CNNMoney - Special Report Issue #1: America’s Money - This week on CNN, Last Updated: August 7, 2008: 6:29 PM EDT

NY strikes deal with Citigroup to buy back troubled securities from small investors and charities at 100% of their value. Merrill also offers clients their money back.

By Tami Luhby, CNNMoney.com senior writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — If your bank contacts you about a bond-like investment you made some time ago, don’t ignore it. You could benefit from an unusual settlement that will allow you to get back 100% of your investment’s value.

Citigroup announced Thursday that by Nov. 5 it would buy back so-called auction-rate securities from individual investors, charities and businesses with assets of $10 million or less. Hours later, Merrill Lynch (ML) announced it too would buy back retail investors’ auction-rate securities at par. Some 30,000 retail customers hold a total of $12 billion of these securities.

“Our clients have been caught in an unprecedented liquidity crisis,” said John Thain, Merril’s chief executive officer. “We are solving it by giving them the option of selling their positions to us.”

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BUSINESSWEEK - Market Snapshot August 7, 2008, 5:01PM EST

Jobless claims rose to their highest level in six years, while AIG reported another $11.6 billion in investment losses

by Ben Steverman

The stock market’s seesaw ride continued Thursday. Major indexes gave up nearly all of the week’s gains amid more worries about the economy and the financial sector, sparked by a rise in jobless claims and an $11.6 billion hit to the balance sheet of insurance giant American International Group (AIG).

On Thursday, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 224.64 points, or 1.93%, to 11,431.43. The broader S&P 500 index lost 23.13 points, or 1.79%, to 1,266.06. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 22.64 points, or 0.95%, to 2,355.73.

Despite a 3.2% rally on Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday’s decline puts the S&P 500 at nearly the same level it started the week. On the New York Stock Exchange, 24 stocks fell for every 7 in positive territory. On the Nasdaq, the ratio was 18 to 10 negative.

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CNNMoney - Special Report Mortgage Meltdown, August 7, 2008: 12:04 PM EDT

Washington will give funds to states and cities to rehab houses. Proponents say it will help stabilize neighborhoods, but others say it’s too little to do much good.

By Tami Luhby, CNNMoney.com senior writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — City officials and community activists can’t wait to get their hands on nearly $4 billion the federal government is about to inject into blighted neighborhoods suffering from record foreclosures.

Opponents of the measure say the paltry sum won’t do much good considering the number of vacant homes on the market - one million families are expected to lose their homes this year - and will more likely turn into a political boondoggle.

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InformationWeek - August 7, 2008 03:35 PM

The Xen hypervisor distributor wants Windows to be sold as part of a virtual environment application package that could run on any hypervisor, on any machine.

By Antone Gonsalves

Virtualization software maker Citrix Systems (NSDQ: CTXS) on Thursday called on Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to offer a Windows license that would enable software vendors to sell the operating system as part of an application package that could run on any virtual environment.Simon Crosby, chief technology officer of Citrix, told attendees at the LinuxWorld Conference in San Francisco that the future of virtualization includes the concept of a “virtual appliance,” a package comprising an application, operating system, and virtual machine that could run on any hypervisor installed on a desktop, notebook, or server. Standing in the way of this advancement in portability is Microsoft, whose Windows operating system dominates the business computing market.

“Microsoft has to change its licensing policies to redistribute Windows on virtual appliances,” Crosby said during his keynote. “Microsoft needs to have a license that allows [independent software] vendors to redistribute Windows as a bag of bits.”

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BUSINESSWEEK - Wireless August 6, 2008, 12:01AM EST

With the debut of the new iPhone 3G, rival phonemakers and wireless operators—and possibly Apple—will feel the impact

by Olga Kharif

Last year, when Apple (AAPL) unveiled its iPhone and made it available in the U.S. exclusively from AT&T, the debut sent ripples throughout the cell-phone industry. Handset maker Palm suffered as consumers swooned for Apple’s phone, according to surveys by consultancy NPD. AT&T benefited by pulling subscribers from rival carriers Alltel (AT) and T-Mobile USA (DT).

So will Apple’s new phone, the iPhone 3G, have a similar effect? Early evidence since the new device’s July 11 debut suggests it will have even broader impact, in part because the entry-level model sells for $199, compared with $499 for the original version. As a rough measure, take last year’s impact and double it. In the first 12 days since the iPhone 3G hit the market, the device sold at twice the rate of its predecessor, according to AT&T (T), which hasn’t made more recent data available yet. And analysts expect this quick pace to continue for at least a few months: The iPhone 3G likely sold up to 700,000 units in the few weeks of July alone, estimates Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research. Apple sold about 1.1 million iPhones in all of the third calendar quarter of last year (BusinessWeek.com, 7/22/08).

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InformationWeek - Posted by Thomas Claburn, Aug 6, 2008 10:57 PM

Robert “RSnake” Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, and Tom Stracener, senior security analyst at Cenzic, had some harsh words for Google at their Black Hat presentation, “Xploiting Google Gadgets.”

“Google cares more about tracking users than they do about consumer safety,” said Hansen.

Hansen said that four years ago, he found a Web redirection vulnerability that was being actively used by phishers. He alerted Google, eBay, DoubleClick, and Visa. Visa closed the hole in hours. DoubleClick had a partial fix in place in days. It took eBay several weeks to fix the problem. But Google still hasn’t fixed all the vulnerabilities.

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