After a hiatus that led many to suspect that Mark Cuban's ShareSleuth experiment had gone the way of the hula hoop, Chris Carey is back with a scathing report on China Fire & Security Group Inc. (NASDAQ: CFSG), which bills itself as a "leading total solution provider of industrial fire protection systems in China."

The ShareSleuth report found evidence of the usual suspects in pump and dumps: exaggerated resumes, disclosure issues, associations with characters of ill repute and a lot of hype combined with little evidence of a strong operating business.

Another major red flag: CEO Brian Lin told Mr. Carey in an email "that you should be careful since you don't know how strong our business is and how many big deals we are close to completion. CFSG SHORT SELLERS WILL BE SQUEEZED - SOON!!"

An email from a CEO to a journalist of that nature is highly irregular, securities lawyer Howard Sirota of Sirota & Sirota told me in a phone conversation. He added that it is a violation of Regulation Fair Disclosure, an SEC regulation requiring that material information be disseminated simultaneously to market participants: "It goes back to the concept of full and fair disclosure. That statement wasn't made in a public dissemination to the entire market. This is selective disclosure, an effort to effect the price of the stock by giving information to a selected market participant. The idea of full and fair disclosure is a level playing field. This is like whispering to one analyst 'We're gonna beat expectations."

Be sure to check out this story from ShareSleuth -- the site could develop into a tremendous resource for investors.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Internet pioneer, is not too happy with how the Internet's infrastructure is evolving. Cuban points out how "each generation to whom the invention was a breakthrough it may have been heretical to consider those inventions 'dead and boring'. The reality is that at some point they stop changing. They stop evolving. They become utilities or utilitarian and are taken for granted."

Cuban points out that until bandwidth throughput to the home reaches far higher numbers, the Internet is dead, as the platform is not evolving fast enough to allow really smart people to come up with groundbreaking ideas. Throughput to the home has not increased more than 5mbs in the past 5 years, and few people's throughput is going to increase to more than 10mbs in the next 5 years, he noted.

GigaOm.com's Om Malik agrees, saying most of the smart people who orginally built out the Internet are now developing the content and not the infrastructure. All the smart people who built the equipment and the pipes are now building Web 2.0 products.

Malik goes on to say "the future, however, is in two-way, symmetrical Internet, where applications such as Kyte.TV and Sling Media can actually be put to use." Malik goes into much greater detail, which should be required reading for those who are investing in technology and the Internet. The blogs can be found at GigaOm.com and BlogMaverick.com. Both Cuban and Malik agree the Internet's infrastructure is due for a serious wake-up call.

It's been nearly 25 years since Donald Trump since Donald Trump bought the New Jersey Generals off the ill-fated USFL. Now another obnoxious mogul, Mark Cuban, is trying to start a new football league.

According to CNNMoney's Chris Isidore, "there are as many as three different groups looking at trying to start yet another league in the coming years. Two of the efforts would try to start leagues in the spring, when the NFL is in hibernation and some of the former leagues, like the USFL, briefly succeeded."

Bill Hambrecht and Cuban are looking at starting the UFL, and Cuban has argued on his blog that the league's collective bargaining agreement structure is :not designed for a competitive environment. Competition for top players, even if the UFL gets just a few, increases prices at the top end for all teams. Every star will get paid more, but still have to fit under the cap. That forces teams to use more low cost players, at the expense of signing the middle of the roster. That gives us access to quite a few very, very good NFL players ..."

Hambrecht has suggested that each team would be able to sell 1/3rd of its shares to the public through IPOs. So not only would the USFL provide opportunities for billionaires to own teams, but also average Joe's: Cool!

The always interesting, if not always sane, Mark Cuban has a fascinating idea for how to shore up the housing market on a long-term basis: Let people take them their houses public:

The rules could be very simple
1. The house is appraised by a company approved by the exchange that lists the houses.
2. "Shares" are set with a Par Value of 10pct of the appraised value. For a 100k dollar house, there are 10 shares potentially available. However at no point in time can more than 40pct of the "shares" in a home be sold. We dont want the opportunity for "hostile takeovers"
3. The price of the shares will of course be set by the market. In a hot market it will be set above par, in a tough market like today, it will sell below Par.
4. All Proceeds from the sale of shares MUST be used to pay down any debt on the home.

At first glance, this idea makes a ton of sense to me. It would be appeal to investors because it allows them an opportunity to profit from potential upside in the real estate market. I can certainly see REITs jumping into this kind of security if it ever comes to fruition. It would also provide a nice alternative to foreclosure for people who are close to losing their homes. It would also create a real-time market for homes that aren't for sale -- It would help people interested in the industry get an idea of what homes are worth.

Hopefully this novel idea will get the attention it deserves. I don't even like Mark Cuban, and I'm intrigued.

ShareSleuth, Mark Cuban's pet project (He calls it journalism) that seeks to uncover fraudulent companies has a new target: Orthopedic Development Corporation.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with ShareSleuth, the basic idea is this: Cuban hired a guy named Christopher Carey to do investigative research into companies that may be engaging in deception and then write about them on the website. The way that Cuban pays for it is where it gets a little controversial: Before the "picks" are posted on the website, Cuban is told about them and he shorts them. This is all disclosed on the website, and Cuban bills it as a new type of financial journalism.

While I don't have any problem with what Cuban and Carey are doing, I'm not so sure it should be called journalism: Journalism is paid for through the sale of publications and advertising. ShareSleuth is more reminiscent of the work of Manuel Asensio, an investor who put out research reports slamming stocks he was short.

The site received a fair amount of negative publicity, and its latest pick differs from its first two picks, Xethanol (AMEX: XNL) and Utek (AMEX: UTK). Orthopedic Development isn't public and, as such, Cuban has no financial stake in the company. The choice of a non-public company may be an effort to appease those who complained about the supposed conflict of interest in the earlier picks, but I'm not impressed.

The problem with exposing a non-public company is this: Who cares? There's no way that we can seek to profit from the expose, and it's just not very interesting. Public fiascoes are much more fun to follow.

Meanwhile, Mark Cuban is writing about his colonoscopy on his blog. That could possibly be less interesting than the piece on Orthopedic Development.

This post is written as part of AOL Money & Finance's Best & Worst of 2006. Check out the other nominees for Most Annoying Money Expert of 2006. Be sure to cast your vote.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban is best known as the eccentric owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA team. But he got his start as an entrepreneur at the age of twelve, selling garbage bags. His other early money-making efforts included providing disco dancing lessons and a chain letter that earned him more than $1,000. The foundation of his fortune, though, came about through starting and selling technology companies. Unlike so many others in that field, Cuban managed to avoid the dot-com bust by diversifying his portfolio. He's now one of the world's 500 richest people, according to Forbes.

Cuban is a confessed admirer of Ayn Rand, particularly a fan of her novel, The Fountainhead, and also of objectivist philosophy; he leans toward the libertarian end of the political spectrum, though he doesn't get much involved in politics. A casual man, Cuban rarely wears a suit and never wears a watch. He purchased his stake in the Dallas Mavericks from H. Ross Perot in 2000, and has since been a very visible and outspoken supporter of the team, often appearing at games in a Mavericks jersey. He's been fined a number of times by the NBA for criticism of referees and league officials, though he matches his fines with donations to charity. In one notable incident, Cuban's complaint that a league manager wasn't smart enough to run a Dairy Queen eventually resulted in Cuban working the counter at a Dairy Queen in Texas, where delighted fans lined up around the block to be served by him.

Other widely reported incidents include a 2003 scuffle with professional wrestlers Eric Bischoff and Randy Orton, which turned out to be a scripted stunt. In 2006, when film director M. Night Shyamalan expressed concern over the marketing experiment of simultaneously releasing Steven Soderbergh's film Bubble in theaters and on DVD, Cuban called Shyamalan an "idiot."

Makes one wonder who Mr. Shyamalan might vote for as the Most Annoying Money Expert of 2006.

The Dallas Maverick's owner Mark Cuban has pulled the plug on a planned weekly NBA basketball show, Mark Cuban's Radio Maverick, for Sirius Satellite Radio, Inc. (NASDAQ:SIRI). An ISDN line was to have been installed in Cuban's home so that he could do the show from there. Cuban has received offers to host radio shows before. He's outspoken, inventive, and audacious; the show might have been worth a listen.

Why this decision? He explains his reasons on his popular blog: BlogMaverick. He agreed to the idea of a show only as long as Sirius had a deal with the NBA. Which it does. Basically, Cuban states he felt his presence would enhance the NBA's brand. The show would have paid him nothing; but he likes to help out when he can. "To be a good NBA partner," as he puts it.

Google shares closed up today to end the trading day at $427.44, an increase of $0.94 or 0.22% over Wednesday's close. With the Office 2.0 convention happening in San Francisco this week, I mused today on how more and more of the things we do every day in computing have shifted to the web browser from the local desktop.

But will the Office suite move as well? I highly doubt this, unless Internet connectivity -- high speed to boot -- becomes so completely ubiquitous that our apps and data are always at hand, whether we're connected to the net or not.

Some comments have agreed with me, and I feel pretty strong that although may things will shift to the web -- that are not already there -- many applications most of us use every day simply will stay local. The network *is* the computer, but only when the network is available. But, on that front, a rather humorous piece with a smidgen of insight came in today as I enthusiastically pored over who is the bigger moron -- Mark Cuban or Google CEO Eric Schmidt. What's your take?

So, is Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt a moron? Charlie Cooper over at CNET ponders this question with great flair and also brings up a person whose blog I've been following for quite some time -- Mark Cuban. Cuban has been on record now -- many times, in fact -- saying that any company that buys YouTube is completely off their rocker.

And then, just about this time last week, vicious rumors started swirling like Midwestern tornadoes that Google was in fact in the process of acquiring the web's largest social video-sharing site. But, it's one rife with copyright problems that have been put a little under control, but not enough to satisfy Cuban -- and many others, for that matter.

Does Google see the future of the web with non-text and non-graphic interactions? Apparently it sees something, but even spending $1.65 billion in stock is just a small touch for Google and its war chest of cash. The purchase price was small, all things considered, but it must prove its value to GOOG shareholders in the years ahead.

After reading Cooper's column though, I couldn't help but be struck with a rather interesting similarity between what Cuban did over six years ago when he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo! for over $5 billion. This has allowed Cuban to cash out handsomely, but was one of many idiotic mistakes made during the height of the dot-com boom when billion-dollar deals were floating around like crazy (deals that would later evaporate).

Perhaps YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley had this same mentality and decided to "cash out" of YouTube and leave a Internet bellwether holding the bag? Interesting parallel here, since I see many similarities between today's web environment and the one of 1999. So, who's the bigger moron in this situation -- Cuban or Schmidt? Only time will tell.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) shares ended the week up on a high note, as rumors swirled 'round Friday on a possible YouTube.com acquisition. Though Mark Cuban tends to decry any acquisition of YouTube -- something I mostly agree with due to YouTube's content and tons of risk -- Google would probably like to turn Google Video into YouTube.

Wait -- that makes no sense (or does it). Don't you just love it when a stock's performance goes nuts over a rumored acquisition that seems totally out of Google's character of past acquisitions -- and about a questionable pursuit at that?

GOOG shares closed Friday up 2.11% or $8.69 from Thursday's close to end the trading week at $420.50 per share. As Google turns to academia to let loose details on the most popular readings at the Google Books website as well as a global literacy program aimed at connecting all kinds of teachers and academic personnel to grow the global literacy rate, these are the types of subjects that are most likely more worldly-important that the acquisition of a video-search website -- albeit the most popular one on the entire Internet.

Here are some Google highlights from this past week:

Google takes it search expertise to the millions of lines of computer code

Google's place as a personal librarian

Google's AdSense search effectiveness

Google gets a reprieve on advertising copyright infringement dilemma

Is Google a $200 stock that trades at $400?