What.

Adam Sternbergh in Slate:

Serena is a bracing reminder of how much expertise goes into making even the most uninspired movie—how dozens of people with wildly different skill sets all have to perform well or the whole project is imperiled. The stars may be the ones with their names plastered over the title, but if you’re Jennifer Lawrence, trapped in Serena like Rapunzel in her tower dungeon, your powers of self-salvation are limited. You can’t reedit the film or rescore its music or rescout its locations. In the end, the lesson of Serena isn’t how remarkable it is when a movie like this goes badly, but how improbable it is that any movie at all turns out to be good. 

The WSJ does a timeline of the Bear Stearns deal:

Mr. Paulson was frequently on the phone with Bear and J. P. Morgan executives, negotiating the details of the deal, the senior Treasury official said. Initially, Morgan wanted to pick off select parts of Bear, but Mr. Paulson insisted that it take the entire Bear portfolio, the official said.

This was no normal negotiation, says one person involved in the matter. Instead of two parties, there were three, this person explains, the third being the government. It is unclear what explicit requests were made by the Fed or Treasury. But the deal now in place has a number of features that are highly unusual, according to people who worked on the transaction.

Via Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.

Posted by iang to Financial Cryptography.

Interesting news: According to the posts over at identity corner, Microsoft is picking up (some of? all of?) Credentica's patent portfolio, and Stefan Brands himself will join the team.

Brands has one (of two) lineages of patents on digital blinding, the other one was via David Chaum, and is now lost somewhere in some bank's hands due to bankruptcy. Though Chaum was working on something new, haven't heard anything about that . . . Anyhow, this means Microsoft is in control of the current state of the art for digital money, and identity management.

Comment by Stephan Engberg:

Congratulations - it must have been a fantastic monetary offer to make you withdraw credentials from the open market like this and hand over control of identity to MS.

This just set [Privacy Enhancing Technologies] back many years.

And Kim Cameron (Microsoft) has a great round up of the PR and reactions in the wake of the announcement at identityblog: Reactions to Credentica acquisition

He ends with:

That doesn’t mean it is trivial to figure out the best legal mecahnisms for making the intellectual property and even the code available to the ecosystem. Lawyers are needed, and it takes a while. But I can guarantee everyone that I have zero intention of hoarding Minimal Disclosure Tokens or turning U-Prove into a proprietary Microsoft technology silo.

Sure you don't, but what about your evil overlords?