Holy Crap! Kansas Supreme Court just ruled

The daily trip to reddit and I chance up a link to this blog entry when I caught the tag line of 60 million mortgages could get invalidated. My interest was piqued. I looked up the original court ruling and it is here. I read it.

Disclaimer: I AM NOT A LAWYER and my summaries can have errors.

My summary:

A guy buys a house and takes 2 mortgages. The second one is from Millennia Mortgage Corp. In the mortgage that he signed MERS, (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc) is defined as a nominee for Millenia Mortgage Corp. Some time later Sovereign takes over the mortgage but doesn't notify the local county of it.

Unfortunately for the guy he has to declare bankruptcy. He declares Sovereign bank is the creditor and files intent to surrender the property.

The company that gave the first mortage Landmark Bank, files a petition with the Court intending to forclose the property and names the guy and the Millenia as the defendants. Now the important event. Landmark doesnt serve notice of the litigation to MERS or Sovereign.

Since there are no answers from the guy or from Millennia so the court enters a default judgment. The property gets sold and Landmark files a petition confirming the sale. Now Sovereign goes "hey hold on", files a petition requesting that sale be be invalidated and the summary judgment be overturned, says it was not notified and MERS is a part of the action.

Court goes OK and listens to arguments from all parties and defers judgment. MERS makes an entry and files a petition to vacate summary judgment.

Court says, thanks for playing, you don't have a ground for objections, lo and behold DENIED becoz
1) MERS is an agent, a Thanks for trying.
2) Sovereign didn't register with the local county about it getting the mortgage. Sorry, better luck next time.

MERS and Sovereign, files motions to reconsider. courts go hmmn, no thanks. DENIED!

Lots of stuff happens and the case ends up in Supreme Court of Kansas. The supreme court does a brilliant job of breaking down the agreement that the guy signed and what role MERS plays.

The orginal mortgage was split into different securities and sold. MERS is a electronic system owned by a private company that keeps track of who is the owner of the mortgage that gets split as securities and sold to other investors. MERS also is considered as a nominee of the banks and act on their behalf when it comes to buying, foreclosures and stuff.

The court concluded:
"The relationship that MERS has to Sovereign is more akin to that of a straw man than to a party possessing all the rights given a buyer. A mortgagee and a lender have intertwined rights that defy a clear separation of interests, especially when such a purported separation relies on ambiguous contractual language."

Damn! The court also concludes that the practices of MERS makes it almost impossible for the public to find out who really has the deed to the property on which the mortgage is taken on. If the mortgage is split so many ways, then who has the deed?

Quting the court:
"The practical effect of splitting the deed of trust from the promissory note is to make it impossible for the holder of the note to foreclose, unless the holder of the deed of trust is the agent of the holder of the note. [Citation omitted.] Without the agency relationship, the person holding only the note lacks the power to foreclose in the event of default. The person holding only the deed of trust will never experience default because only the holder of the note is entitled to payment of the underlying obligation. [Citation omitted.] The mortgage loan becomes ineffectual when the note holder did not also hold the deed of trust." Bellistri v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, LLC, 284 S.W.3d 619, 623 (Mo. App. 2009). "

Which means MERS which foreclosing properties can possibly no longer foreclose properties. Damn, double Damn! If this stays on, then we are looking at a big problem. A wild ass guess as to the fall out,

1) People who are forced to foreclose by MERS can get more breathing time , peace and some justice.
2) The tax payer will get shafted again unless the public hounds congress to hold people in wall street accountable.

Fun times. bah!

Calvin and Hobbes

ROTFL! The comic still makes me laugh.

Source: http://progressiveboink.com/jon/images/calvinhobbes/jon4.GIF

My fancy

For some odd reason Lewis Carrol popped into my head when thinking of poetry, here is a nice one.

PAINTED her a gushing thing,

With years perhaps a score;

A little thought to find they were

At least a dozen more;

My fancy gave her eyes of blue,

A curly, auburn head;

I came to find the blue a green

The auburn turned to red.




She boxed my ears this morning--

They tingled very much;

I own that I could wish her

A somewhat lighter touch;

And if you were to ask me how

Her charms might be improved,

I would not have them added to,

But just a few removed!




She has the bear's ethereal grace,

The bland hyena's laugh,

The footstep of the elephant,

The neck of the giraffe.

I love her still, believe me,

Though my heart its passion hides;

"She is all my fancy painted her,"

But, oh, how much besides!

Source: http://www.poetry-archive.com/c/my_fancy.html

DexTer

Started to watch this series. It seems interesting, It kind of stood out odd that the central character is a forensics/blood expert yet when he opens doors or cabinets at potential victims place is not wearing gloves and is leaving behind fingerprints. So much for being a show on forensics/blood expert who is a serial killer. The 4th season starts in a few days, might watch it.

Puffy rulez!

No puffy is not a dog or any other 4 legged animal. It is a pufferfish, it is the mascot of OpenBSD. I decided to give OpenBSD 4.5 a try. It has been a while since I used it. The install was a breeze. Grab the iso and I have a minimal X session working. I liked the fact that ifconfig could do wireless configuration instead of using a different binary in the Linux world.

ifconfig iwi0 wpa wpapsk "0xlongasskey"; ifconfig iwi0 up ; dhclient iwi0. Lo and behold I was connected to net via wireless. pkg_add -i was easy enough. I like aptitude better though. The FAQ was good enough to get the system up and running. Now I have a OpenBSD system with an Gnome that is consistent with my Debian system. Nice!

I need to get encrypted filesystem up and running, that's on my list of things to do.

You are naked!

The internet has made the world a true global village. Edward Bulwer-Lytton coined the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword". I would today rephrase it as "The keyboard is the mightier than the sword". People have been either stripped or stripping themselves digitally, consciously or unconsciously. No. I don't mean porno you pervs. I mean loss of privacy. Just as people leave stuff around in their house that can reveal their dna if examined, like hair, people leave digital footprints in their own computer or in places they have no control over, revealing a lot about them.

Lets say, my friend gave me a laptop to examine and tell me what kind of person used that laptop, I could begin with as simple as.

1) Examine list of installed software.
2) Examine the browser.
Fire up the browser and look at the following
a) History
b) Bookmarks
c) Cache
d) Temp files.
e) Cookies.
f) Stored passwords.
An average person probably keeps a lot of cached files around.
3) Look at IM logs.
Take Pidgin/YIM/Trillian as examples, you dont even has to be logged on to find this information,
a) They reveal the person's friend's list
b) If the person logged conversations, they would be in plain text or in the case of YIM (XOR'ed with your id)
4) A peek at my documents application data directories is a treasure trove of information, especially if a the person is well organized.
5) History of applications (Microsoft Word/Excell/Photoshop) that reveal the person recently edited.
6) Media players what the person recently watched.

I can now take a good guess about a person's personality. In yester years it was gossip or public actions that tradionally led others to know about a person. Now combine the above with the ones below, a stranger can know a lot about a person even without meeting or talking to the person and without 3rd person gossip.

Take it to the next level and determine the social connections and personality of the person.

7) Examining the social connectivity of the person via social networks. If the person has a public profile, then it is the Holy Grail!
a) Type of friends.
b) Events attended
c) Hobbies, ratings on different quizzes.
d) Self expression.
e) The causes supported
f) The political standings
etc
8) Blogs, Forums,

Think I am full of crap, well check out this article that was reported on Slashdot.

Take it to the next level of what the government can know about you. This presentation titled "Death of Anonymous Travel" is a good indication of how data can mined and where technology is headed.

All one can do is be careful about the digital footprint they leave behind. Stuff posted on social networks can easily come back to haunt a person.
Ex:
1) Suggestions on what not to do
2) Tweet about a job offer
3) Facebook and boring job
4) Boss and Facebook

Recommended reading: Future of online reputation