An effective way to silence a disgruntle company

Bank of America, the largest US bank, for becoming the latest institution to
halt financial transactions for Wikileaks after MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe
and others did the same, under self censorship or pressure from US government.
Can Chinese companies exercise the same strategy to cease relationship by not
running ads on any Google sites?

Setup ssh tunnel

ssh -f -t -L <locl_port>:<remote_host>:<remote_port>
<user_login>@<gateway_server>

pam_access(sshd:account): access denied for user `xxxx' from 10.10.10.1

Why?

User 'xxxx' has not been allowed by PAM access control.

Solution:

1. Update access.conf to ass user 'xxxxx'

+:user_xxx:ALL

2. Add pam.d/sshd following line if needed

account required pam_access.so

Now or never?

Once again, the home mortgage interest rates are near historical lows. Fed has signaled that they intended to keep the prime rates "unchanged" for the "foreseeable" future. Major lenders include Bank of America has maintained favorable rates.

Monthly Payment Rate % Points % APR %

30-Year Fixed Rate, interest only $4,725.00 7.875 1.250 8.021

10-Year Fixed Rate $7,680.78 5.125 1.000 5.413

30-Year Fixed Rate $3,755.86 4.750 1.000 4.866

3-Year ARM $3,865.12 5.000 1.000 3.858 (Variable)

5-Year ARM $3,334.43 3.750 1.000 3.618 (Variable) (Samples with a loan size of $729,000 for new
constructions)

With more than 2 trillions national debts, more than one full year of annual GPD, this country has no way to pay back. So dollar will depreciate and Fed will have to print more paper notes. Wall Street reputation has already fallen down the cliff. It's golden time to invest in real estate.

The question is if borrowers should take conservative approach for the 30-year fixed, or to go for 5/1 ARM?

If you intend to live in the same house for more than 15 years from today, you should consider the 30-year fixed. In contrast, you have multiple mortgages and want to downsize in less that 15 years, the 5/1 ARM will give you more liquid assets.

Google found a good excuse to pull back from China

Recent high profile thread made by Google to pull back from Chinese market has drawn applause, particularly from China bashing audience. However, the real reason behind this seems to be more of a business decision. Google has not been running smoothly in China in last 24-months or so. After another high profile legal dispute with Microsoft on alluring Dr Kai-Fu Lee to run China operations, Google had high expectation on the native Chinese native Lee hoping he will be able to expend the search engine market share in country with the most internet users.

Unfortunately, like eBay's terrible loss to Alibaba and Yahoo's to Sina, Google tails Bidu, the native Chinese owned search engine by claiming only 32% of the search engine market there. Another blow to Google was Dr Lee's departure after his short tenure with Google.cn which last less than 24-month.

Ironically, Google went to Chinese market when Chinese government had much tighter regulation and filtering on cyberspace. Google had been complying fully only until recently, after the revenue declined, market share tumbled and top executive departed. Of those 32% market share claimed, less than 2% comes from Google.cn, the Chinese version Google search engine.

While defying Chinese government and protesting cyberspace regulations, Google in Indian at the same time turned over dissident''s IPs and mailbox information to India government leading to at least two arrests and jail time punishments. Google has not made any attempt to defy NSA on secretly intercepting personal communication when using its Gmail. Google permanently stores user information matching individual IPs with search keyworlds which is a huge privacy violation.

If Google.cn contributes less than 1% to its overall revenue and used only by 2% in China and declining, then to shutdown Google.cn makes complete business sense. If Google is so against cyberspace regulation, then why it went to China to begin with?