UBS fined $1.5 billion in growing Libor scandal

By Katharina Bart and Tom Miles

ZURICH | Wed Dec 19, 2012 7:17am EST

(Reuters) - Swiss bank UBS admitted fraud and accepted a $1.5 billion fine on Wednesday for its role in manipulating global benchmark interest rates.

Dozens of UBS staff rigged the Libor rate, which is used to price trillions of dollars worth of loans, in collusion with brokers and traders at other banks, according to an investigation by authorities in multiple countries.

The controversy is expected to ensnare other big lenders and spark criminal and civil lawsuits against individuals involved. The penalty UBS agreed with U.S., UK and Swiss authorities far exceeds the $450 million levied on Britain's Barclays in June, also for rigging Libor, and the second largest ever imposed on a bank.

"This is an endemic banking industry problem and shows how far the industry has fallen, failing itself and its customers," said Neil Dwane, chief investment officer for Allianz Global Investors.

"For the future it shows that without strong regulation and strong and new management throughout most of the biggest banks, there can be no reasonable expectation that they will improve their behavior substantially - at least UBS now has strong new management."

Shares in the Swiss lender rose 1.6 percent to hit a 17-month high of 15.5 francs ($16.97) in early trade as investors judged the worst was over.

"You can see from the stock movement that the fine is already baked in," said Markus Jordi, principal at Zurich-based investment manager Cosmos Capital.

"The bank has already kicked out some traders, apologized, said it will shut down parts of the investment bank and overhauled management."

The UBS fine comes a week after Britain's HSBC agreed to pay a record $1.92 billion to settle a probe in the United States into laundering money for drug cartels.

UBS's unit in Japan pleaded guilty to one count of fraud relating to manipulation of benchmark rates, including the yen Libor.

The Libor benchmarks are used for trillions of dollars worth of loans around the world, ranging from home loans to credit cards to complex derivatives.

Tiny shifts in the rate, compiled from daily polls of bankers, could benefit banks by millions of dollars. But every dollar a bank benefited meant an equal loss by a bank, hedge fund or other investor on the other side of the trade - raising the threat of a raft of civil lawsuits.

REPUTATIONAL HIT

The Libor settlement caps a torrid 18 months for UBS during which it lost $2.3 billion in a rogue trading scandal, underwent a management upheaval and made thousands of job cuts.

"We deeply regret this inappropriate and unethical behavior. No amount of profit is more important than the reputation of this firm," UBS Chief Executive Sergio Ermotti said in a statement.

The reputational impact of the controversy may only emerge next year.

"The only thing shareholders can do is keep a very close eye on the money flows on the wealth management side," said Neil Wilkinson, portfolio manager at Royal London Asset Management.

"We may not see until the first quarter of next year whether they have lost any clients as a result of this."

Ermotti said around 40 people had left UBS or had been asked to leave as a result of the investigation.

The bank will pay $1.2 billion to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), 160 million pounds to the UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) and 59 million Swiss francs from its estimated profit to Swiss regulator Finma.

The UK penalty is the largest in the history of the FSA and more than double the 59 million pounds paid by Barclays.

UBS said the fines would widen its fourth quarter net loss but it would not need to raise new capital.

BE A HERO

Britain's FSA said attempts to manipulate Libor and Euribor, its European equivalent, were so widespread that every submission UBS made over a six-year period from 2005 to 2010 was suspect.

At least 45 people at UBS were involved in the rigging, which was discussed in internal chat forums and group emails but never detected by compliance staff, despite five audits.

The FSA said the manipulation was considered to be "normal business practice" by a wide pool of people within UBS.

In addition to traders trying to move the Libor rate up or down to make money for themselves, senior managers at the Swiss bank directed dealers to keep Libor submissions low during the financial crisis to make the bank look stronger.

The extent of the wrongdoing was highlighted in a series of emails released by the FSA which showed how traders and brokers conspired to rig the rate and referred to each other in congratulatory terms such as "superman" and "be a hero today".

In one email, a trader wrote :"I need you to keep it as low as possible ... if you do that .... I'll pay you, you know, 50,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars... whatever you want ... I'm a man of my word".

It is the first time that brokers have been accused of taking payments to aid manipulation. ICAP, the world's largest inter-dealer broker, and rival RP Martin have suspended employees in connection with the probe.

In a memo to staff on Wednesday, Ermotti said it was too early to determine whether or how clients were affected, pending further regulatory probing of the rate fixing.

Last week, British police arrested three men, including former UBS and Citigroup trader Thomas Hayes, in connection with the Libor probe, the first such arrests. The two others were Terry Farr and James Gilmour, who both worked at interdealer broker RP Martin.

Until the rate-rigging scandal broke, Libor had been ignored by regulators and left to the banks to police. From next year, Britain's FSA will have oversight of it as part of a major overhaul.

The steep fine for UBS is despite the bank, since 2011, cooperating with law-enforcement agencies in their probes. The bank said it received conditional immunity from some regulators.

A similar admission by Barclays in June touched off a political firestorm that forced its chairman and chief executive to quit.

(Additional reporting by the Zurich bureau and London bureau; Writing by Carmel Crimmins and Alex Smith. Editing by Anna Willard and Janet McBride)

Source : reuters

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Maya apocalypse and Star Wars collide in Guatemalan temple

(Reuters) - At the center of the rebel base where Luke Skywalker took off to destroy the Death Star and save his people from the clutches of Darth Vader, Guatemala is preparing for another momentous event: the end of an age for the Maya.

Deep inside the Guatemalan rainforest stand the ruins of the Maya temples that George Lucas used to film the planet Yavin 4 in the movie "Star Wars," from where Skywalker and his sidekick Han Solo launched their attack on the Galactic Empire's giant space station.

This week, at sunrise on Friday, December 21, an era closes in the Maya Long Count calendar, an event that has been likened by different groups to the end of days, the start of a new, more spiritual age or a good reason to hang out at old Maya temples across Mexico and Central America.

"If it is the end of the world, hopefully Luke will come and blow up that Death Star," said Alex Markovitz, a 24-year-old consultant and Star Wars fan from Philadelphia, looking out over the site of Skywalker's rebel base. "I see why they shot here. It doesn't look real. It looks like an alien planet."

Once at the heart of a conquering civilization in its own right, the ancient city of Tikal is now a pilgrimage site for both hard-core Star Wars fans and enthusiasts of Maya culture eager to discover what exactly the modern interpretations of old lore portend.

In the 1960s, a leading U.S. scholar said the end of the Maya's 13th bak'tun - an epoch lasting some 400 years - could signify an "Armageddon," though many people trekking to the old temples believe it could herald something wonderful.

Discovered in 1848 when locals unearthed human skulls whose teeth were studded with jade jewels, Tikal draws tourists from around the globe. Visitors this week said they felt a powerful presence in the blue skies above them.

"The force is strong here," said Jimena Teijeiro, 35, an Argentine-born self-help blogger. "The world as we know it is coming to an end. We are being propelled to a new age of light, synchronicity and simple wonderment with life."

Maya scholars and astronomers have dismissed the idea the world is on the brink of destruction but mystics and spiritual thrill-seekers have flocked to feed off Tikal's energy. Park guards said they had to throw out 13 naked women who were dancing and chanting around a fire pit near the temples last week.

"Something big is going to happen," said the president of Guatemala's Star Wars fan club, entrepreneur Ricardo Alejos. "The Maya were an incredibly precise people. Something big is going to happen and we'll find out what in a few days."

Surrounded by thick jungle home to jaguars, monkeys and toucans, the view of Yavin 4 from the top of Tikal's Temple Four, known as the temple of the double-headed serpent, has changed little since Lucas filmed here in 1977.

CIVIL WAR

Lucas chose Tikal when he saw a poster of the site at a travel agency in England during the production of the original "Episode IV: A New Hope" film, and sent a crew to Guatemala in March 1977 to shoot during its 36-year civil war.

His team hoisted bulky camera gear and heavy lights to the top of the 210-foot-high (65-metre-high) Temple Four with a pulley system and paid a guard with six-packs of beer to protect the equipment with a shotgun for four nights, locals said.

A year after the shoot, the wooden huts where Lucas' film crew camped were burned to the ground by leftist rebels fighting against a right-wing military government.

Extending for 222 square miles (575 square km) through Guatemala's sweltering north, Tikal is one of the largest pre-Colombian Maya sites and known by some as the New York City of Maya ruins because of its high temples that climb toward the heavens.

The peaks of the limestone structures pierce the dense, green canopy of the jungle and howler monkeys wail at sunrise.

Yavin 4 and the rebel base return to the Star Wars plot in the forthcoming Episode VII, announced in October by the Walt Disney Co, in which Skywalker comes back to the planet to build a Jedi Knight academy. However, fans said that Disney will likely film those scenes in a studio rather than return to Tikal.

The shrines, believed to have been used mainly for worship, also appeared in the 1979 James Bond movie "Moonraker" in which 007 was lured through the jungle to the lair of his enemy Hugo Drax.

Local guides are expecting a rush of visitors this week and the Guatemalan government forecasts a record 235,000 foreign tourists for December. Hotels in Tikal are fully booked.

"There are passionate groups that come," said tour guide Gamaliel Jimenez. "One group told me 'If you don't take us to where they filmed Star Wars, we aren't going to hire you.'"

(Editing by Dave Graham, Kieran Murray and Mohammad Zargham)

Source : reuters

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In modern scandal, an e-mail is forever

By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent

LONDON | Wed Jul 11, 2012 9:04am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - When ousted Barclays CEO Bob Diamond says he felt "physically ill" reading e-mails of his traders crowing over interest rate manipulation, he is almost certainly telling the truth.

The veteran banker says it was the first he knew that employees had worked to artificially inflate the London interbank rate LIBOR. Whatever the reality, he must have realized that the saved messages - with employees glorying in their activities and promising each other champagne - could only add to the damage.

Businesses, governments, individuals and institutions around the world are all gradually waking up to the same realization. In the 21st century anything written down electronically, even in confidence, can be stolen or subpoenaed and come back to haunt the writer - and others - years later.

The Barclays scandal which cost Diamond his job seems only the tip of the iceberg.

"E-mail, Twitter, texting and the rest all intuitively feel like short fuse ephemeral communications - a quick word in passing, if you will," says John Bassett, a former senior official at British signals intelligence agency GCHQ and now a senior fellow at London's Royal United Services Institute.

"Yet as soon as we push the send button, these communications take on an enduring digital permanence that means that in effect they never quite go away."

As the US government discovered with Wikileaks, huge volumes of information can be lifted in a single go by one determined and skilled computer user. Sophisticated algorithms and search programs can strip through millions or more files in seconds rather than the weeks it might have taken for a team of human specialists.

Alternatively, the whole dataset can simply be dumped on the web or handed to newspapers and other media outlets, as Wikileaks did this week with thousands of Syrian government e-mails including negotiations with Western arms firms.

The danger does not just come from hackers or criminals. Plenty of companies have been legally required to surrender huge volumes of electronic documents to national authorities or legal adversaries.

Already, practices are changing as a host of professionals learn what it takes to stay off the grid.

Telephone calls, they realize, may well be safer than e-mail - although in many companies, landline calls are already recorded. Even if mobile phone calls are not, the service provider meticulously records who dials who and how long the conversation may last.

Even the simple act of signing a visitor into a building is often now stored for ever in an electronic vault, easily extracted by law enforcers, legal challenge or, for some governments at least, a "Freedom of Information Act" request.

But there are always new techniques.

In Washington DC, political operatives say a branch of Caribou Coffee near the White House has become the standard location for administration staffers to meet lobbyists they would rather not sign in to the West Wing.

Around the world, cafes, trade fairs and the corporate areas of major sporting events have all become venues for frenetic, serious - and largely unrecorded - conversations.

When traders and others in large financial institutions now want to discuss a matter privately, insiders say they often use a simple code: "LDL", or "let's discuss live", a request for a face-to-face meeting.

"We work with a daily awareness that email archives are legally recoverable ," says Kevin Craig, managing director of London-based company Political Lobbying and Media Relations (PLMR). "We tell clients that e-mails are incredibly vulnerable... If your communication is not legally privileged (such as between a lawyer and client), think very carefully about writing it down."

REPUTATIONAL, WIDER DAMAGE

Some companies offer ways in which staff can communicate electronically without any record being kept. The US firm Vaporstream, for example, offers systems that guarantee messages cannot be forwarded, saved or later recovered.

Others offer to wipe databases and make sure e-mails are truly permanently deleted - although the deliberate destruction of evidence can be distinctly legally dubious. Even then, companies will often find e-mails have been already forwarded outside company systems to personal e-mail accounts.

"The ability of e-mails to surface at a later date is, for a variety of reasons, increasing," says Anthony Dyhouse, a cyber security expert for British defense firm QinetiQ. "They are not transient. They have no half life and they do not degrade... when viewed after a period of several years - and (with) changing politics, the original content can suggest an entirely different meaning."

The cost of being caught out by the contents of one's electronic footprint can go well beyond simple reputational damage - although that alone can be considerable.

Diplomatic sources say U.S. officials are still working to reassure their contacts that confidential discussions will remain so. Cables released by Wikileaks named hundreds of foreigners who had spoken to U.S. officials under what they believed was a guarantee of permanent anonymity.

In the case of Barclays, the LIBOR scandal has already cost more than $450 million in fines and the company has seen its share price fall by roughly a fifth since June. There may be further pain to come as the company faces what could prove to be a vast number of lawsuits from those who lost money as a result of heightened interest rates.

Britain's News of the World Sunday tabloid could well still be in existence if it were not for the existence of a handful of e-mails between senior managers at News International on phone hacking.

British Prime Minister David Cameron too found himself drawn into the story in part because of his text messages to former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks.

It is hardly a coincidence, however, that many of the scandals and awkward e-mails currently coming to light are from several years ago - before many in the business and government world realized how long a data trail they were leaving.

When it comes to hacking and information theft, the mere revelation that a company has been a victim can be just as damaging as any particular item lost.

Millions of e-mails belonging to publishing company and private intelligence firm Stratfor released last year by Wikileaks, for example, contained relatively little seriously damaging in itself.

Through avoiding referring to them by name, the firm was even able to keep the identities of its many confidential sources secret.

The greatest harm to the company, experts in the sector say, was that a firm that prided itself on its spy-like tradecraft and security was such easy prey for "hacktivists" from Anonymous.

"ELECTRONIC EXHAUST"

For many sensitive matters - such as company insiders talking to journalists - mobile phones, text and Blackberry messaging long ago replaced using company e-mail or landlines.

Personal e-mail addresses or even facebook pages can also offer ways to bypass company accounts sometimes monitored by compliance departments and easily searched in the event of suspicion.

But in the event of a criminal investigation or even civil lawsuit, even their records can be swiftly seized. The days of traders using mobile phones on a dealing room floor to get tips ahead of the market, industry insiders say, appear largely over - or at the very least, very much reduced.

Militant groups and criminal networks too have discovered to their growing cost the sheer amount of information available to those tracking them and speed with which it can inform police raids or drone strikes on remote hideaways.

"Technology has played a major role here," Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and now head of political risk and transnational threats are London's International Institute for strategic studies, told Reuters earlier this year.

"The electronic exhaust left by terrorists when they communicate has made them easier to track and sophisticated relational software has made it much easier to identify connections between people who don't want to appear connected."

The greatest security, experts say, is simply for a small number of people - ideally no more than two - to meet in person in a place they cannot be overheard. But with work diaries ever more crowded and time at a premium, the days of the "long lunches" and drinking sessions over which deals could quietly be done have largely gone.

Even if everyone in the world tightened their act today, billions of cached electronic records of personal, business, political and sexual indiscretion would almost certainly remain.

"Human behavior hasn't adapted yet to be cyberspace environment," says former GCHQ official Bassett. "There are already enough electronic communications in existence that if revealed that would embarrass a significant minority of the global population, both in the office and at home."

(Reporting By Peter Apps; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Source : reuters

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This Rotten Week: Predicting Jack Reacher, This is 40, And More Reviews

After weeks of skating by with one movie here, two there, the studios saw fit to dump a full on smorgasbord on us all at once. No time or words to spare. We’ve got Jack Reacher, guilt trips, manhunts, mid-life crises, and acrobats.

Note: Won’t be doing Monsters, Inc (3D) because Rotten Tomatoes combines its reviews with the original making a prediction moot. Instead, replacing it with Zero Dark Thirty in a slippery slope effort to hit on limited releases garnering a fair amount of buzz. Started this precedent with Lincoln and in time will probably regret it. All for the greater good.

Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at what This Rotten Week has to offer.

Jack Reacher

Having never read any Jack Reacher books, I decided to do a little research on the guy. By research I mean reading his Wikipedia page. And by guy I mean fake book character. Reacher at 6’5” 215 pounds, is a hard-around-the-edges drifter, smart as a whip, reserved in groups, level-headed, agoraphobic, and a killing machine. The choice to play this man? The 5’7’, 170 pound, clean cut, crazy-ish, serial dating/ marrying, spotlight-seeking Scientologist, who jumps on couches to profess his love for girlfriends. Yup, seems like perfect casting.

Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher might not be exactly how Jim Grant (non de plume: Lee Child) drew it up in his head. But whatever, Cruise will be Cruise and this flick looks like the kind of action-y TC vehicle we’re used to. Think a mashup of Knight & Day (53%) and the Mission Impossible‘s with a sprinkling of War of the Worlds (74%). It’s got that kind of feel. And though Tommy might do a bit more scowling in this one than his other work (and plenty of fish-tailing in his roadster, seems to happen every third frame and replaces his signature running straight ahead move), the film at least looks entertaining. If nothing else, Cruise does entertaining flicks.

Christopher McQuarrie (wrote and produced Valkyrie-61%, directed The Way of the Gun-48%) adapts the book character into something that looks like it plays on the big screen. Early reviews are positive and point to a crime thriller that has enough fun playing to Cruise’s on screen sensibilities. But I don’t see it maintaining the 70% it has now. In fact, I think we see a drop of about fifteen percent going forward. The early reviews have that good, not great, feel that can indicate an impending dip. The Rotten Watch for Jack Reacher is 55%

Source : cinemablend

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Zero Dark Thirty

The scene you may be expecting from Zero Dark Thirty comes at the very end of the nearly three-hour film, as director Kathryn Bigelow precisely recreated the raid on the house in Pakistan that led to the Navy SEAL team assassinating Osama bin Laden. It's a spectacularly tense and realistic scene, full of the same adrenaline you remember from Bigelow's Point Break and The Hurt Locker, and suffused with both films' sense of male camaraderie and macho strength.

But the two hours that come before that tell a very different story, with a woman--Jessica Chastain's Maya--at the center and a much different kind of drive that led to finding bin Laden. The 10-year manhunt, including setbacks like the 2005 London bombings and several CIA deaths, is recreated in unbelievable detail, with screenwriter Mark Boal's journalist's eye cannily setting up the major and minor players who led to that dramatic SEAL Team Six raid. And before we even meet Maya or any other agents, Bigelow bombards us with an audio recreation of 9/11, using phone calls made from inside the World Trade Center; it's a harrowing and unforgettable scene, setting up the incredible stakes for finding bin Laden, and plunging us immediately into that post-9/11 atmosphere of fear and lust for revenge.

Maya embodies both of things perfectly, though it takes a while to see it; we first meet her as a silent, shocked witness to a CIA agent (Jason Clarke) as he tortures an al-Qaeda detainee, derisively calling him "bro" and promising "If you lie to me, I will hurt you." With her delicate features and flowing red hair Maya looks out of place in the dingy torture chamber, but she knows what she's doing; when the detainee begs her for mercy, she refuses, setting the tone for her tough and unrelenting character as well as the movie's attitude toward torture. Bigelow shoots the torture scenes in grim, uncomfortable detail, but she also allows that such intense interrogation leads to a key piece of information that helps Maya hunt down bin Laden. Though Zero Dark Thirty deals with incredibly politicized topics, its only bias is toward the devoted CIA agents who were willing to do absolutely anything to find their man.

Though embedded deeply in the dirty and sometimes dull work of the CIA, from tapping phones to bribing sources and, yes, torturing them, Zero Dark Thirty's winding story dovetails occasionally with more famous history-- a brief sequence of the 2005 London bombings is unbearably tense, and protests in Pakistan surrounding U.S. drone strikes affect one character we've come to like without even knowing his name. For anyone with only a passing knowledge of modern CIA history, though, there are plenty of surprises, from the details of how we found bin Laden's hideout to a few moments of explosive violence that, to me at least, came as a complete surprise. The film moves at a methodical, professional pace as Maya conducts her investigations, but in the occasional pops of suspense Bigelow's action directing skills truly shine.

It's frankly incredible that, in the middle of such a complicated story, Zero Dark Thirty presents such a complex character in Maya, a tough woman in an impossible job who sidesteps every imaginable possible cliche. Everything about her, from the way she wears a scarf over her head when interrogating a detainee to the false smiles she gives to put powerful men at ease, speaks to her unusual position as a woman in the Middle East, but that contrast never becomes text, just another fascinating layer in a story with no simple conclusions. Not all of the characters around her are equally as complex-- Chris Pratt, Harold Perrineau and Joel Edgerton are just a few of the big names who are gone as soon as they arrive-- but Jennifer Ehle, Kyle Chandler, James Gandolfini and especially Clarke all make their impact, though all somewhat overshadowed by the powerhouse that is Chastian. Like the woman at its center, Zero Dark Thirty exudes a constant, quiet confidence, telling a story with an ending we all know and making it feel thrilling, suspenseful, and completely vital.

Source : cinemablend

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Rise of the Guardians

Rise of the Guardians
Production year: 2012
Cast: Alec Baldwin, Chris Pine , Isla Fisher, Jude Law

Just to confirm that the noughties' golden age of animation is behind us, here's a bland, underpowered, humourless feature from DreamWorks. Rise of the Guardians is about an Avengers-style grouping of all the mythic heroes in your childish imagination: there's Santa Claus, voiced with a Russian accent by Alec Baldwin; the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman); the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher); and the silent Sandman, and they are all subordinate to the Man in the Moon. The story insists so fiercely on the moral superiority of saucer-eyed, childlike belief in these figures, that the film could be a massive satirical hoax by Richard Dawkins. Anyway, they're taking on an evil bogeyman with a prissy Brit accent named Pitch Black (Jude Law), who's attempting to poison kiddies' dreams. Unfortunately, he is often addressed simply as "Pitch!" I expected lines like: "You! Pitch!" and "Oh Pitch, please." To help combat this evil-doer, the Guardians try to recruit a new warrior, supercool teen badboy Jack Frost (Chris Pine). Jack is revealed to have a tragic, premythic, human existence that gives meaning to his heroic destiny: it's the film's one flicker of interest. Compare this moderate entertainment to, say, Monsters, Inc., and it really looks feeble.

Source : guardian

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The War Z: Murder of the Fittest

In The War Z's alternate version of history, Colorado is a cold, lonely place where the dead rise from their graves and seek out the last remnants of survivors to snack on. The droves of zombies congregating in the towns and cities nestled in this bucolic patch of countryside are deadly indeed in large numbers, but they're not what concerns me the most. It's those that are still breathing you really have watch out for.

Spawning in this zombie apocalypse survival MMO with nothing more than a puny flashlight, a granola bar, a can of soda, and some bandages instills an immediate sense of urgency and desperation. You need to wrangle some serious supplies and a means to defend yourself quickly, because hunger is the least likely thing to kill you. The struggle to stay alive lies at the heart of what makes The War Z such an interesting, gripping experience, and it spurs you and others you encounter into making some murderous snap decisions.


The War Z’s 400 square miles of virtual woodland territory is pockmarked with small settlements and bigger hunks of city ripe for the plundering. Nabbing melee weapons, food, armor and semi-automatic rifles greatly improves both your chance of staying alive and your bargaining power with other players. But supplies are hard to come by, and venturing into once heavily-populated areas alone is risky business: they're hotspots for zombie activity and alluring destinations for fellow survivors.

When you're cautiously roaming the mountains and forests around Boulder, the natural inclination is to find other survivors. That's a deadly gamble. In the rare instances where you find friendlies willing to team-up, it's a real relief from the lonely prowling through long days and black nights. You're all stuck in hell, so might as well work together to tackle the hordes and the brigands together, right? It's fun when it clicks. Unfortunately, the first and only rule of survival in The War Z is trust no one. It's a lesson you learn very quickly when you're bleeding out on the cold, hard ground while your corpse is being looted.

I've spent a lot of time in The War Z being murdered by other survivors. Perhaps 90 percent of my run-ins with other humans have resulted in someone clubbing me to death or putting a bullet in my head, despite my attempts to make peace. Sometimes bullets ring out from nowhere. Other times players lure you in with a "Hey, I'm friendly" before slaughtering you with your back turned. Considering you lose all of your accumulated gear and hard-earned guns every time you die, it really does feel like you're being robbed. It makes you jaded, suspicious, and cautious of other players, which spurs a "shoot first, die later" mentality.


The War Z is a fascinating social experiment in primal human nature as much as it is a zombie survival sim. Given its current beta state, a lot of planned features -- including a proper reputation system to curtail excessive murder and a skill system to reward tenacious survivors -- have yet to be implemented. The core survival gameplay is pretty addictive to begin with, though The War Z still has a way to go before it evens out its player interaction playing field. A ruthless player base can make wading neck deep into this eerie undead war frustrating at times, yet there's something oddly alluring about the uncertainty of whether you'll live or die from one moment to the next as you push to carve out a path in this dead world.

If you’re interested in trying out The War Z, you can buy in over on the official site.

Source : ign

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Symantec Norton Internet Security 2013 review

Probably the best-known Windows internet-security (IS) suite in the world (although AVG may come close), Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2013 offers anti-virus, firewall, website/online banking protection and parental control.


Internet Security doesn't include PC tuneup or online backup; for those elements you need to look for Norton 360. Symantec boldly claims 'Our exclusive reputation and behaviour antivirus technology are so advanced that they can stop online threats that bad guys haven't even created yet'. See also: Group test: what's the best security software?
Norton IS 2013 also contains Norton Management, a cloud-based service which lets you add licences to your account without having to re-enter the product key. It's hard to see how this is of major benefit to customers.
The 2013 interface has had a revamp, with large fonts and simple controls. The main screen has just four, Windows 8-style tiles, labelled Secure, Scan Now, LiveUpdate and Advanced. Further options line up along the top and down the right-hand side.
The Performance option flips the main screen round to show a pair of live performance graphs of CPU and memory use, as well as details of any recent security events.




Most settings are simple slide switches and the defaults for most people will be fine. This makes the software particularly easy to setup and, in our testing, most of the time it worked quietly in the background, without irritating notices pointing out everything it's done.
Running a scan on our 50GB basket of files took 22 min 49 sec and targeted 176,280 files, giving a scan rate of 128 files/sec.
This is the third highest throughput we've measured and shows a quick and thorough scan. It's a 19 percent higher scan rate than Norton IS 2012, too, so there has been some improvement in the scan engine in the last year.
Rerunning the scan took 3 min 15 sec to cover just 37,604 files, so Norton IS 2013 seems to be fingerprinting files to avoid having to rescan those already cleared.
Copying a 1GB file took 40 sec, with normal Norton background tasks running and 51 sec while also running a system scan. So that's almost a 28 percent increase in copy time when scanning, which is relatively light by the standards of much Windows security software.
AV Test is still testing the 2013 version of Norton Internet Security, so we cannot vouch for this software's efficacy in catching malware.
But results for the 2012 version were impressive, with an overall score of 15.0/18.0 for Windows XP and 15.5/18.0 under Windows 7. That breaks down into 5.0/6.0 for Protection, 4.5/6.0 for Repair and a perfect 6.0/6.0 for Usability.
Last year's program did pretty well at spotting zero-day attacks, perhaps because of its cloud-based SONAR technology, which looks for suspicious behaviour all the time your PC's running.
It was at least 10 percent above average for its test group and it also managed a perfect 100 percent spotting widespread malware. It dropped a bit detecting recent threats, dipping a couple of points below the average in this category.
Norton IS 2012 also did well at repairing systems damaged by malware and particularly in preparing critical system modifications, where it was a full 30 percent above average. In Usability, which looks at false warnings and the average resource hit, it was exemplary. Visit: Security Advisor

Source : pcadvisor

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TGS: Metal Gear Rising Is Insane, Intelligent, Awesome

Each time we see Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Platinum Games has a point to prove. At E3, the developer reassured us the slicing mechanic was a viable form of ferocious tactics and not just a parlor trick. Trailers and messaging from the developer since then communicated that Rising was very much a Platinum Games joint, with the signature wacky comedy and badass presentation present in spades. Revengeance always seemed to be missing that Metal Gear magic, though -- and that's precisely what the Tokyo Game Show demo brought to the table.

Stealth, cinematics, and the Soliton Radar are as integral to the experience as any blade Raiden's ever wielded. Yes, Rising is a fast-paced action game first and foremost, but its soul is unequivocally Metal Gear.


Each time we see Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Platinum Games has a point to prove. At E3, the developer reassured us the slicing mechanic was a viable form of ferocious tactics and not just a parlor trick. Trailers and messaging from the developer since then communicated that Rising was very much a Platinum Games joint, with the signature wacky comedy and badass presentation present in spades. Revengeance always seemed to be missing that Metal Gear magic, though -- and that's precisely what the Tokyo Game Show demo brought to the table.

Stealth, cinematics, and the Soliton Radar are as integral to the experience as any blade Raiden's ever wielded. Yes, Rising is a fast-paced action game first and foremost, but its soul is unequivocally Metal Gear.We're four years after the events of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots here, so the classic Metal Gear tech has seen plenty of advancement. Raiden's codec isn't an inner-ear device, but a full visual interface that keeps you in control without cutting to talking heads. Granted, you won't be making sandwich meat out of men while talking to your Maverick Security pals at home base -- Raiden slows to a walk, giving you a chance to take in the scenery while waiting for the chit-chat to finish. It's not quite as exciting as front-flipping up walls and kicking guys in the head with a sword grasped in your foot, but hey, highs and lows are what great pacing is made of.

Time has also benefited the bad guys, a terrorist group of super-ninja called Desperado. Raiden is so thoroughly trounced by the very menacing-sounding Samuel Rodrigues, a Desperado cyborg ninja, that he loses his arm and an eye. In turn, he has to upgrade his suit and tech so he's on the same level when he goes back for more. Rodrigues' cronies should give Raiden a run for his money, though. Marisal, another Desperado Agent clearly inspired by the Hindu goddess Kali, makes use of additional robot arms to take on our hero. Monsoon, another in the terrorist elite, detaches his body in chunks like a living group of magnets.

Desperado takes cues from Dead Cell, Cobra Unit, and the FOXHOUND rogues from past Metal Gear games, and their quirk and threat level are in line with what you'd expect from a proper sequel, now amplified with Platinum Games' limitless what-if hypothetical imagination.


Now, however, you'll take them on in interesting new ways. One of their minions, a robot dog with a chainsaw attached to its tail, pinpointed Revengeance's dedication to mimicking Metal Gear's unforgettable boss battles. The "Bladewolf" is, far and away, the fastest fight in any Metal Gear -- it leaps and flips toward Raiden relentlessly, leaving little room to attack exposed areas. Sliding beneath the pooch and using Blade Mode to line up a series of slow-mo slashes is useful. So is hopping over a car and dropkicking it, kiting it around the battlefield, or launching a rocket into its ribs.

Its destructive forward force destroys objects scattered in the road, and if the beast takes you down, you'll get a chainsaw rammed into your chest. What's different here versus any previous Metal Gear Solid fight is that Raiden is always moving. Snake, on the other hand, would have to stop to do something clever, using his wits as much as his tools, to outsmart his enemy. Raiden is all about brute force, but the Bladewolf brawl requires a delicate kind of aggression. Caution scores you the kill, not haste.

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is slick, sexy, and as strong as melee combat games come. Platinum is pulling out all the stops to show not only its expertise in action and the absurd, but its adoration and respect for a franchise nobody would ever have expected it to have a hand in.

The only thing left to prove now is that it can all stay this excellent from the time we press start until the credits roll.

Source : IGN

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Movie Review: "The Hobbit"

By Stupid Celebrities, Mon, December 10, 2012
‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey‘ is a prequel to ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy and the latest movie reviewed by Stupid Celebrities. Peter Jackson returns as the director. It starts off really slow and a tad on the boring side. You’re going to have to fight to stay awake for the first quarter of the film! I had to nudge my tween niece to wake her up! Needless to say, it’s more for adults than tweens and teens. But a tween falling asleep speaks volumes about the pace of ‘The Hobbit.’

I saw it in both High Frame Rate 3D and plain old 2D. I’ve read reports where some people suffered nausea from the 3D version. I was fine. But I warned you! This film is best in the 3D format. High Frame Rate 3D felt even more real than the usual 3D.

The highly anticipated film follows the adventures of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and a group of Dwarves led by Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen.) They embark on a journey to recapture the Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from a dragon. On their trek to the Lonely Mountain, they have to fight off Goblins, Orcs and Wargs. Oh, and the oddly loveable Gollum makes a special appearance. Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum resulted in a glimpse of the “precious ring,” which gave Bilbo some sort of special power once he wore it. The beautiful elves were also back in the picture. Sorry, Orlando Bloom was not a part of this film. I know, I was sad, too. I loved his role as Legolas in ‘The Lord of the Rings!’ So dreamy!

‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ is definitely a setup for the next two films. This certainly wasn’t as exciting as ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy. It didn’t quite live up to that. I was slightly disappointed. But I was much happier after meeting the director Peter Jackson! Check out the photo! I apologize for the poor quality. I didn’t expect to snap a photo with him!



Mr. Peter Jackson and Me

He was such a nice guy! I thought he did an extraordinary job with ‘The Lord of the Rings!’ I can’t wait to see what he has up his sleeves for the rest of ‘The Hobbit’ trilogy! He did a great job with directing this film but the story itself was a bit harder to sit through.

‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ begins December 14 followed by ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug‘ in December 13, 2013. And finally, ‘The Hobbit: There and Back Again’ expected in July 18, 2014.


Source : opposingviews

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