. When I put down my window, she apologized for honking her horn at me.
2) Everyone weighs 15 pounds less
It's hard to believe until you see it. Everyone is just in slightly better shape than I see them in Boston. It's a visual average I noticed after a few days.
I think the cause of this is pretty simple. Nice weather = more time outdoors = more exercise. What kills us (even a gym rat like me) are these brutal winters. It's really hard to get enough cardio in under those circumstances which means every winter you're putting on a little weight. Add that up over a winter or two and you quickly get those 15 pounds.
3) The Valley has safer drivers
I'll be totally honest: after not driving for 7.5 years, I'm a pretty terrible driver. Luckily, people in the Valley drive slower on the highways (around 65 instead of 80) and well, they aren't MassHoles. They actually use things like turn signals and let people over when they do signal. It was refreshing and the only reason I got back to Boston in one piece.
4) Parking is a breeze outside SF
There's easy parking in Mountain View and Palo Alto. Even downtown. And it's free. I was terrified when I forgot to bring quarters with me on my trip and was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't need them.
5) Their public transportation is good, but flawed too
We all have our gripes with the MBTA but it gets you where you need to go….usually. The SF system is the same. Their buses are slightly unreliable, but have some drawbacks: the stops often smell of urine and the back part of every bus is covered in graffiti. Meanwhile, the CalTrain is incredible. Like a well oiled machine, the trains fly through the Valley right on schedule.
The best part of their system is they've tied it all together on one master card (their version of the Charlie Card). The Clipper Card, as they call it, was the only thing I needed and was easy to pick up at a station.
6) They have a serious homeless population
I found out while I was there that SF has the largest homeless population in the country and for some ridiculous reason they give each of them $400 a year (as if the year round good weather wasn't attractive enough for the homeless). I think this is a likely contributor to the bus stop urine smell.
These are just a few of the random differences I noticed in comparing the cities of Boston and SF and the Valley vs. New England. Have you been both places? What have you noticed as a difference?


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i can see how you actually determine for a customer where the pain points are and you can validate user remarks about poor performance. But i don't see from your post how you are going to attack the problem of fixing the performance issue.Under the service model I described in the Performance as a Service post, a client using our performance service would have several choices about how to respond to a problem. They could contract our team as consultants; they could use someone else; they could do it themselves; or of course, they could choose to defer the solution.
i would be most interested in hearing your thoughts on that. I wonder if you guys are going to touch the actual code behind the "order button" you described.
Attacking the problem of fixing the performance issue is actually the "easy" part. Well, it's not necessarily always easy, but it's the part that my team have been doing over and over again since the early 1990s. We use Method R. Once we've measured the response time in detail with Oracle's extended SQL trace function, we know exactly where the task is spending the end user's time. From there, I think it's fair to say we (Jeff, Karen, etc.) are pretty skilled at figuring out what to do next.
Sometimes, the root cause of a performance problem requires manipulation of the application source code, and sometimes it doesn't. If you do diagnosis right, you should never have to guess which one it is. A lot of people wonder what happens if it's the code that needs modification, but the application is prepackaged, and therefore the source code is out of your control. In my experience, most vendors are very responsive to improving the performance of their products when they're shown unambiguously how to improve them.
If your application is slow, you should be eager to know exactly why it's slow. You should be equally eager to know, whether you wrote the code yourself or someone else wrote it for you. To avoid collecting the right performance diagnostic data for an application because you're afraid of what you might find out is like taking your hands off the wheel and covering your eyes when a child rides his bike out in front of the car that you're driving. There's significant time-value upon information about performance problems. Even if someone else's code is the reason for your performance problem (or whatever truth you might be afraid of learning), you need to know it as early as possible.
The SLA Manager service I talked about is so important because the most difficult part of using Method R is usually the data collection step. The difficulty is almost always more political than technical. It's overcoming the question, "Why should we change the way we collect our data?" I believe the business value of knowing how long your computer system takes to execute tasks for your business is important enough that it will get people into the habit of measuring response time. ...Which is a vital step in solving the data collection problem that's at the heart of every persistent performance problem I've ever seen. I believe the data collection service that I described will help remove the most important remaining barrier to highly manageable application software performance in our market.


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BOSTON (AP) — Investigators appealed to the public Tuesday for amateur video and photos that might yield clues to the Boston Marathon bombing as the chief FBI agent in Boston vowed "we will go to the ends of the Earth" to find whoever carried out the deadly attack.
Two bombs blew up seconds apart Monday at the finish line of one of the world's most storied races, tearing off limbs and leaving the streets spattered with blood and strewn with broken glass. Three people were killed, including an 8-year-old boy, and more than 170 were wounded.
A doctor treating the wounded said one of the victims was maimed by what looked like ball bearings or BBs.
Federal investigators said no one had claimed responsibility for the bombings, which took place on one of the city's biggest civic holidays, Patriots Day. But the blasts raised the specter of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
On Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called the bombings "a cruel act of terror" and said "a thorough investigation will have to determine whether it was planned or carried out by a terror group, foreign or domestic."
Across the U.S., from Washington to Los Angeles, police tightened security, monitoring landmarks, government buildings, transit hubs and sporting events.
"We will go to the ends of the Earth to identify the subject or subjects who are responsible for this despicable crime, and we will do everything we can to bring them to justice," said Richard DesLauriers, FBI agent in charge in Boston.
He said investigators had received "voluminous tips" and were interviewing witnesses and analyzing the crime scene.
Gov. Deval Patrick said that contrary to earlier reports, no unexploded bombs were found. He said the only explosives were the ones that went off.
FBI agents searched a home in the suburb of Revere overnight. Authorities gave no details. But investigators were seen leaving a building there early Tuesday carrying brown paper bags, plastic trash bags and a duffel bag.
At a news conference, police and federal agents repeatedly appealed for any video, audio and photos taken by marathon spectators, even images that people might not think are significant.
"There has to be hundreds, if not thousands, of photos and videos" that might help investigators, state police Col. Timothy Alben said.
Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said investigators also gathered a large number of surveillance tapes from businesses in the area and intend to go through the video frame by frame.
"This is probably one of the most photographed areas in the country yesterday," he said.
Investigators refused to give any specifics on the bombs and say, for example, where they might have been hidden or whether they were packed with shrapnel for maximum carnage, as is often the case in terror bombings overseas.
But Dr. Stephen Epstein of the emergency medicine department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said he saw an X-ray of one victim's leg that had "what appears to be small, uniform, round objects throughout it — similar in the appearance to BBs."
The fiery explosions took place about 10 seconds and about 100 yards apart, knocking spectators and at least one runner off their feet, shattering windows and sending columns of smoke rising over the street.
Roupen Bastajian, a state trooper from Smithfield, R.I., had just finished the race when he heard the explosions.
"I started running toward the blast. And there were people all over the floor," he said. "We started grabbing tourniquets and started tying legs. A lot of people amputated. … At least 25 to 30 people have at least one leg missing, or an ankle missing, or two legs missing."
At least 17 people were critically injured, police said. At least eight children were being treated at hospitals. In addition to losing limbs, victims suffered broken bones, shrapnel wounds and ruptured eardrums.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services, said: "This is something I've never seen in my 25 years here … this amount of carnage in the civilian population. This is what we expect from war."
Eight-year-old Martin Richard was among the dead, said U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch, a family friend. The boy's mother, Denise, and 6-year-old sister, Jane, were badly injured. His brother and father were also watching the race but were not hurt.
A candle burned on the stoop of the family's single-family home in the city's Dorchester section Tuesday, and the word "Peace" was written in chalk on the front walk.
Neighbor Betty Delorey said Martin loved to climb the neighborhood trees, and hop the fence outside his home.
Tim Davey of Richmond, Va., was with his wife, Lisa, and children near a medical tent that had been set up to care for fatigued runners when the injured began arriving. "They just started bringing people in with no limbs," he said.
"Most everybody was conscious," Lisa Davey said. "They were very dazed."
The Boston Marathon is one of the world's oldest and most prestigious races and about 23,000 runners participated. Most of them had crossed the finish line by the time the bombs exploded, but thousands more were still completing the course.
The attack may have been timed for maximum bloodshed: The four-hour mark is typically a crowded time near the finish line because of the slow-but-steady recreational runners completing the race and because of all the friends and relatives clustered around to cheer them on.
Davis, the police commissioner, said authorities had received "no specific intelligence that anything was going to happen" at the race. On Tuesday, he said that two security sweeps of the route had been conducted before the marathon.
The race winds up near Copley Square, not far from the landmark Prudential Center and the Boston Public Library. It is held on Patriots Day, which commemorates the first battles of the American Revolution, at Concord and Lexington in 1775.
Richard Barrett, the former U.N. coordinator for an al-Qaida and Taliban monitoring team who has also worked for British intelligence, said the relatively small size of the devices in Boston and the timing of the blasts suggest a domestic attack rather than an al-Qaida-inspired one.
"This happened on Patriots Day — it is also the day Americans are supposed to have their taxes in — and Boston is quite a symbolic city," said Barrett, now senior director at the Qatar International Academy for Security Studies.
The Pakistani Taliban, which has threatened attacks in the United States because of its support for the Pakistani government, on Tuesday denied any role in the bombings.
A woman who was a few feet from the second bomb, Brighid Wall, 35, of Duxbury, said that when it exploded, runners and spectators froze, unsure of what to do. Her husband threw their children to the ground, lay on top of them and another man lay on top of them and said, "Don't get up, don't get up."
After a minute or so without another explosion, Wall said, she and her family headed to a Starbucks and out the back door through an alley. Around them, the windows of the bars and restaurants were blown out.
She said she saw six to eight people bleeding profusely, including one man who was kneeling, dazed, with blood trickling down his head. Another person was on the ground covered in blood and not moving.
"My ears are zinging. Their ears are zinging," Wall said. "It was so forceful. It knocked us to the ground."


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TRON 2.0 Complete Map Pack (Containing All Multiplayer Maps) Updated
Download the Complete Map Pack
The TRON 2.0 Complete Map Pack has been updated. It contains one new map, and there have been some other changes.
Changes in Derez (DM) Map Pack
Use REZ Handler to install just the YCP HQ map, and then use the "Combine .REZ" feature to merge the YCP.REZ file with DM_Pack.REZ to reduce the .REZ file count.
Click here to download just the YCP HQ map
Changes in All Map Packs
Some of the map authors saved their sound effect and music files in an incorrect format. This caused the sounds to not play for everyone, depending on their sound hardware configuration.
The sound files have been reformatted (without affecting quality), to fix the issue and allow music and sound effects to be heard by everyone. Therefore, if you install this updated version of the map pack - even if you already have these same maps from the previous release - you may now hear music and sounds in a map that the map authors intended you to hear, but have not heard before.
Changes to the Installer
The map pack is now compressed with a 7-Zip self-extractor. This was done for a couple of reasons.
- It resulted in a significant file size reduction compared to compressing as a .zip file. (Down to 721 MB.)
- The self-extractor prevents people from trying to run the installer without extracting first (running inside the .zip), which would often result in error messages when attempting to install that way. The extractor will extract the map pack to the desktop by default, where it's easy to find. But, the program also offers you the choice of where to extract it.
After the map pack has been extracted, you click on the icon to run the installer. The maps will then finally be installed. If you chose to extract to the desktop but don't see the icon, hit the F5 key on the keyboard to refresh the desktop or click the right mouse button on the desktop and choose Refresh if it's available.
The installer also now checks during installation, if a newer version of the map pack is available. If so, it will inform you and direct you to a download link for the updated version.


text:
Layer styles, layer effects, liquify tools, and a brand-new image-editing engine highlight the new features in Pixelmator 3.0 FX, a major upgrade to the OS X image-editing package long seen as a lean, mean—not to mention low-priced—competitor to Photoshop.
Pixelmator 3.0 FX is an upgrade from version 2.2 Blueberry, equipped with an enhanced editing engine that supports new features in OS X Mavericks and promises faster performance.
Nondestructive layer styles include shadows, inner shadows, gradients, outlines, and reflections, which you can create freehand or from built-in presets. A compact Styles palette makes it easy to apply and tweak styles for unique compositions. You can also combine a set of effects to create and save your own custom-made Layer Style presets.
Now, Pixelmator also lets you destroy the faces and bodies of your friends and loved ones, or perhaps some inanimate object, with the new Liquify tool. You can twist portions of an image, add artistic detail, or even distort an entire image with the new Warp, Bump, Pinch, and Twirl commands. Click or drag to enlarge, pinch, squeeze, or stretch parts of your images. Twist images for a grotesque look, or distort, transform, or create unusual details.
Pixelmator's revamped imaging engine combines technologies such as Core Image, OpenCL, OpenGL, and Grand Central Dispatch to offer dramatically faster performance, according to the developers. Pixelmator says that this new version is 1.4x faster overall and up to 2x faster with complex compositions.
Taking advantage of new features in OS X Mavericks such as App Nap and Compressed Memory, the latest Pixelmator is designed to be more responsive and power-efficient than the previous version. Tags in OS X Mavericks will help you organize and find Pixelmator documents quickly. With the enhanced multiple-display support, you will have more flexibility to open Pixelmator windows the way you want to, on the display you choose, so you can run the program on every display connected to your Mac the same way as on your primary display.
Pixelmator 3.0 FX is available now on the Mac App Store for $30 or as a free upgrade to current users who purchased it on the App Store. Check out a trial version for 30 days free of charge.


text: Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with, the New York Post reported. The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a "do not eat" signal to the body's immune system, according toScience Magazine. This protein is produced in healthy blood cells, but researchers at Stanford University found that cancer cells produced an inordinate amount of the protein thus tricking the immune system into not destroying the harmful cells. With this observation in mind, the researchers built an antibody that blocked cancer's CD47 so that the body's immune system attacked the dangerous cells. So far, researchers have used the antibody in mice with human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumors transplanted into them. In each of the cases the antibody forced the mice's immune system to kill the cancer cells. Scientists find treatment to kill every kind of cancer tumor | Fox News


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v6ops Working Group E. Levy-Abegnoli Internet-Draft G. Van de Velde Intended status: Informational C. Popoviciu Expires: December 2, 2010 Cisco Systems J. Mohacsi NIIF/Hungarnet May 31, 2010 IPv6 RA-Guard <draft-ietf-v6ops-ra-guard-05.txt> Abstract It is particularly easy to experience "rogue" routers on an unsecured link [reference4]. Devices acting as a rougue router may send illegitimate RAs. Section 6 of SeND [RFC3971] provides a full solution to this problem, by enabling routers certification. This solution does, however, require all nodes on an L2 network segment to support SeND, as well as it carries some deployment challenges. End- nodes must be provisioned with certificate anchors. The solution works better when end-nodes have access to a Certificate Revocation List server, and to a Network Time Protocol server, both typically off-link, which brings some bootstrap issues. When using IPv6 within a single L2 network segment it is possible and sometimes desirable to enable layer 2 devices to drop rogue RAs before they reach end-nodes. In order to distinguish valid from rogue RAs, the L2 devices can use a spectrum of criterias, from a static scheme that blocks RAs received on un-trusted ports, or from un-trusted sources, to a more dynamic scheme that uses SeND to challenge RA sources. This document reviews various techniques applicable on the L2 devices to reduce the threat of rogue RAs. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." This Internet-Draft will expire on December 2, 2010. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2010 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved. This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. This document may contain material from IETF Documents or IETF Contributions published or made publicly available before November 10, 2008. The person(s) controlling the copyright in some of this material may not have granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process. Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) controlling the copyright in such materials, this document may not be modified outside the IETF Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for publication as an RFC or to translate it into languages other than English. Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 Table of Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2. Model and Applicability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 3. Stateless RA-Guard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4. Stateful RA-Guard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.1. State Machine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4.2. SeND-based RA-Guard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 5. RA-Guard Use Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 6. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 7. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 8. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 9. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 9.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 9.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 1. Introduction When operating IPv6 in a shared L2 network segment without complete SeND support by all devices connected or without the availability of the infrastructure necessary to support SeND, there is always the risk of facing operational problems due to rogue Router Advertisements generated maliciously or unintentionally by unauthorized or improperly configured routers connecting to the segment. There are several examples of work done on this topic which resulted in several related studies [reference1] [reference2] [reference3].This document describes a solution framework for the rogue-RA problem where network segments are designed around a single or a set of L2-switching devices capable of identifying invalid RAs and blocking them. The solutions developed within this framework can span the spectrum from basic (where the port of the L2 device is statically instructed to forward or not to forward RAs received from the connected device) to advanced (where a criteria is used by the L2 device to dynamically validate or invalidate a received RA, this criteria can even be based on SeND mechanisms). 2. Model and Applicability RA-Guard applies to an environment where all messages between IPv6 end-devices traverse the controlled L2 networking devices. It does not apply to a shared media such as an Ethernet hub, when devices can communicate directly without going through an RA-Guard capable L2 networking device. Figure 1 illustrates a deployment scenario for RA-Guard. Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 Block Allow +------+ incoming +---------+ incoming +--------+ |Host | RA | L2 | RA | Router | | |--------\--------| device |--------/------| | +------+ \ +----+----+ / +--------+ \ | / \ |Block / \ |incoming / \ |RA / \_______|_______/ | | +---+---+ | Host | | | +-------+ RA-Guard does not intend to provide a substitute for SeND based solutions. It actually intends to provide complementary solutions in those environments where SeND might not be suitable or fully supported by all devices involved. It may take time until SeND is ubiquitous in IPv6 networks and some of its large scale deployment aspects are sorted out such as provisioning hosts with trust anchors. It is also reasonable to expect that some devices might not consider implementing SeND at all such as IPv6 enabled sensors. An RA-Guard implementation which SeND-validates RAs on behalf of hosts would potentially simplify some of these challenges. RA-Guard can be seen as a superset of SEND with regard to router authorization. Its purpose is to filter Router Advertisements based on a set of criterias, from a simplistic "RA disallowed on a given interface" to "RA allowed from pre-defined sources" and up to full fladge SeND "RA allowed from authorized sources only". In addition to this granularity on the criteria for filtering out Router Advertisements, RA-Guard introduces the concept of router authorization proxy. Instead of each node on the link analyzing RAs and making an individual decision, a legitimate node-in-the-middle performs the analysis on behalf of all other nodes on the link. The analysis itself is not different from what each node would do: if SeND is enabled, the RA is checked against X.509 certificates. If any other criteria is in use, such as known L3 (addresses) or L2 (link-layer address, port number) legitimate sources of RAs, the node-in-the middle can use this criteria and filter out any RA that does not comply. If this node-in-the-middle is a L2 device, it will not change the content of the validated RA, and avoid any of the nd- proxy pitfalls. Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 RA-Guard intends to provide simple solutions to the rogue-RA problem in contexts where simplicity is required while leveraging SeND in an context environment consisting of with a mix of SeND capable devices (L2 switches and routers) and devices that do not consistently use SeND. Furthermore, RA-Guard is useful to simplify SeND deployments, as only the L2 switch and the routers are required to carry certificates (their own and the trust anchor certificates). 3. Stateless RA-Guard Stateless RA-Guard examines incoming RAs and decide whether to forward or block them based solely on information found in the message or in the L2-device configuration. Typical information available in the frames received, useful for RA validation is: o Link-layer address of the sender o Port on which the frame was received o IP source address o Prefix list The following configuration information created on the L2-device can be made available to RA-Guard, to validate against the information found in the received RA frame: o Allowed/Disallowed link-layer address of RA-sender o Allowed/Disallowed ports for receiving RAs o Allowed/Disallowed IP source addresses of RA-sender o Allowed Prefix list and Prefix ranges o Router Priority Once the L2 device has validated the content of the RA frame against the configuration, it forwards the RA to destination, whether unicast or multicast. Otherwise, the RA is dropped. 4. Stateful RA-Guard 4.1. State Machine Stateful RA-Guard learns dynamically about legitimate RA senders, and store this information for allowing subsequent RAs. A simple stateful scheme would be for the L2-device to listen to RAs during a certain period of time, then to allow subsequent RAs only on those ports on which valid RAs were received during this period. A more sophisticated stateful scheme is based on SeND, and is described in Section 4.2. Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 The state machine for stateful RA-Guard can be global, per-interface, or per-peer, depending on the scheme used for authorizing RAs. When RA-Guard is SEND-based, the state machine is per-peer and defined in [RFC3971]. When RA-Guard is using a discovery method, the state-machine of the RA-Guard capability consists of four different states: o State 1: OFF A device or interface in RA-Guard "OFF" state, operates as if the RA-Guard capability is not available. o State 2: LEARNING A device or interface in the RA-Guard "Learning" state is actively acquiring information about the devices connected to its interfaces. The learning process takes place over a pre- defined period of time by capturing router advertisements or it can be event triggered. The information gathered is compared against pre-defined criteria which qualify the validity of the RAs. In this state, the RA-Guard enabled device or interface is either blocking all RAs until their validity is verified or, alternatively it can temporarily forward the RAs until the decision is being made. o State 3: BLOCKING A device or interface running RA-Guard and in Blocking state will block ingress RA-messages. o State 4: FORWARDING A device or interface running RA-Guard and in Forwarding state will accept ingress RAs and forward them to their destination/ The transition between these states can be triggered by manual configuration or by meeting a pre-defined criteria. 4.2. SeND-based RA-Guard In this scenario, the L2 device is blocking or forwarding RAs based on SeND considerations. Upon capturing an RA on the interface, the L2-device will first verify the CGA address and the RSA signature, as specified in section 5 of [RFC3971]. RA should be dropped in case of failure of this verification. It will then apply host behavior as described in section 6.4.6 of [RFC3971]. In particular, the L2 device will attempt to retrieve a valid certificate from its cache for the public key referred to in the RA. If such certificate is found, the L2 device will forward the RA to destination. If not, the L2 device will generate a CPS, sourced with UNSPECIFIED address, to query the router certificate(s). It will then capture the CPA(s), Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 7]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 and attempt to validate the certificate chain. Failure to validate the chain will result in dropping the RA. Upon validation success, the L2 device will forward the RA to destination and and store the router certificate in its cache. In order to operate in this scenario, the L2-device should be provisioned with a trust anchor certificate, as specified in section 6 of [RFC3971]. It may also establish a layer-3 connectivity with a CRL server and/or with and NTP server. Bootstrapping issue in this case can be resolved by using the configuration method to specify a trusted port to a first router, and send-based-ra-guard method on all other ports. The first router can then be used for NTP and CRL connectivity. 5. RA-Guard Use Considerations The RA-Guard mechanism is effective only when all messages between IPv6 devices in the target environment traverse controlled L2 networking devices. In the case of environments such as Ethernet hubs, devices can communicate directly without going through an RA- Guard capable L2 networking device, the RA-Guard feature cannot protect against rogue-RAs. RA-Guard mechanisms do not offer protection in environments where IPv6 traffic is tunneled. 6. IANA Considerations There are no extra IANA consideration for this document. 7. Security Considerations Once RA-Guard has setup the proper criterias, for example, it identified that a port is allowed to receive RAs, or it identified legitimiate sources of RA, or certificate base, then there is no possible instances of accidently filtered legitimate RA's assuming the RA-Guard filter enforcement follows strictly the RA-Guard criteria's. 8. Acknowledgements The authors dedicate this document to the memory of Jun-ichiro Hagino (itojun) for his contributions to the development and deployment of IPv6. Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 8]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010 9. References 9.1. Normative References [RFC3971] Arkko, J., Kempf, J., Zill, B., and P. Nikander, "SEcure Neighbor Discovery (SEND)", RFC 3971, March 2005. [RFC4861] Narten, T., Nordmark, E., Simpson, W., and H. Soliman, "Neighbor Discovery for IP version 6 (IPv6)", RFC 4861, September 2007. 9.2. Informative References [reference1] LORIA/INRIA, "NDPMon - IPv6 Neighbor Discovery Protocol Monitor (http://ndpmon.sourceforge.net/)", November 2007. [reference2] KAME Project, "rafixd - developed at KAME - An active rogue RA nullifier (http://www.kame.net/dev/cvsweb2.cgi/ kame/kame/kame/rafixd/)", November 2007. [reference3] Hagino (itojun), Jun-ichiro., "Discussion of the various solutions (http://ipv6samurais.com/ipv6samurais/ demystified/rogue-RA.html)", 2007. [reference4] Chown, Tim. and Stig. Venaas, "Rogue IPv6 Router Advertisement Problem (draft-ietf-v6ops-rogue-ra-00.txt)", May 2009. Authors' Addresses Eric Levy Abegnoli Cisco Systems Village d'Entreprises Green Side - 400, Avenue Roumanille Biot - Sophia Antipolis, PROVENCE-ALPES-COTE D'AZUR 06410 France Phone: +33 49 723 2620 Email: firstname.lastname@example.com Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 9]
Internet-Draft IPv6 RA-Guard May 2010
Gunter Van de Velde
Cisco Systems
De Kleetlaan 6a
Diegem 1831
Phone: +32 2704 5473
Email: email@example.com
Ciprian Popoviciu
Cisco Systems
7025-6 Kit Creek Road
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina NC 27709-4987
Phone: +1 919 392-3723
Email: email@example.com
Janos Mohacsi
18-22 Victor Hugo
Budapest H-1132
Phone: tbc
Email: email@example.com
Levy-Abegnoli, et al. Expires December 2, 2010 [Page 10]