Over the years, Mark Cuban has been quite open on his blog concerning various stock strategies that he has -- which have often gone against the grain. He's not a big fan of just buying a small amount of a company's outstanding stock and holding it, assuming that as a small shareholder, you're probably not getting the real information about a company. A few years back, Cuban funded a somewhat controversial investigative journalism project, where the journalist would research companies that he believed were scams in some sense. The journalist would reveal his findings to Cuban before publishing the content, allowing Cuban to short the stock. This led some to accuse Cuban of insider trading, but that was clearly incorrect, as the info wasn't insider info, but information that had been uncovered through research.

However, the SEC is now claiming that some of Cuban's other stock moves weren't so cut and dried. It's charged Cuban with insider trading in his stake in meta-search engine Mamma.com. That story was a big deal four years ago. Towards the beginning of 2004, Cuban had to reveal publicly his 6.3% stake in the company (anything over 5% needs to be revealed), saying that he liked the company because in using its search engine he found that it worked well, and in investigating the company he realized that it was generating a fair amount of cash. However, just a few months later headlines were made again when the news came out that Cuban had sold his stake, noting that he was upset about the company's plan to raise money via a private placement, pointing out that such a transaction would dilute him. So, when he found out about it, he sold all his shares.

The problem, according to the SEC, is that he sold those shares after company insiders told him about the planned fundraising -- not after the company made that info public. If that's true, then it does sound like he would have been selling on material non-public information received from an insider, which would be bad news.

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A Stanford University documentary film project, A Fair(y) Use Tale, weaves snippets of classic animated films into a short short in which Disney characters explain the basics of fair use and argue against longer copyrights.

Metasploit LLC released version 3.0 of the Metasploit Framework (MSF), the popular penetration testing project, late last month. Version 3.0 is a complete rewrite of the previous tools using primarily the Ruby programming language; versions 1 and 2...

For many years, we've had stories about people getting incredibly pissed off at hidden fees, often from the telco industry. The industry tries to defend those fees, but they're really just ways of lying about the actual price so they can advertise low prices and actually charge you a lot more. The telcos really love these fees. Remember last year when telcos no longer had to charge a certain government mandated fee, and instead simply replaced it with a new fee with a meaningless name that they just got to pocket? The latest is also a fun one. Chronno S. Trigger lets us know that Verizon is charging some customers a fee for not using its long distance service. Yes, you read that right. There's a $2 fee for some customers if they don't make any long distance calls. But, it gets even better. If you want to get rid of it, you can pay a one-time fee of $6.75 to block all long distance calls on your phone. Verizon, almost comically, tries to defend the $2 fee by coming up with an absolutely bizarre example: "Because what they're helping to do is supporting the network they would use if their cousin Tillie is critically ill in California and they need to arrange a critical-care nurse." Oh, of course. If only Verizon had said it was all so I could help cousin Tillie in the first place, I'm sure everyone would be thrilled to pay the fee. In the meantime, will Verizon be okay if its customers charge it a fee for having to waste time understanding all its fees? How about if they swear that money will go towards helping poor cousin Tillie who needs a critical-care nurse? Verizon obviously wouldn't mind that.

Negative pressure wound therapy is a new innovation in treating severe and complex wounds in children that decreases the need for frequent and stressful dressing changes.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

VeriSign has already teamed up with PayPal to offer one-time use passwords on key fobs, but it looks like it's now found a way to make that additional layer of protection even more portable, partnering with Innovative Card Technologies Inc. to squeeze the disposable digits onto standard size bank cards. Apparently, you'll get a new password after each transaction you make online (displayed by pushing a button on the back of the card), making it theoretically impossible for anyone without the card to access your account, even if they somehow manage to get a hold of your regular password. While it's not clear when the cards will actually be put into use, VeriSign is promising to make an announcement about a "major bank" set to use the cards sometime this month.

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!