BUSINESSWEEK - Finance August 11, 2008, 1:47PM EST

Entrepreneurs are negotiating with tough new creditors as banks look to ditch troubled loans

by Amy Barrett

Got a good relationship with your banker? Well, if you’re late with your loan payments, it might not matter. Banks looking to spruce up their balance sheets are selling off problem loans, particularly if payments are overdue or borrowers are in violation of bank covenants. (Such covenants often stipulate how much cash a company must have on hand or the percentage of cash flow that can be used to pay debt.)

As of Mar. 31, 2008, problem business loans—those more than 30 days past due—totaled $22.6 billion. That’s up 45% over the same period last year, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Banks wanting to sell off these loans are finding ready buyers in hedge funds, private equity firms, and finance companies. That means an increasing number of entrepreneurs are getting a nasty surprise: Their bank loan has been sold to a third party they’ve never heard of.

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CNNMoney - Last Updated: August 12, 2008: 5:36 PM EDT

Wall Street retreats as investors eye the latest spate of financial market problems.

By Alexandra Twin, CNNMoney.com senior writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Stocks tumbled Tuesday, with blue chips leading the way, as a slew of financial companies warned about the ongoing impact of credit market problems, overshadowing any relief about lower oil prices.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 1.2%, with the average’s financial components leading the selloff. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 (SPX) index fell 1.2%. The Nasdaq composite (COMP) dropped 0.4%.

The major gauges were in negative territory for most of the day, although the Nasdaq composite made a few forays into positive territory, thanks to lower oil prices.

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Sillicon Alley Insider - Vasanth Sridharan | August 12, 2008 3:32 PM

Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has called for a end to the conflict in Georgia, declaring that his country has achieved its military goals. But there’s no cease-fire on the Internet.

Weeks before the invasion, there was a cyber attack on many of Georgia’s key government and news Web sites. Unless you’re going to count the code-breakers at Bletchley Park and their ilk, the attacks marks the first time that a shooting war was coupled with a cyberwar,

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FORTUNE - August 11, 2008, 4:42 am

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

It’s been a month since the iPhone 3G and the App Store made their debut, and Steve Jobs used the occasion to offer up some selected facts and figures:

• Users have now downloaded more than 60 million programs for the iPhone and iPod touch, or roughly 2 million per day.
• Revenue from those applications came to about $30 million. 70% went to the developers; Apple kept 30%. (Free apps apparently accounted for the vast majority of the downloads, since average revenue per download is 50 cents.)
• If sales continue at the current pace, Apple stands to clear at least $360 million a year. “This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” Jobs told the Wall Street Journal. “Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time…. I’ve never seen anything like this in my career for software.”

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InformationWeek - August 12, 2008 09:50 AM

The President of Georgia’s Web site has been moved to the State of Georgia in the United States to defend against threats real and virtual.

By Thomas Claburn

Even as it battles Russian and separatist forces, the country of Georgia faces a cyber assault that has intermittently knocked its national Web presence offline.Since August 8, multiple command and control servers have been attacking Web sites that are Georgian or are sympathetic to the country, reports Steven Adair of Shadow Server Foundation, a security watchdog group.

The attacks have resulted in the defacement of the Web site of the Georgian Parliament. A group calling itself the “South Ossetia Hack Crew” claims responsibility for posting a series of images that compare Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili with Adolf Hitler.

Other official Georgian sites have been affected too. At times on Monday, clicking on a link to the English language version of Georgian President Saakashvili’s Web site returned an SQL error.

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