Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Well...

Well...

a) Seismographic equipment doesn't seem like a very high profile target. As corestore (above) points out, this data is generally openly available anyway. Which isn't to say it wasn't hacked but again it just doesn't seem like a particularly juicy target.

b) As thames points out (above), well, take a look at even the NSA's public tools (no kidding they have a github). Ghidra is a really great, free and open source disassembler (which besides showing you assembly language, will make a fair attempt at turning it into C code so, if the program was written in C at least, you'll get something back at least vaguely resembling the source code that may have gone into the program to begin with.) They don't write these programs to NOT use them, I'm quite sure they're hacking plenty of things.

c) Not that I'm happy about China's behaviors, but do keep in mind the five eyes (US, Canada, Britian, Australia, and New Zealand) run what is probably the largest surveillance network on the planet. I've found the rhetoric of the last couple years to be hypocritical to say the least. Keep in perspective when you hear "I can't believe China is doing xyz" (in regards to data collection or surveillance) if the five eyes aren't doing the same.

So mixing the Tesla and Twitter operations again?

I'll be shocked -- SHOCKED I tells ya! -- when it turns out the first tenant in these data centers that Tesla investors pay or turns out to be Twitter.

6.2 update

I had one computer affected by 6.2 update -- ironically I used a live USB to do a live install to it, three days earlier and I would have had a semi-functional 5.19 kernel. This has a very old Nvidia chip (8600M GT), I ended up installing "non-HWE" 5.15 kernel and putting 340 nvidia driver on there. No comment on my other systems, just like Liam (article writer) found, on my other systems they updated to 6.2 and everything continued to run fine. I do think 6.2 might be running a hair faster than 5.19 for me but that might be placebo.

Disingenuous

I find it to be particularly disingenuous of Oracle to put in these E-Mails "Customers no longer need to count every processor or user name" then tell people they must pay for every employee at the company. I mean, OK, technically an employee is not a user name... but obviously that's what they are trying to imply.

Anyway, yeah, I don't think I used Sun Java since the 1990s, and I've never used Oracle Java. I can't imagine not just using OpenJDK or the like instead.

I have one!

I have a nextstation! I fired it up last week (after realizing I was wondering about Y2K compliance so I had probably not fired it up since 1999.) It powered right up. Then I realized I needed the password... luckily I remembered it after about 10 tries. One really nice saving grace (if you intended to actually use it rather than have it as a showpiece), it DOES support NFS, so rather than trying to find some 30 year old SCSI hard disk to replace the ~100MB HDD (and manage to get nextstep installed on it, which I think involves a boot floppy?), you can just access your terabyte after terabyte of modern storage over the network. I'm not a member of the "cult of Jobs" so I will probably sell it while the prices are high.

Yup

Yup. Obviously, there's work you have to physically be present to do. But going into a dreary cubicle farm, only to log into a usually equally-dreary computer and spend all day on a computer coding and collaborating via instant messages and slack channels? Screw that, I can (and now do!) do that from home. As a bonus, the employer I work for now is in an area where wages are much higher than my area, so I'm getting a very good hourly rate. (No, I'm not working from India... it's a US employer and I'm in the US, they're just in a part of the US with higher costs of living than mine.)

Ugh.. AZERTY

Ugh... AZERTY. I had the misfortune to use one of these things in Morocco. It was terrible. Leave it to the French to decide to move a few keys around just because.

Incidentally, I did find it odd that ALL the computers I saw there had AZERTY keyboards... I mean, it used to be a French colony so OK... but the primary spoken language there is Arabic and I never saw a single Arabic keyboard anywhere in the country. Do people there just E-Mail each other in French (or not E-Mail each other at all?) or use an on-screen keyboard or what?

Smart

Smart. I mean, the minimum of core i3 is a LITTLE high, but I can see it as an easy cut off. My dad is still using a Dell Optiplex 755 with a Core 2 Quad (that is about to turn 18 years old) as a daily driver with Ubuntu 22.04 on it, and it gets a hell of a workout (he loads 100+ page documents full of graphs and figures almost daily, scans both photos and documents, lots of printing, and Zoom conferences at least weekly if not several times a week -- monitor-mounted web cam...) Zoom maxes out 2 cores, but luckily it has 4. It'll hit 200-300% CPU usage as chrome loads up those more bloated web pages (then dropping nice and low once the page is loaded of course.) It is VERY slow to boot however (it's not just because it's using spinning rust, the drive was priced very low when new because it was an unusually slow model. I guess my dad starts it up then just goes and does something else while it boots.) I think the top of the line Core 2's would be "OK" but I could see drawing the line at a Core i3 rather than seeing a "Core 2" sticker and taking the risk that it's a lower-end model that would not be fast enough to keep the user happy.

The first several Core i3/i5/i7 models, I think it's Sandy Bridge (2nd gen) where it could be SHIPPED with Win10 but after-the-fact upgrades are not permitted. So the first several generations of Core chips don't support Win10 at all. In addition, my understanding is that later Win10 releases REQUIRE "UWP" drivers, and the earlier Core series CPUs don't have them (since Intel dropped support for these series before UWP drivers became a requirement), so those series MUST use a several year old version of Win10 LTSB (Long Term Support Branch.) Of course quite a few can't run Win11. So I could see plenty of fully-functional systems that business will retire simply due to not being able to keep the (Microsoft) software on them up to date. Of course, you now have Zoom and software like this that will NOT let you conference if the software is more than about 3 months out of date (which I suppose is for both security reasons, and maintainability since you don't have to ensure backward-compatibility with years-out-of-date client software). So you don't have the option of just running older software for certain uses. I'm running a Ivy Bridge (3rd gen) right now and it's fully up to date; 16GB RAM, loads of storage (really, I have like 22TB storage hanging off this thing), and a GTX1650 video card; courtesy of wine/dxvk/vkd3d (and proton for steam games) it even runs every game I've thrown at it. I may expand it to it's maximum 32GB since the DDR3 RAM prices have utterly collapsed, I got the 16GB for like $90 a few years back, now the 2x16GB kit is about $40.

"ISTR that when 5G (or was it 4 or 6 or whatever?) being mooted it was said that because the range was so small the base stations could be like WiFi and instead of erecting the sort of masts they're now putting up they would be many unnoticeably small boxes similar to WiFi base stations on lamp-posts etc."

Yeah that was just PR hype. Microcells are small like this (and mmwave 5G does have coverage of a matter of city blocks.) But of course, just like 2G and 3G, 4G and 5G run on a variety of bands and for wider coverage the cell companies are going to continue to use the "cell towers" as well.

So there's (perhaps) 2 different technologies at play here (and I don't know if Vodafone is using both or not). 5G standalone is just as described, the cell cos started rolling out 5G for faster data before the spec was completely finished, so all "control channel" traffic ran over 4G, voice calls ran over 4G (if the company and phone support VoLTE, otherwise it could still run voice over 2G or 3G potentially). Running control channel over 5G is "5G Standalone", the battery life savings are mainly by not having to keep connected to both 4G and 5G. The 5G control channel does let it schedule time to send/receive data packets a bit faster so you get a slightly lower ping that way too, and save a slight additional bit of power since the radio can spend slightly more time powered down.

The OTHER technology is mmwave 5G. This is the stuff that gets easy multi-gbps speeds, Verizon got "in the lab" 5gbps over it 3 years ago and I've seen people posts for the last 2 or 3 years from places like Manhattan showing they could easily get 2.5gbps speeds in real-world use. The sites have a range of a matter of a few city blocks (because 28ghz+ frequencies get scattered and absorbed), but massive speeds. This isn't doing anything too fancy to get those speeds, they just run 400-800mhz wide channels versus the typical 4G/5G channels being 20-40mhz, so needless to say if you have a channel that's like 40x the size you can get much higher speeds over it.

The nice middle ground now, C-Band (5G bands n77, n78, n79 -- don't worry, I googled those bands I didn't have them off the top of my head.) This is 3.3ghz-5ghz range. It's used by satellite (not Sky Television, the giant dishes that went up first in the late 1970s and 1980s, and TV networks and such still use for uplinks), but in the US at least the FCC, cell cos, and satellite companies came to an agreement where the satellite companies are getting paid to move all their remaining C-Band stuff to one end of the band so the rest can be used to free up like 1500mhz or so for additional speed -- this is nice because it has FAR higher range than mmwave band, but (since it's a huge block of channels) should allow massive speeds. (For most cell cos, CBand alone will give them more spectrum than they have in all their other bands combined, so it should give a nice speed boost when they have it all up and running.)

Nonsense

This is nonsense. Open source writers do not have to rewrite licenses to accomodate AI systems memorizing their entire code and then typing it out for somebody. Any more than, a company could not just hire people with photographic memory to read some code, write it down verbatim then claim that this is new code and not subject to the license. Clean room implementation (i.e. one person writes a description of what the code, does, and a second writes code based on this description?) This is allowed. Copying the code over? It's still subject to license whether they want it to be or not, and that is as it should be.

And, to be clear, patent trolls are patent trolls -- companies that have not invented anything, just patents and lawyers, often abusing the patent system by extending their patent(s) so they can add things that are already being done by others but get it backdated so they can falsely claim they "invented" them first (.. I think in the US this was finally fixed, but the patent system did have that ridiculous bug where you could extend a patent for years WHILE adding things to it and everything in it would be backdated to the original filing date.) People producing code under an open source license enforcing their license against people who think they can incorporate their code into proprietary products without following the license? This is not trolling this is using the copyright system as intended.

As for developing new licenses for AI data sets -- that does make sense. It's still tricky, an AI that will spit out vebatim blocks of code without following the license of that code, putting the entire AI data set as a whole under a license does not change the fact that the code it's spitting out is still subject to the original license whether the AI company or people using the code the AI spit out want it to be or not.

(To be clear, I'm not hating on the article, Steven did a fine job writing up what's going on here. I'm objecting to the AI system vendors arguments that they should be able to pirate open source code for proprietary products because an AI read the code off, say, github, then spit it back out.)

Good.

Good. Section 702 was frankly unconstitutional from the start; allowing warrantless wiretapping while being able to *retroactviely* get a warrant from this closed court Simian Surprise refers to. Except, what do you know, it's been know for years that they don't even bother to do that!

Really both main parties can be blamed for this, from roughly the mid-1990s (at least) to very recently, both main parties have steadily given these surveillance agencies more legal authority, and kind of complain about every year or two about how much they exceed their legal authority but don't really do anything about it. Republicans have (possibly) talked a bit more in favor of bills giving more surveillance powers, but both main parties gleefully voted for them.. and on the other hand for years Ron Paul (also a Republican but really more LIbertarian) spoke out the most vehemently against these laws (and in fact voted against them). I do wonder some of this was initiated by Trumpists (who basically began being distrustful of the FBI and US surveillance once some of this was being applied to investigate Trump, file federal charges, etc.) Nevertheless, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, if this gets the mainstream Congressmen looking at this more closely then great. It's been time to reign this in for years.

a monster

Yes, indeed back when I used gentoo, the two packages that were so large they were like "you know what? Maybe you *don't* want to build this one from source" (and had the option to install a pre-built binary package) were firefox and libreoffice, and libreoffice was by far the larger of the two. That thing would take all day to build!

Not discrimination

I don't think they'll find this is discrimination. The type of discrimination these policies were targetting (at least here in the states) was when Comcast began falsifying RST ("Reset") packets to close bittorrent connections (which also awkwardly triggered killing some people's remote desktop and VPN sessions) claiming this was equivalent to throttling (no, forcing a connection closed is not the same as throttling); some providers began slowing down everyone's video on demand services except their own to encourage uptake of their own services; AT&T thought they would try to charge Youtube Netflix, etc. for access to their network (... umm, not how it works guys, youtube does pay at those peering points just like you do); you had providers that intentionally interfered with voip to encourage use of their own phone service. Stuff like that.

Having a full-speed bucket then throttling after that bucket empties (regardless of traffic), you may not like it but it is not discriminatory. Personally, I'd probably notice but not complain; I'm getting 32mpbs down and 4mbps (40/5 DSL but a long line length) myself. And the price is over $80 a month -- the phone company here took "option B" in the telecom act that deregulating bell companies in the 1980s, they do not compete outside their local market but maintained their landline monopoly, no 3rd party DSL here!

Bluetooth?

I could see including bluetooth. It's definitely unusual, but I've used bluetooth tethering between my phone and computer -- it uses FAAAAR less power than turning on the phone hotspot and gets about 2mbps which is slow but "fast enough". The phone claims to support up to 8 devices to tether on the bluetooth too. And (since my computer has the wifi/bluetooth antenna that runs around the display, giving it nice range) it seems to have enough range to reach from one end of a house to another. So I could see including it in the list, so some "naughty" provider didn't just decide to provide (slow but uncensored) internet service over bluetooth.

Tough tactics

Those are some tough business tactics that's for sure. A bit shady but *shrug* that's another good reason to try to legislate patent trolls out of existence IMHO.

I wonder how long it'll take

I wonder how long it'll take? I recall, like 15-20 years ago, the military having a remote controlled tank that they were quite sure was secure, and had some people poke at it to make sure (expecting nobody to get in). Someone got full control in I think 15 minutes.

Yes please

Yes please, buy more kit from us!!!

Umm, yeah.

Cost?

Not that I'm complaining, but how does it cost $80 million for the first 6 months (that Musk covered), $120 for the second 6 months, but then $400 million for the year after that? (Well, maybe the numbers of ground stations in use is steadily increasing. It still looked pretty odd at first glance.)

Factual discussion

"Huawei believes that there should an objective and factual discussion about how risks in cyberspace can be mitigated."

And I agree. The last audit I recall seeing of Huawei equipment, the worst they found was that some modules on it would have an up-to-date SSL version, while some other modules would have one that is somewhat out of date. But they found the same type of issues looking at telecom equipment from other companies too. No spyware, no unusual logs on the thing, no unusual network behavior. I mean, really, with the amount of traffic that goes through some of these things, even if the barest summary was being sent to Huawei or whoever someone would notice. (After all, if the equipment had a backdoor, how would they know what to request the equipment to send back without some kind of summary? Oh you (J. Random Politician) think it's sending everything do you? Yeah I'm sure it could send gbps of extra traffic with nobody noticing.)

Earlier test

I do recall reading about an earlier test (like Iraq war era) with an automated machine gun -- test 1, the thing like immediately starts swivelling around on full auto fire and someone frantically pulls the plug before it turned 180 degrees and fired on the military brass checking out the demo. Test 2 -- they "figured out the problem", but just in case put put like a block of wood or something to stop it swivelling around. It rammed into the block, knocked it over and someone had to again frantically unplug it before it swung around on the spectators. Test 3 -- "it's definitely fixed this time", but they put an electronic limiter, i.e. if it his 90 degrees or whatever it cuts the power to the motor. It immediately started swinging around AGAIN and shut down when it hit the 90 degree mark. The brass decided to not pursue this project!

DDR3 is cheap too!

DDR3 is cheap too, REAL cheap. I got 16GB for this system (an Ivy Bridge) a year or two ago, it was $90. Now I can max it out with 32GB for $40.

Wrong disorder

Just taking a guess here, but I these seems like it would be sensible device if your eating disorder involved OVER eating. I wonder if it just didn't ask (or got the wrong impression) and went for that. If you're dealing with mental health, using an AI chatbot seems like a seriously bad idea.

I'd make a smart-assed comment but... (thanks snap!)

I'd make a smart-assed comment here... but, courtesy of snap, I had my (snap-based) copy of firefox lose it's ability to save files for a bit just last night! I had a swap-storm (from running entirely too much stuff), firefox then couldn't save. (This doesn't make sense but...) snap restricts where firefox can save files, so it uses "xdg-portal" to save outside that area... (to me it doesn't make sense, it's jumping through a hoop to just be able to save wherever anyway.. so why have the restriction to begin with? Anyway...) I suppose something timed out and it decided xdg-portal was gone... I don't know, whatever happened saves didn't work for a good while, then later on they started working again.

Damn man

Damn man. Signed drivers for a camera? I mean, I use Linux so I don't have to deal with this stuff anyway (nothing to expire here!). But what hardware doesn't just have bog-standard USB-connected cameras that would not require special drivers, certificates or not?

Admitting the problem...

"Putting something on their status page is admitting they have a problem. No company ever wants to admit to that."

ESPECIALLY Apple! Back when I was in college, I encountered silliness with this twice. At my student job, I was running a Mac 6100, which (besides my using it for web browsing and such) ran tape backup to a DDS-3 tape drive. So, this department was well-funded so it didn't take too long for someone to have a newer hand-me-down system -- but the tape drive wouldn't work! Turns out (per Google, Apple never acknowledged the issue) the SCSI chip had a bug (I think with synchronous commands?) that affected tape drives (but not hard drives etc.); they actually had a few OS9 versions that worked around the problem, then it quit working again! Apparently, again per Google, the fix got removed -- it wasn't causing anyone else problems (it didn't fix tape drives but break something else), just some coder there saw this kludgey-looking bit of code, and there was no acknowledged bug so the code got removed.

Second time I had an issue, someone put statistical software on their Mac and it kept crashing! On that one, it turns out Apple installed cache memory that was like 0.5-1ns too slow, so it "usually" worked but if you had like compression, decompression, number crunching in general that would have run in a fast loop and accessed memory nice and fast, it'd crash! This was back when the cache was still in a slot so I just pulled the cache. Again, this came from Google searches, Apple never acknowledged the problem; I wonder how many people just dealt with this model being flakey on them, when it could be fixed for $0 (pull the cache) to $20 or so (replacement cache module) and about 15 seconds labor time?

PDF/CAD files

"In which case would possession of a file that could print one, or a PDF or CAD file that allows someone to make one count as possesson of a machine gun? If so, could big tech execs be facing 110 years in jail for supplying those parts?"

Oh they had a case on that described here: https://reason.com/volokh/2018/07/10/us-government-drops-prohibition-on-files/

In short, restrictions on CAD files and the like were put in place in the US in 2015 or perhaps a year previously; a lawsuit was filed in 2015, and the gov't settled (dropping all restrictions on these files) in 2018. This lawsuit's primary argument was that this was a violation of first ammendment rights (which I think is a fair argument, freedom of speech in the US is guaranteed. Producing or dealing in illegal items is illegal; discussion on how they COULD be produced is not.)

Revenge!!!

"India is the largest market for WhatsApp, with over 450 million users – many of whom have in the last couple of weeks received plenty of spam calls from overseas."

Revenge!!! The amount of illegal robocalls calls I received over the years from Indian call centers was extraordinary, I reported something like 2000 calls (and received a letter of thanks from the FCC for it actually.) They would falsify caller ID but (at that point) were using illegally set up VOIP services in Florida to make their calls to numbers in the US. I am just tickled pink that, at least for a few weeks, India is instead *receiving* mass robocalls from overseas call centers.

Interesting

Interesting. I note that with fusors, the last research I saw suggested they were near breakeven (where it produces as much power as it consumes) with a large desktop model, with models suggesting scaling it up should have generated net power output. The first scaleup was going to cost $3 million, and second about $10 million.

This is not a fusor, it's using magnetic constriction; from what I've read that has shown promise too. Will it work? I don't know if they are in the pure R&D stage (still figuring out the possible ways of having it run for more than a few minutes) versus engineering (whether the current prototypes can run for an extended time or not, they know what materials and techniques must be used in a later prototype and ultimately production to have it keep running.)

LLNL and the like are essentially researching a large-scale reactor, they draw a large amount of power, charging up very high capacity capacitors, release a large burst of power to get a quick even larger burst out. Fusor and I think Helion are smaller-scale designs, they run at lower temps (still high, 100 million degrees plus, this is not some claim of cold fusion...), are much smaller, produce less power but take less power to fire up as well. And of course cost would be much lower, just as with a conventional nuclear power plant some 1GW plant would cost more than a 50MW one.

Refund?

So are anyone who bought extended service going to get a refund? A FULL refund going back to June 2020 when extended support began? I would expect one -- people pay extended support on "mature" products knowing that they will not get frequent patches, but under the assumption that when it DOES need a patch it'll receive it. Paying that for "Hey, screw you, we're not patching it anyway", well, it really seems like a problem to me.

Also, does Cisco realize this'll hurt them in the long run? Why would anyone ever pay for extended support if they know Cisco is going to just take their money and then not follow through?

Seems fair

Seems fair. I mean, to me it seems clear the "act of war" exemption is meant so, if some city got a nuclear bomb dropped on it, it wouldn't immediately bankrupt every insurance company in the country (that did any significant underwriting in that city). Not so an insurance company can insure for ransomware, and then weasel out of paying for it. (That said, $1.4B? Merck must have bought pretty good insurance!)

Yeah I wouldn't replace dick without full funding

Yeah, I wouldn't replace dick without full funding.

Avon B7 is spot on here, this is political posturing. The ZTE and Huawei equipment had intense scrutiny placed on it after it was suggested it may have security problems, backdoors, etc. The worst that was found was some messiness (like, some software will have up to date libs, some other software will be using older, out of date libs.) But the equipment from domestic vendors does this too (just like access points, IP cameras... basically everything but dekstop, notebook, server, and phone/tablet software.. where they tend to just get some kernel and libs that work then just keep using them forever unless there's some real reason to update them.)

If they want to have companies ditch the ZTE and Huawei hardware, go ahead! But they can't expect to have companies do it for free, or have the gov't agree to pay half or something, when they could be expecting them to scrap equipment that has a decade or more of service life left on it.

Lucky that it's only $5 billion -- Verizon has used Nokia, Erricson, and Samsung back to the 2G days. AT&T has too. I don't know if T-Mobile or Sprint used any ZTE or Huawei in the past, but in recent times Sprint was buying all Samsung at the point T-Mobile bought them out, and T-Mobile is using a 50/50 split of Nokia and Erricson on their 5G network.

(For those who don't know, the 5G equipment uses SDR -- Software Defined Radio -- so the single set of 5G equipment can run 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G, basically all the old kit can be scrapped. Verizon shut down their last 2G/3G at end of 2022 -- after delaying it twice from original end date of end of 2019. AT&T has had their 2G/3G shut down for several years. T-Mobile is running a skeleton 2G network for now, to scoop up contracts from whatever alarm companies etc. still have non 4G/5G equipment out there, but I'm sure that's using the 2G functionality of their 5G hardware.)

Almost all fraud or abuse

Almost all use of H1B Visas is fraud or abuse, and it was already 25 years ago when I was in college.

Many years back, Siemens brought in nuclear engineers from Germany on a 2 year H1B visa to train the locals how to use some shiny new nuclear power plants. Even the nuclear engineers and operators in the US would have probably been familiar with a GE nuclear reactor, they would not know the ins and outs the people sent over from Siemens did. That is a legitimate use.

What they usually get used for? Outsourcing firms bring masses of programmers (with no specialities whatsoever) over from India so they can pay them well below market rate. By the time they realize they are not even being paid a living wage* it's too late, they can keep working or get their visa revoked and sent back to India with no money and no job.

*The perverse part of it is a large part of this is that these firms bring their H1Bs to silicon valley... the pay they offered would be acceptable in the midwest where I live; they falsely claim they can't find anyone to fill these jobs without even looking in country. And in fact some of these firms lost a fair bit of business to other outsourcing companies that do just that, start up in a part of the US without the insane housing prices of Silicon Valley and hire talent in the region at prices that'd be a joke in Silicon Valley but acceptable where they are located.

Sensible

I think it's sensible, if you are going to send vehicles to the moon or mars -- why not have a car company design it?

Lame

The same lame excuse. "You cannot have privacy or there'll be child porn." A weak, weak, useless, stupid argument.

Good luck with that

Good luck with that -- companies bought into SAP (in decades past) partially because of the ability to customize it to hook into their existing business systems (to slurp data out of them), etc. Why would one go into a cloud version of SAP where customizations are not permitted? And if you had to go and redo everything anyway to fit a standard, why would you then stick with SAP?

I'm sure they know what they are doing, plenty of SAP users are already in their cloud. But I think they are sorely mistaken if they think the customers with lets say "bespoke" SAP setups are going to give them up.

Weak case and due diligence not done

Weak case for sure. Should he be extradited? Maybe, I suppose if HP has enough of a case for trial then they get their trial. There were reported "irregularities" in the company. Whether they were illegal or just not-quite-standard, I don't know.

Should he be found guilty? Probably not! HP vastly overpaid for this company, even taking Autonomy's numbers at face value. They had firms do the due diligence, those firms found that HP's proposed buyout value was too high... HP then ignored the due diligence reports and paid the price they paid anyway.

I recall when HP bought Autonomy -- it was widely discussed at the time that HP was ridiculously overpaying for the company. (Per Wikipedia, HP paid *79%* over the market price for the shares -- who the hell does this?) Then within a year or two they had to hugely write down the purchase -- of course, acting like it was a huge surprise that a company that they paid 79% over market price for was not worth what they paid for it, what a shocking shocking surprise amiright?

"It was reported that more than 15 well known firms advised HP on the Autonomy deal: UBS, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America and others with Slaughter & May and Morgan Lewis serving as the company's legal advisers.

All of these business/legal heavyweights count with hundreds of (very) highly paid professionals within their ranks yet not one of them objected to the deal."

Oh but they did object -- I recall reading articles at the time (or probably after HP wrote it down) bringing up that these firms found 'irregular' accounting and (even if you took that accounting at face value) HP was vastly overvaluing the company. For some reason HP paid for these reports and apparently didn't read them!

Theft list

In the past, the US has both CDMA and GSM networks, and apparently it was pretty stupid -- the CDMA carriers kept one list, the GSM carriers kept another, and neither was synchronized with any overseas GSM theft list. So (for the newer phones that supported both CDMA and GSM) you could just steal one from AT&T or T-Mobile and sell it to a Verizon or possibly Sprint user (Sprint liked to customize their phones...), or the other way around. With all US networks now being 4G LTE and 5G NR (most 2G and 3G has been totally shut down...), they do now have one theft list.

Something amusing I read... so, if you go to activate a stolen phone on most carriers now, the phone just won't work -- it'll either do nothing, or ONLY allow calls to customer service. Apparently on AT&T, it does that for about an hour, THEN you start getting calls from AT&T customer service taking the piss with you... asking if you're aware that phone was stolen, where did you get the phone from, you are aware you won't be able to activate it anywhere right?, and so on. I'm not an AT&T fan but I think that policy is both great and very amusing.