Bernie Madoff is the financial criminal of the past. Billionaire hedge fund chief Raj Rajaratnam is the financial criminal of the moment! Slick back your hair, watch Wall Street, and forget Ponzi schemes—insider trading is back, big time!

Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the $7 billion hedge fund Galleon Group, the 551st richest man in the world according to Forbes, and America's one and only Sri Lankan billionaire, has been arrested and charged for taking part in a $20 million insider-trading scheme. [NYT, WSJ]

Mark Cuban concedes his HDNet has been permanently kicked off Time Warner Cable Systems nationwide. It's a rough time for the mouthy internet entrepreneur.

"My blog, because the press never gets it right." This 2006 Hewlett Packard ad featuring Dallas Mavs owner and dotcom bazillionaire Mark Cuban shows why it'll be fun to watch him fight with the SEC over a chump-change $750,000 windfall from what the lawmen claim is insider trading. Cuban is a crazy super-multitasker who gets 1,000 emails a day, yet still had time to do Dancing with the Stars. Halfway through this ad, he checks off The Smartest Guys in the Room, a documentary about the Enron scandal that he coproduced. My guess on this week's insider trading charge against him? He did it, not thinking through the risks. But he's going to make the SEC look like a bunch of dolts on the Internet. Pass the popcorn!

Dallas Mavericks owner and dotcom jillionaire Mark Cuban has posted an SEC P2 filing to his personal blog. Cuban can run a team, but he's a bit sloppy trying to put the paperwork in context. In short: The SEC has accused Cuban of ordering the sale of his shares in Mamma.com in 2004, based on inside info, to avoid a $750,000 loss. Here's what Cuban is trying to say with his post:

Tech billionaire, anger-driven blogger, and owner of the Dallas Mavericks Mark Cuban has just been charged with insider trading by the SEC. The (civil, not criminal) charges center on an incident in 2004 in which Cuban allegedly got early insider information about a company he had an ownership stake in, and used that info to avoid a loss of $750,000. We have no idea whether the charges are true, but if they are, it's a foolish business move by a guy who's already been fined more than twice that much by the NBA just for running his mouth. Though it is possible to formulate a wild conspiracy theory about this! Mark Cuban would be just another rich guy except for his penchant for saying whatever pops into his head. He constantly criticizes the NBA, which is a no-no by owners. The flipside is he gets great PR. Although half of it is bad! Oh well. He also has a blog that is sometimes hilarious and not well thought out a bit. At the moment, Cuban wants to buy the Chicago Cubs from Tribune Co., which needs to sell the storied baseball franchise to raise cash, which it will burn in a vain attempt to save its newspapers. The idea of Cuban—a maverick—owning the Cubs absolutely kills traditionalists, who think he would totally ruin all the great Chicago traditions, such as having ivy on the outfield walls and losing constantly. So is it possible that there was some shady conspiracy that caused this allegation from 2004 to surface just in time to (likely) torpedo any chance Cuban has of buying the Cubs? You would have to be a crazy conspiracy freak to believe this, for which there is no evidence whatsoever, so please don't sue us.

The SEC has filed charges against Dallas Mavericks owner and dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban. The Wall Street Journal, which disgraced Cuban with a stipple portrait this morning, sums up the paperwork thusly:

You'd think LinkedIn management, which has made no secret of its plans to take its automated schmoozefest public, would be trying to avoid trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so. They're aggressively marketing the company's latest moneymaking scheme, LinkedIn Research, to hedge fund managers. The premise: Traders can use LinkedIn to find "experts" with "unique input" on public companies in their portfolio. What LinkedIn marketers delicately phrase as "input," SEC investigators might well call "inside information." And the only thing actionable about the whole affair might be the insider-trading charges that result.

Seems as though the Securities and Exchange Commission has a little problem on their hands when it comes to husbands and wives revealing secret information to each other about companies' stock, and now their chief of the office of Internet enforcement, John Reed Stark, is on the case. See, even if your wife has a different last name, or you buy stock you're not supposed to be buying in your mother-in-law's name, or whatever, the SEC will probs figure it out. Bummer, right?

Michael Arrington says on TechCrunch: