Why is Bitcoinica not responding to user inquiries over email?
There are a lot of them and we have limited resources to respond. We're trying to sort through all the claims in the most expedient way possible.
The information we have available is certainly very limited. It is not even close to a full database backup.
Why was help.bitcoinica.com taken down? (as it was separate from the app)
The dns provider was changed as they were screwing up the DNSSEC records.
Why are updates not posted on the Bitcoinica website?
There isn't a whole lot to say beyond the obvious we're trying to sort out this mess and it's going to take a while.
When will the claims process close?
I'm not sure we could legally close the claims process at all.
How is Bitcoinica dealing with open positions?
All open positions are considered closed, the prices for close will be chosen to be reasonable based on the overall claims picture.
Part of the reason we haven't started to pay claims is that without a high level view of the claims we cannot pick a reasonable close price.
Why the secrecy?
At first there was secrecy in hopes that people would submit more accurate claims if they were unaware that the database and all known backups had been destroyed.
After that it seems like there hasn't been a whole lot of secrecy. (People arguing with each other in an open forum thread isn't very secretive now is it?)