Author: Justin Lane

With Puerto Rico’s economy taking it in the shins for nearly the past decade, financial advisors that have been pedaling products tied to the territory face mounting legal woes. “Knowingly recommending concentrated debt positions that were dependent on Puerto Rico’s economy opened investors to unnecessary and unwarranted risk,” commented Peter Mougey, a shareholder with the Levin, Papantonio law firm and director of the firm’s business torts and securities litigation departments. UBS Puerto Rico has been selling proprietary municipal and leveraged bond funds to its own clients. Puerto Rico’s floundering economy has resulted in U.S. credit rating agencies downgrading these...

Most American business executives will never have to pay the true costs associated with their decisions to engage in damaging and often illegal practices. Whether it’s pharmaceutical companies releasing products and lying about potential, associated hazzards, investment advisors lying to investors about the risks of certain products to rake in their own on fees, or politicians who lie to the people and pass legislation that benefits their cronies – they get in, take what they can and get out. Often, they walk away, paying fines that are merely a pittance. Pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $2.2...

The NSA has hardware exploits for most devices and will, if given the opportunity, co-op your devices into spying on your neighbors. If your unused wireless router is sitting around, not being used – say you’re at work but you didn’t turn your home PC off – the NSA has programs in place to take over your PC, scan networks within range and intercept whatever data they can. Sounds like a 21st century version of forced quartering of soldiers. At the end of last week, German news publication Der Spiegel published a story revealing NSA documents and which discuss...

Over the past several months, a continuing saga has been unfurling before the world. Edward Snowden and others have come forward, revealing classified documents that detail the operations and procedures that the National Security Agency (NSA) engages in to warrantlessly surveill practically every person on the plant. Obviously an intrusion on people’s privacy, one less obvious victim is American business. A powerful component of the NSA’s operations include exploiting or accessing what are referred to as backdoors. These backdoors come in many forms and vary from hardware modifications to software exploits. A recent report from Der Spiegel outlines many...

Ring of Fire’s top stories from the past week. Video Rewind Duck Dynasty Supporters Share Some Unsurprising Similarities | @Joshual33 If you haven’t heard about the recent controversy regarding Duck Dynasty “patriarch” Phil Robertson, you haven’t either been near a television or in the vicinity of internet access. To catch you up, Phil Robertson made some remarks in an interview regarding homosexuals. Then, the internet had a collective heart attack. … Read more. Algae Converted to Crude Oil in Less Than an Hour | @childoftheearth Scientists with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have successfully created a chemical process that produces crude oil...