Friday, January 20, 2012

A Hacker Hacked Luxembourg Style. What the Heck Says Gov?

The Luxembourg Press reported that the unexpected happened. A hacker got hold of about 48,000 medical files of Luxembourg athletes or aspiring athletes set up for a certification.

Minister Bildgen said at a press conference that hackers are becoming more and more sophisticated. In this case the inventiveness of the hacker went to new heights:

One of the professionals in a Ministry had put his user name and password on a memo stick glued to his computer screen, in order to remember both. To blame are of course Luxembourg Government regulations that make those access codes too convoluted to remember them easily. In this case I learnt from generally untrustworthy sources that the user name was "alibaba" and the password was "letmein". Minister Schneider (no the other one) hence surmised that the hacker probably took a picture of the memo with his Android, no it wasn’t an iPhone (so it wasn’t me) and while watching over his left shoulder, snatched the picture thus smuggling it out of the premises, unbeknownst to the people there, who were not told by the hacker that he had obtained a publicly available official secret.

The new password will be from now on: “Sesame”

Hey, Andy Schleck, do you know if Contador was in Luxembourg these days and does he have an Android?

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Luxembourg and BCCI: a WSJ feature story about Adil Elias


Pursuing a Scandal's Long Shadow

(WSJ, January 10, 2012. By Brad Reagan).

Adil Elias, a victim of fraud, and maybe official carelessness, tries to get even. The dragon however has many heads to cut off.

My favorites in this story are actually recurring subjects. Madoff victims and others, here are the essentials and the timelines:

  • More than twenty years went by, and the case is still not yet resolved.
  • Deloitte, the liquidator, who was envisioning that creditors might get 10 cents on the dollar, now boasts 86 cents, I guess in 2012 dollars. They made $600 million in fees.
  • Liquidators want to get over it, if there isn't much money to be made. That's the case generally in Luxembourg bankruptcies. In the opposite case, it is of course obvious that things will last a couple of million of billable hours.
  • Mr. Elias' persistence increased Abu Dhabi's settlement figure by more than $ 1 billion!? He deserves a monument and all his money back.


Saturday, January 7, 2012

Target Tour de France 2012. The Schlecks' Team Presentation


Our friends at road.cc did a really nice job reporting about the presentation of the new RadioShack Nissan Trek Team. Event and pictures of the new outfits with Luxembourg colors and Lance Armstrong's Livestrong yellow band.


Personally, I had started dreaming of a recipe for success in 2009, given the evident shortcomings of the Schlecks' organization for a victory in the Tour de France. The most obvious road is the one that could have happened in 2009, in time for the 2010 season. Here were the arguments and they still are almost the same: ad know-how and expertise to the Schleck's talents:



Here are the 2012 boys for RadioShack Nissan Trek:

Jan Bakelants (BEL)
Daniele Bennati (ITA)
George Bennett (NZL)
Matthew Busche (USA)
Fabian Cancellara (SUI)
Laurent Didier (LUX)
Jakob Fuglsang (DEN)
Tony Gallopin (FRA)
Linus Gerdemann (GER)
Ben Hermans (BEL)
Chris Horner (USA)
Markel Irizar (ESP)
Ben King (USA)
Andreas Klöden (GER)
Tiago Machado (POR)
Maxime Monfort (BEL)
Giacomo Nizzolo (ITA)
Nelson Oliveira (POR)
Yaroslav Popovych (UKR)
Joost Posthuma (NED)
Grégory Rast (SUI)
Thomas Rohregger (AUT)
Hayden Roulston (NZL)
Andy Schleck (LUX)
Fränk Schleck (LUX)
Jesse Sergent (NZL)
Jens Voigt (GER)
Robert Wagner (GER)
Oliver Zaugg (SUI)
Haimar Zubeldia (ESP)