* Posts by Henry Wertz 1

3137 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Intel doubles its bounty for women and ethnic minorities

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Theory and practice

"where are smaller companies supposed to find individuals to meet their quotas? What are the actual targets? Are they set based on simple perpetual ratcheting or population at large ratios?"

Short answer, population at large ratio, and who knows where smaller businesses are supposed to find whoever. This practice is actually illegal, but the responsible enforcement agency does not enforce the rules as written. Long answer:

What is supposed to happen, the EEOC is (as far as I know) complaint-based, they don't regularly investigate companies or anything. If the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commssion) gets a complaint, they are supposed to make sure an employer is not discriminating in hiring, period (they aren't supposed to care what the gender or ethnic makeup of a company is). The only requirement is to be able to show that there is no discrimination in the job listing itself, no discrimination in where it's listed, and that the hiring practice itself is not discriminatory. Other than the obvious actual discrimination, the main ways to get in trouble are to, for example, list your ads only in Maxim (a men's magazine), then someone could complain that women would then have no chance to see the ad. Or, have someone show that they were not hired despite having better qualifications than the person who was hired. There's no requirement whatsoever that the population of a company has any particular makeup, just that everyone has an equal opportunity, in recognition of the fact that some jobs just don't draw everyone in equally. And in fact, if a company does hire fairly, they will not run into any problems.

That's the theory. In *PRACTICE*, some companies regularly have (illegal) race and gender-based set-asides, (illegally) will have things like Intel here where they will have higher bounties based on race or gender, and (illegally) sometimes even set different hiring requirements based on race and gender, to try to bring (insert race or gender here) up to the percentage of the population in the local area. This violates both the letter and spirit of the EEOC rules and laws, since clearly favoring one group over another violates equal employment opportunity. Of course, if a company is majority minority or women, there's no expectation that they should hire more men to match the local population. The responsible agencies look the other way, and view this as a proper way to ensure employment opportunty, instead of, you know, expecting companies to actually ensure equal employment opportunity.

" "White males did get organized. Unfortunately, those who did so were awful people and the current "men's rights" movement is filled with unrepentant assholes"

Yep, some are assholes, and the other problem has been the widespread racist view that every white male in the US can just do the secret handshake or whatever and get whatever great-paying job they want. So, if anyone even broaches this subject, someone will (racistly) complain about "entitled white males" and the discussion grinds to a dead halt. Don't get me wrong, as a white male I think these entitled white males *do* exist (wealthy, know "the right people" so they can kind of do what they want.) But the rest are in the same boat as everyone else. Of course just like any racist belief, one can see it's not true with their own eyes (why would there be any white males working at McDonals if they were all that entitled?) but facts don't get in the way of people believing it

Ford's 400,000-car recall could be the tip of an auto security iceberg

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

No OTA access thanks.

This actually does NOT point to the need for OTA updates. Most car companies at present do a pretty good job of quality assurance for the car software (and calibration tables that go with that to actually make it work with your particular engine) before it's shipped. Having OTA updates may in fact not add much value in this respect. Cases like Ford's should really not be that widespread.

On the other hand, having the car "online" to get the OTA updates to begin with presents an enormous security risk. I see a secondary risk from this of companies deciding it's alright to ship computer-controlled systems that have not been debugged yet, "secure" in the knowledge they can just OTA it.

Sysadmin jailed for a decade after slurping US military docs

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Professional expectation

"Government logic... "yes, we gave you the password and it's one of those areas you manage.. but you aren't supposed to look at anything"."

Actually that's not some government-specific thing, as a professional I consider it to be a normal expectation to admin without looking through anything. When I was providing IT support a while ago for a business, I had the admin passwords for the PCs, I had the LogMeIn credentials, I had the admin password for the hosted E-Mail, and the admin password for the Carbonite backup. This means, yes, I *could* have remote desktop'ed in and snooped through documents *or* snooped via the Carbonite backup, and read through the E-Mail via the hosted E-Mail admin login. But, they wouldn't have expected their documents and E-Mail to be snooped on, and as a professional I didn't.

This was of course a little more than glancing at something he wasn't supposed to, it sounds like he disabled an anti-copying system (will he be brought up on some dumb DMCA charge for defeating a copy-protection system?), and attempted to wipe logs indicating his actions.

'White hats don't want to work for us' moans understaffed FBI

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Working for the man"

I have the suspicion that, some whitehats also figure that the NSA has been operating illegally for at least a decade, homeland security has been given excessive authority, and don't want anything to do with this. They don't realize the government is not monolithic, and that the FBI has nothing to do with these other agencies.

Sick of politicians robo-calling you? Bin your landline, says the FCC

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Of course...

Of course, I have made it clear when I used to get these political calls (illegally, on my cell phone), that the fact they telemarketed me made SURE I would not vote for them, and would encourage others not to vote for them. SOME politicians *do* have the common sense to realize that it's not the 1950s, there are ways to make people aware of information without harassing them via telephone.

Landline or not, I do intend to file complaint any time I get one of these. If the FCC spends enough time processing complaints, maybe they will decide to come to the sensible decision that this is in no way a proper use of telephones.

Hacking Trump: Can we not label web vandalism as 'terrorism', please?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Broken polling system and "terrorism"

"But, I think both he and Trump do/did well only because of their entertainment value"

Nope, Perot did well because the people running against him were utter horses asses. People that voted for the main two parties generally were like "I don't have any choice I have to pick one" even though, no, you don't, you can vote third party or independent. Trump, I have no idea why, I find it impossible to take him seriously, but I don't take the effective 1 party system the US has seriously anyway.*

*My pet theory on why is the broken polling, combined with this dangerous and corrosive view that one is "throwing away" their vote if they vote for who they actually want to be in office, if they aren't in one of the two main parties. (Doubly odd, because these same people who won't vote 3rd party because "they're throwing their vote away, they have no chance of that winning" will have NO qualm voting for a main party candidate that can't possibly win in their district.. like voting democrat in a 70% republican county, or vice-vera) . I've been polled twice -- the first time, I said i was voting 3rd party and the person on the phone admitted they had NO WAY to put that choice into their system, they asked if they could put "undecided". I pointed out, no, I'm not undecided, I'm not choosing either one. The *2nd* time I was polled, the call was like "dial 1 for (some jerk), dial 2 for (some other jerk), dial 3 for undecided, dial 9 for 3rd party", and when I dialed 9 it said "that choice is invalid" and hung up. Needless to say, this then results in polls falsely claiming 100% vote for one of the two main parties or undecided, and then the "throwing the vote away" people feel like they MUST vote for one of those two... I've heard too many people complain "both candidates are assholes" to think they would REALLY vote for them if they weren't forced into thinking they have no choice.

====================

Needless to say, when some of these "anti-terrorism" laws were passed, people said the feds would probably push claiming all kinds of crap that is not terrorism is terrorism in order to abuse this law, since terrorism wasn't defined in these bills. And this is what has been happening... not as quickly as some had feared, but the "terrorism creep" is nevertheless happening relentlessly. Calling some web page vandalism "terrorism" lets the powers that be potentially use all kinds of powers that would be illegal for them to use otherwise, and gets the public into a panic to extend the feds further powers (whether those powers would be useful or not in that specific instance, it then builds precedent to use those powers later.)

Re/code apologizes for Holocaust 'joke' tweet

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Nonsensical and unfunny

Don't get me wrong, I find no contradiction in finding a joke to be in bad taste and still be funny. But not only was this 'joke' tweet in bad taste and unfunny, since Nokia's not (say) an Isreali firm it meets the trifecta by also being nonsensical.

It really seems like something a troll would post rather than someone posting on a company's twitter feed.

UK's first 'DIY DAB' multiplex goes live in Brighton

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Hard to take the "it won't work" guys seriously

I would have found it hard to take the "we looked into software-based DAB, it won't work" people seriously. Due to the "fun" US cellular market, several companies have ended up pursuing software defined radio systems with 100s of channels of capacity for the last 10 or 15 years, so I would assume 6 unidirectional channels would be no sweat.

What fun? Most cell cos in the US picked *either* the CDMA or GSM upgrade path, but a few cellcos ended up running both.

Western Wireless for example bought up a mash of companies in the western deserts throughout the late 1990s, running all available standards (at the time, analog (AMPS), TDMA, CDMA, and GSM). WW ended up being nominally a CDMA carrier, but instead of removing TDMA and GSM and installing CDMA on sites that weren't already CDMA, they installed all 4 systems on almost all sites! They decided 1) They wanted to let everyone keep their existing phone. 2) They had the ONLY coverage in a lot of these markets, so why not get roaming revenue from every carrier? Alltel bought them, then Verizon Wireless bought Alltel... a lot of these sites now have CDMA, EVDO (3G), GSM, UMTS (but no HSPA), and LTE. Needless to say they pursued (and started using) SDR at least 10 years ago, they didn't want to have to run 5 racks of almost-totally-seperate hardware.

TalkTalk customers demand opt-out fix for telco's DNS ad-jacking tactics

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Mediacom and CenturyLink do this

The joys of this city... the cable and DSL provider both disallow 3rd party ISPs on their systems, running as a near-duopoly in the city (other choices are cellular data, which usually is stupidly expensive like $80 for 5GB cap, and satellite internet, which due to the duopolies absurd pricing is actually price-competitive with their offerings.). BOTH hijack DNS!

Mediacom (cable co. and first member of the ISP duopoly here) not only runs DNS servers that violate internet standards, they would hijack *3rd party* DNS and redirect NX to a garbage domain. (No, the results were NEVER useful -- they resemble what you see on one of those "this domain has expired" pages with a bunch of nosense ad links thrown about, except with Mediacom logos strewn about.) You used to be able to disable it, just to find it re-enabled at random intervals. The disable does now seem to stick (I don't know if they still hijack 3rd-party DNS since I've disabled it.)

CenturyLink (the DSL provider and other member of the ISP duopoly here) ALSO runs an invallid DNS. Luckily using 3rd-party DNS completely evades theirs.

James Woods demands $10m from Twitter troll for 'coke addict' claim

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge
Devil

"Ask all those who have been bullied to death (literally, via suicide, ironcially on Twitter too), does libel exist?"

Yes it sure does! Not my problem that people don't know their legal options. One person where I work was commenting how some debt collector kept calling even after she told them they had the wrong number -- I was like "That's great news, that's $4,000 per call once you told them this!" She had no idea there were laws regulating the conduct of debt collectors. Same thing with libel. Of course, if someone is being taunted online for stuff that is true, it's not libel.

Anyway... with that dispatched of.

First, $10,000,000 sounds like ridiculous damages. Of course, this is California, who knows who's responsible -- if it turns out the responsible party has $100,000,000 then trying to sue them for like $1,000 would have been a joke and not affected their behavior in the least. Generally, they could have the option to find the "John Does" are not wealthy and lower the damages they seek, but not to find out "John Does" ARE wealthy and raise damages later on.

Second, how can this both be libel and an invasion of privacy? Theoretically (I'm not claiming which is true!!!) If it's libel, it's made up and doesn't indicate anyone looking into his private life in any way whatsoever. If it's invasion of privacy, then presumably the information is true so it is not libel.

Stop forcing benefits down my throat and give me hard cash, dammit

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Agreed, but...

I agree 100%. The last place I worked (just quit there recently), actually provided about 8 days -- 1.5 business weeks or so -- a year PTO (paid time off). But, that was it -- if you got sick it used PTO; I'm not a sickly person, but this still meant after 8 months I had just 3.5 days of vacation built up.) Honestly, although PTO is nice for keeping your paychecks predictable (important if your budget is tight!) I would have preferred simply being paid when I'm there, and not being paid when I'm not there, but having a little more flexibility in taking time off, and hopefully slightly higher pay. (Disclaimer, this place was awesome otherwise, dot-com-style break room air hockey table, massage chair, and all... free freezer with ice cream sandwhiches and such, free coffee, a weight lifting room, and so on, nice work environment, and plenty of camraderie with nice co-workers and supervisors, and "highers up" who clearly did care about the employees. But we're talking benefits versus straight cash here.)

The problem I'm seeing is, at least here in the US... for a company with PTO like above, they could cut PTO, raise hourly pay by about 25 cents and hour, and still pocket a few cents an hour in savings. But, standard "US corporate culture" would suggest many companies would just (given a chance) cut PTO, and raise pay by 0. The economy here is still in poor shape (despite what the talking heads say), with many low-paying jobs (in real terms, and even lower when inflation-adjusted) replacing the higher paying jobs lost the last 5-10 years.

"I'm still trying figure out how being paid for time off is an "imposition." Doubleplus good, eh?"

His point was, unless you took off *exactly* 5.6 weeks vacation, you have potential time when you could have been vacationing (or sitting around at home) while being paid, and instead you were at work actually working for the pay, leaving potential benefits on he table and losing them. He contends (more or less) that 5.6/52 is 10.7%, so wouldn't people prefer a 10.7% raise? I would (but as I say above, I expect many companies given the chance would cut the vacation but not give even 5% raise let alone 10%.)

Windows 10 marks the end of 'pay once, use forever' software

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Dual-core, 2GB ram*, Win-10 Pro 32-bit, only Edge open with 2 tabs, fan roaring its head off continually, disk light duty cycle > 90%

*Suspect this might be the culprit. Reminiscent of how slow my first Windows-3 machine was. It had 1/1000th of the RAM, 2MB. Nothing really changes."

Did you just install it? I found when I installed 10 into a VM, it burned through alarming amounts of disk I/O and CPU time for quite a while doing whatever (I guess building search indexes, whatever the equivalent is of .NET ngen cache, maybe it installed some updates.) But once it finished doing this it seemed quicker than 7 in the limited testing I gave it. I haven't used it enough to comment on the UI or Edge.

No, Microsoft: Your one-billion Windows 10 goal is just sad ... really sad

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"There's a reason that most (90 per cent!) people happily prefer Windows to Mac OS X, and buy Windows machines. They're comfortable with the experience."

What I've actually heard from some people (buying blank PCs and OEM Windows CD to install on it as opposed to buying it without CD) was they liked Windows but then would go right on to "Don't you hate it when your computer " (litany of problems that Windows gets but OSX and Linux distros don't.. viruses, spyware, slowdowns as more and more programs are installed or whatever, etc...one dude even complained about how much he "had" to run defrag (he was running it like daily to get that 99% defraged back up to 100. Yeah.)) I will add here, I didn't have these problems when I've used Windows, I do think most of these guys' problems is shall we say operator error. But still, I would say it's more familiarity (afraid anything else will be too radically different) than comfort, the experience they described sounded downright harrowing to me.

Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I think it's the store

I think the reasons for free Windows 10 are probably simple and 2-fold:

1) They have not had the success with the Windows Store they wanted. They have often proven over the years to be QUITE stubborn, when something doesn't sell how they'd hoped, they'll just try again and again and again (maybe not again after that, but at least 2 or 3 times) to build sales. Even past the point where it doesn't make economic sense (see Surface tablets for another example -- and yes, to me it's a tablet with a bad add-on keyboard, not whatever they want people to call it.) I could fully see them releasing Windows 10 for free JUST to try to show they can increase Windows Store sales.

2) Even when they've wanted to increase usage of some product or service, in no case have they been wiling to add support for any older version of Windows to do so. Could they port WinRT and the Store to Windows 7? I'm sure they could, and it probably would even be pretty easy... it probably all just runs on top of a .NET runtime. But they will not do so.

To summarize, I think they want to increase Windows Store sales at any cost, except the cost of porting it back to Windows 7.

How much of one year's Californian energy use would wipe out the drought?

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

It's dafter than that

"*Strangely perhaps, the US government prefers to use British Thermal Units. In Britain, by contrast, the kilowatt-hour and its derivatives are favoured."

It's dafter than that. My power bill is in kwh (kilowatt-hours). Heating is measured in BTUs (and the bill is in something unholy like cubic feet of natural gas...). Air conditioning capacity is measured in tons, with a typical house with central air conditioning having 1.5-3 tons of air conditioning. 1 "ton" is based on the amount of cooling per hour 1 ton of ice will produce if it melts uniformly over a 24-hour period, 11-something thousand BTUs/hour, which is rounded to 12,000 BTUs/hour. Metric or American ton? I have no idea (I won't call it a "British" ton since you have the common sense to use metric in Britain these days...)

UK.gov wants to stop teenagers looking at tits online. No, really

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"Voluntary"

Don't most sites already voluntarily want credit card "verification" to get access to the pron? Then "verify" the card to the tune of $5-$50 a month?

Bloke cuffed for blowing low-flying camera drone to bits with shotgun

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Within his rights

I would say he's 100% within his rights. The drone's worth $1,800? Welp, maybe you should not be tresspassing your expensive drone onto other peoples property. I don't have a gun, but fully intend to net and keep any unauthorized drones that fly onto my property (if I'm in a good mood and can see the operator, I'd warn them ONCE to not keep flying it on my property.). As for difficulty of hitting the drone - one commenter commented he used birdshot (which is safe when it falls back out of the sky, unlike a slug or shell.) This also would make it much easier to hit a drone than with a shell -- the shell has one chance to hit or miss the drone, the buckshot or birdshot both scatter, and I assume it'd only take one or two flecks of shot to disable the drone.

Microsoft admits critical .NET Framework 4.6 bug, issues workaround

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Optimization error

"Take any medium size (or larger) application written in C/C++ and compile it with gcc -o3. Result: Broken application.

.NET has a *far* better history, even including this bug, of having a functional optimising compiler."

This is a ad hominem. You compare .NET's default, out-of-the-box behavior with a compiler option that is generally not recommended (I actually can't find this recommendation any more, but it used to be -O2 was the highest recommended, with -O3 being a "it'll be faster but make sure it actually works" optimization.) That said, .NET does have a pretty good track record regarding compiler errors and such. This does point to the big concern of Windows 10 autoupdates... you could read about a broken update, decide "Well, good thing I read about it, I'll not install that one", then realize "Whoops, I have no way to disable automatic updates!". Nice.

Don't touch this! Seven types of open source to dance away from

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Criteria

When I start using a project, I will also simply look to see if it's been out for a while, and appears to be well developed. I look to see if the docs are good enough to figure out how to use it, and try it to see if it does what I want it to do. Some projects are pretty inactive because they are mature -- look at some of the GNU utils, they are simple, focused utilities that already do everything they claim to do, and have had the bugs worked out for years. Of course, if you are planning to use these utilities online (like to provide some service to the internet at large), you better make sure that project is active enough so if security holes pop up they are dealt with.

The Lazarus Effect: Saved by Linux and Cash Converters

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

" spec-for-spec pricing higher than new (if such low spec is even possible to buy any more)"

Well, yeah. The machine usually gets down to like $400 and just disappears off the market, even though one with 1/4 the spec or less is perfectly usable. So, to get 1/4 the spec for 1/4 the cost, you have to buy used.

Kali? Interesting choice. I just played with it recently, and although it's an unusual choice as a general-purpose distro (since it's a security/hacking distro), it *is* Debian-based so you can install any normal apps that it's missing out of the box.

How to waste two years and lose $415m: Cisco's now-dead Whiptail deal

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Hardware problems

Two points... first, hardware. It sounds like Cisco's biggest problem here was the "you must use this NetApp off-the-shelf" mentality. If the engineers say "the hardware is inadequate", and after a month or so (to come up with creative solutions to cut resource requirements) they *still* say "the hardware is inadequate", then guess what? The hardware is inadequate. Maybe they would have run into problems anyway, but it certainly helps to have a system that you think will actually run your software adequately.

Second point... re "..the names alone tell everything." The names alone tell nothing. Management problems apply to all nationalities.

AT&T swallows DirecTV in $50 BEELLION biz gulp – moments after FCC OK

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Not gonna do it.

"I see nothing about them not being allowed to kill off the satellite business end. Where a lot of Direct TV's customers are (same for Dish TV) the cable/broadband service is crap if it's even available."

I can't see them doing this though. AT&T's working for AT&T's interests, not the entire cable industry. AT&T cable does not cover a large portion of the US, while DirecTV covers the whole thing. They'd gain a few AT&T cable customers while losing many more customers who have no AT&T services (except maybe wireless) available.

Want longer battery life? Avoid the New York Times and The Grauniad

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Bad javascript

Yeah, I have not run powertop to measure my actual power use, but I will go to some sites and firefox and Xorg are just chugging CPU time with nothing visible happening onscreen. I speculate some banner ads may have horribly written Javascript that (despite no actual animation) redraw the banner either as fast as possible or at some high frame rate. I'm interested into looking into if firefox has any options to throttle this naught javascript.

All smartwatches are insecure, reveals unsurprising research

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yes.

"They don't report on which devices they tested. They also don't even say if they tested the iWatch, just that they tested "10 of the top smartwatches" not the top 10 smartwatches. Did they test the Pebble? Did they test any of the Swiss Chronograph with smart functionality?"

How many "smartwatches" are on the market anyway? I would assume "Did they test xyz?" the answer would be yes, just because I didn't think there'd even be mroe than 10 models.... That said this whole "responsible disclosure" thing of not even naming and shaming vendors is crap IMHO.

Dough! Dominos didn't register dominos.pizza – and now it's pizz'd off

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"At the same time, however, the new gTLDs risk becoming permanently associated with risk and cybersquatting in the corporate business mindset: something that no one in the domain name industry wants."

I don't know about that, they of course would say this. But, on the other hand, the few ads I've seen for any new domain are like "Register your name now so someone else doesn't beat you too it!" (with the clear implication being a squatter getting the domain, not a competing business.)

Anyway, my guess would be they were just not aware of the .pizza domain? I don't know. I didn't know there was a .pizza domain. The silliness of Dominos pretending they aren't a pizza place is true, so that's also a possibility I guess, although in that case there'd be no reason for them to seek it out now either.

Disaster-gawping cam drones to be blasted out of the sky in California

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Cause and effect

"They already do this with cars. An old friend of mine who's a firefighter has plenty of stories about people who park their cars in front of fire hydrants. Firefighters will ram them out of the way with their trucks"...

That's what I wondered.... fire trucks are permitted to ram cars out of the way that are illegally parked or blocking the intersection, so why wouldn't the feel free to drop that water right on the drones? Well, anyway, if they (for whatever reason) don't, this will make it clear it's permitted.

Re: "Just Paint it Black (Liar and Racist!)"

First, I do think it's just a tad tasteless to suggest painting the drones black. I have to admit to having a "bad pun" kind of groan when I saw it though 8-)

All joking aside, I'm white and I've personally black people pulled over quite disproportionately. In addition, I've noticed when someone white is pulled over (even if the car is full of people), single police car as is usual for a traffic stop. Someone black pulled over (even if they're in the car by itself), the 2nd and 3rd police cars usually show up before the first policeman's possibly had any chance to even glance in the car and determine there's anything worth calling backup for.

And, no, people who loots, riots, etc. should not be shot... they should be arrested. Resisting arrest *IS* stupid but does not warrant getting shot (unless the person resists arrest by going for their own gun). The police have tazers to take care of anyone that is too "lively" to arrest otherwise.

For you guys in UK who wonder where these police problems in the US have come from., it's from people like this guy who think "criminals should be shot", combined with people who (while *usually* claiming to not be racist) would think one person is rioting, while another person performing exactly the same actions is protesting. (There's also some degree of hype and hyperbole... a few people have been shot while pulling out their handgun to fire at the police, and if they are black it's rolled out as some example of racism... in those cases, it's definitely not.)

The US taxman thinks Microsoft owes billions. Prove it, says Microsoft

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Common law

"I saw a documentary recently, the main proposition of which was that there is no actual written US law or statute that compels US citizens to pay "income tax" i.e. a tax levvied by a government on the exchange of their personal labour, for reward; and that the only tax that was legally required to be paid on "labour exchange" was corporation tax?"

The 16th ammendment allows the feds to collect income tax. I have no idea if there's any specific law authorizing the IRS etc to actually do so. If not, what can I say? The US doesn't usually use common law, but this is a case where the IRS will come down hard if you don't pay taxes you owe, and judges go along with it, so it's safe to say it's common law anyway if there's no specific statue to point to.

The practical matter is, employers withold money and give it to the tax man, so in many cases if someone doesn't file, the IRS will be perfectly happy with that, because you'd either owe 0 or the IRS would actually owe you a refund anyway.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Can't have it both ways

Regarding corporations as people, there's two problems here...

First, in the US, corporations indeed are considered people. From Wikipedia:

"This rule of construction is specified in 1 U.S.C. §1 (United States Code),[15] which states:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise--

the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;"

Second, the economic point (that it's being double taxed)... actually, this is a good point, for companies that are paying out a large amount of ther income as wages, salaries and other services that are already taxed, taxing it at a similar rate would amount to double taxation. The problem, though, is the likes of Microsoft and Apple avoiding paying tax on money that is pure profit, simply being banked away and not spent on any salaries, wages, or goods and services whatsoever.

As for the 15% flat tax (except your pet exemption of mortgages)... well, one of the games corporations play *now* is to shuffle around profits, losses, and where income goes. They would simply make sure their income comes in overseas, and you'd get 15% of jack.

As for Microsoft's situation, they used some kind of tax shelter or other that the IRS then decided was invalid. I would suppose both Microsoft is probably being difficult with the IRS, and the IRS are probably being jerks about it. The IRS do tend to be jerks if you are "difficult" with them.

Dumb MongoDB admins spew 600 TERABYTES of unauthenticated data

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Check your access!

I don't care if you're using MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server (Well, don't actually use this please)... check your access! Can you connect to it from the outside? Then you have a problem!

America's tweaks to weapons trade pact 'will make web less secure'

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I doubt it's accidental

I seriously doubt it was "loosely written" or accidental in any way. The US gov't right now is back on that "Oh, privacy is so inconvenient, the public doesn't need crypto" kick. They attempted in the 1990s to use export regulations as a club and to force crypto that was uselessly weak on the public. So, they've already forgotten how thoroughly this failed (the Clipper chip crypto was broken before it even shipped, and was a bad joke; and the export restrictions just made it so companies that were interested in crypto moved their offices overseas since it could be *imported* into the US, just not exported.)

So, so far the gov't has "nicely asked" Google etc. to quit using ubiquitous encryption (they've said the feds can go f' themselves), are whining about crypto preventing various spying on the public (well good!). So, some technically inept bureaucrat now thinks that if they can hobble security research via export restrictions, that it'll somehow... well, I don't even know what the logic is, I suppose they are unaware that blackhats even exist.

Dead device walking: Apple iPod Touch 6th generation

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Most powerful pocket computer

" most powerful and flexible pocket computer you can buy."

That would be one of the Android phones or tablets, particularly one with a Broadcom wifi chip. No inflexible locked down Apple store limiting what apps you can get, and with the Broadcom wifi chip, it'll even do raw packet capture and packet injection for all that fun wifi hacking.

Ashley Madison invites red-faced cheats to bolt stable door for free

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Wreckless

"This isn't a Hollywood movie and most people aren't cosy with Mafia types, so that's all rather a bit far fetched don't you think?"

Very few know gangsters. But, with 37 million customers, it's statistically likely that a few do. Not farfetched at all. And honestly, I think these particular hackers may have it coming to them. Don't get me wrong, it's greasy to use a site like Ashley Madison, but the blackmail these hackers are perpetrating is rather wreckless.

On a side note... 37 million? Really? That seems like rather a lot.

Reg top tip: Don't have the same name as someone else if you use Facebook's Instagram

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

They can damn well answer

"This is undoubtedly true, but of course responding personally, to every single request for help, would cost an absolute fortune."

Yes, because most requests for help are probably pointless and stupid, like "Hey Instagram help me get viruses off my computer" or whatever.. No, I would not respond to those.

But, if they have enough manpower to decide legitimate accounts are "imposters", they can damn well have enough manpower to respond to requests *from the very accounts they disabled*, saying "Hey, I'm a real person."

Americans find fantastic new use for drones – interfering with firefighting

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

"they should have dumped the water anyway...drones be damned."

Agreed 100%. The problem they run into, is they are following FAA rules written assuming any flying vehicle is manned, so they must avoid damage to other vehicles at all costs. You know what, if you're flying a drone over a fire? Fuck it, dump the water on it, wreck that drone. I would also have no objection to them having nets (or some kind of drone tazers or something) or sharpshooters take care of the drones.

It sounds like it's time to bring radio direction finding equipment to these, along with possibly jammers. I'm assuming the owners were not caught but with RDF they'd be caught, and with a jammer the drones would go out of control and crash (there's already a fire there so no harm done I guess), freeing up the airspace within a minute or so.

Reg reader casts call centre spell with a SECRET WORD

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Yep

Yep, Sprint is a distant last place in customer service still in the US. They are well known for having account problems. Sometimes it's in your favor -- you get a service you're not billed for. Sometimes, it's like in the article, they cut off a service. EITHER WAY, it's apparently like pulling teeth to get it fixed (I'm sure very few have tried to get charged extra to pay for services, but apparently the few who have tried have found it just as difficult as getting services turned on after they've been mistakenly turned off.)

GTE doesn't exist any more (part of Verizon). But, a few telcos used to "take over" exchanges from each other back in the day... GTE was apparently so bad, when they would take over a market in California, the tech companies would MOVE to avoid having to deal with GTE!

Ashley Madison hack: Site for people who can't be trusted can't be trusted

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I doubt they'll see a revenue increase

"The hack may lead to a significant revenue increase. Expect and stampede to pay the fee to remove profiles."

A) The hackers presumably already have the data.

B) Per the article, the $19 apparently pays for nothing, they take the $19 then don't do jack to actually remove the data. Which is apparently what went the hacker go ballistic to begin with?

C) This is well past the point where I would expect them to remove information FOR FREE, if they want the SLIGHTEST chance of not having every single customer take them on for a nice big lawsuit. Don't get me wrong, they WILL be sued, but the $19 fee could be "the last straw" for some people (who may not have that much juicy info on there anyway), who would just remove their account to instead join a lawsuit.

On a side note, I agree that the misuse of the word "terrorism" is a travesty (I don't think it was used in the article, but in the comments). Firstly, it minimizes true terrorist acts. Secondly, it's dangerous. The US and UK both have rather poorly written anti-terrorism laws... and the danger is by getting the public used to abusing the term "terrorism" for virtually any crime big or small, investigating speech some politician doesn't agree with, even (in the case of UK) not picking up your dog shit*, that these laws become quite overbearing and fascist when they can just be applied to all and sundry.

*The dog case, I read it in the register several years ago... one of the UK's anti-terrorism laws was used to be able to DNA analyze these dog dukes, get samples from neighborhood dogs, and figure out the responsible party. I assume the dog and owner were then sent to some kind of British Gitmo for terrorism... no, actually, they were fined or whatever for not picking up after their dog. In this case the anti-terrorism law was abused to spend way more money solving this case then they would have been allowed to otherwise.

Ant-Man: Big ideas, small payoff

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Two points

1) As has been pointed out, chriswakey, superhero movies are not sci-fi. I like a good sci-fi movie (*good*, mind...) but superhero movies, I could take it or leave it.

2) I figure liking these movies or not is based on taste (to clarify, I don't mean "bad taste" versus "good taste"). I have a friend who is absolutely obsessed with Avengers movies, and Marvel movies in general. I'm sure he would say Ant-Man is the pinnacle of cinema as every Marvel movie has been. I find the plots to be rather formulaic (some baddies show up, there's lots of fighting and explosions, the bad guys are defeated, usually after wrecking half the city.) So I can't get overly excited about the prospect of another one. I'm not going to go out of my way to see one (i.e. spend any money) but if one's on I won't object.

Feel like you're being herded onto Windows 10? Well, you should

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Automatic updates would be a deal breaker for me

The forced automatic updates would be a deal breaker for me. I know there's too many people who just turn them off then NEVER update... but...

Linux (Ubuntu, and when I ran gentoo, that too), I go ahead and install the updates... but I don't want the system to just install them whenever. Windows, there's been enough updates that just plain break something or other that I don't like the idea of forced updates at all. (Remember, Windows does not have proper package management, you'd have to "roll back" the whole system, you can't just install the non-updated version of some package that has a broken update...) Of course, with Win10, if you had a broken update and roll back, it'll just re-install the same broken update whenever it feels like it.

I also get the distinct impression (from using it in a VM as well as reading about it) that Win10 is being seriously rushed out, and that they may not even see this as a problem. As many bugs as some Windows versions have had on release, it looks like now their attitude is to rush the software out then just dump on tons of patches... giving me the distinct impression that Win10 will be far buggier on release... and if you want something resembling stability (in both senses of the word... lack of crashes etc., and stability in terms of not having things move around and behaviors change...) you are expected to buy some corporate version. Makes me glad I don't use Windows!

Surviving Hurricane Katrina: A sysadmin's epic DR (as in Didn't Realise) odyssey

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

A real disaster

Other than the "have offsite backups, have a backup data center", I think almost all disaster recovery plans are more a matter of trying to keep a data center running in the face of, perhaps an ice storm or wind storm knocking power out for a while. More serious issues than this are simply not usually planned for, and may be impossible to properly plan for (for instance, who would really expect ALL phones *from* an area to fail when you are completely out of the area?)

"his is why all my tech guys have laptops, mobiles with modem tethering, remote access from the laptop, with citrix access from any PC to a remote support VMs as back up."

Wouldn't have worked in this case, 1) The cell sites in the wide area were all down. 2) The device wouldn't have worked anyway. When you got somewhere with a functional cellular network and tried to make a call or data session, the cellular network would check with(I think) the HLR (Home Location Register) from your area to make sure your device is valid and paid up -- and get no reply because the HLR would have been under water by then. Most likely, calls and data sessions would have been physically routed through the switch for your home area, which also was underwater.

" In addition we run dual data centres with key infrastructure duplicated and replicated between sites. "

This would be the key, as long as both data centers weren't in the same city.

"Multiple ISPs and telcos used for network resilience."

Wouldn't have helped in this case. All ISPs and telcos failed.

" Huge UPS with massive generator backup to survive power outages. Every single bit is backed up to tape cross site.'

In this case, sites with generators were unable to get fuel, so it helped them run longer, although if their internet providers had already failed it was a moot point. Backing everything up is of course key to recovery.

OCP supporters hit back over testing claims – but there's dissent in the ranks

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Agree with both

I agree with both... I agree with Cole Crawford's quote (you'll see in the recent article about the OCP testing that I said almost the same thing), that the OCP hardware is designed for clusters or "clouds" where you want to get hardware at the best possible cost, without extra faff that is unnecessary for that kind of cluster... whereas for systems that demand hardware fault tolerance, the "extra faff" provides this and you'll want to pay for it.

On the other hand, I also agree with Barbara Aichinger, even if the base OCP certification does not have her recommendations, perhaps there should be a higher OCP certification available that does. The tests she recommends do sound like a good idea.

I do think characterizing this as an "attack" on OCP or whatever is hyperbole though.

Oxford Uni unearths 800-year-old document to seize domain names

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Rather entertaining

If the site is down by the time you go to look at it, www.royalcollegeireland.co.uk seems to have nearly identical content. (Which, of course, is probably appropriating a real Royal College's name...)

Vincent Ballard (a few posts above) is right, this site is ridiculous. The "Oxford College graduates" starts listing a few graduates and their degrees, then after several graduates, will have like 20 pages of text between each one.. I don't know if it's supposed to be that graduates dissertation or what.

The course descriptions are ridiculous --- one will have a list of courses or general description that looks vaguely like a syllabus... the astrophysics (as Ballard says) just has photos... one with some nonsensical diagram about "white energy" and dark matter, one showing aliens of Mars, Saturn, and Pluto with like owls and monkeys along with greys and such. The hand-drawn electronic diagram was odd to say the least, and didn't seem to have enough components to actually do anything (resistors, 27V worth of 9V batteries, an op amp, a "lamp" and an LED, and a male headphone jack labelled "for colloidal silver"?) The page on "human and poisonous food" is just an anti-meat rant, no description of courses whatsoever. Some pages are a mix, like half the page will resemble what you'd expect from, if not a college then at least a diploma mill, then like mid-page it's like whoever was typing it out lost their train of thought and decided to start talking about something else.

It's really rather nonsensical and mildly entertaining... they don't even seem to be trying to sell anything, insofar as I didn't see anywhere on there to actually sign up for anything or buy anything.

Ditch crappy landlines and start reading Twitter, 999 call centres told

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Done and done.

"Mobile - triangulated - within 500m. With GPS - 10m. Trouble is, no-one thought to put any technology in place to easily send the GPS coords to the emergency centre."

They've done that in the US since the late 1990s. For 911 calls. It relies on some phone firmware (with emergency numbers hard-coded in AFAIK) so it won't do it for texts though.

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

The've got this in Iowa

They've got this in Iowa, at one 911 call center (that's 999 equivalent in the US.) I don't know how much it's been used, but I can see the use of it. Expecting it to REPLACE landlines is stupid, but as a supplement? Sure.

First, people have listed how much trouble there'd be with non-understandable texts. True, I have a physical keyboard on my phone, but the onscreen ones are (IMHO) utter crap. BUT, you ignore the problem of noise. Three examples that immediately come to mind -- Along the highway, if you crashed or some other emergency arose, it's generally far too noisy to make a voice call (especially with the semis -- lorries -- going along). Second, fire alarm -- I have not seen a single fire alarm where there'd be any chance of being able to get a single word through on a call. Third, parties -- I don't know if people passing out at raves or concerts is really that common, but it'd be easier to text about it than to call.

Of course, people apparently make prank calls to 911 too. They are harshly penalized. So, just make it clear texting 911 as a prank will be penalized and I don't think people will go around doing it just because it's a text or tweet.

Smartphones are ludicrously under-used, so steal their brains

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Good article

I was afraid it was going to suggest making the phone do, like, seti@home or something while I carry it around (which obviously would kill the battery life.) Luckily, not the case. I have to agree with others, though, I'm not going to plug my phone into the washing machine and oven -- they don't need the processing power, and I'd rather keep the phone with me.

But, I in fact (as a test) ran a full Linux desktop -- including OpenOffice -- off a Motorola Droid 2 Global a few years back. I used the remote capability of X over the wifi, since there's no HDMI port on there. This model had a single 1ghz ARM, not the dual or quad >1ghz processors like you'd have now. Nevertheless, not only did it work it was actually snappy! These phones really do have loads of processing power.

Facebook casts a hex with self-referential IPv6

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I'd like some dead beef

I'd put some dead beef in my address, personally. Or c0ffee.

Linux on the desktop is so hot there's now a fight over it

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Inevitable? No.

"Actually you've highlighted the problem yourself. There are a myriad of Linux distros and on top of this a myriad of desktops. Imagine the following scenario, Bob is talking to Fred in the pub who is having an issue and he doesn't understand how to change his screen resolution for the new monitor he's purchased. Bob says don't worry mate I'll pop over and show you how. The trouble is Bob is running Ubuntu and Fred is running Mint. (Try not to be a pedant and point out that Mint runs on Ubuntu.)"

OK, Bob then come's over to "WindowsFred's" house, and says "Sure I know how to change your screen resolution." But he's done it in Windows 7, and "WindowsFred" is running 8, 8.1, 10, XP, or some version of Windows Server, all of which have put this in slightly different places. Just saying, when it comes to an OS debate, people will point out the different Linux distros as a negative, then conveniently pretend all Windows installs are identical.

I really don't know if Linux will become big on the desktop or not, but it seems like sooner or later Microsoft will make enough mis-steps that things will change; I guess we'll see how Windows 10 does.

Before you think it's inevitable that things will never change, take a look at the early 1980s -- you had CP/M systems for businesses and home PCs (Apple II, Atari, etc.). CP/M-86 (a port of CP/M from the Zilog Z80 CPU to Intel 8088/8086) was out, and there was no reason to think it wouldn't dominate on Intel-based systems. The very issue of Byte that reviewed the IBM PC had a Digital Research CP/M-86 ad with a guy in a bad leisure suit pointing to a chart showing the millions of units they'd ship over the next several years. Well, those millions of sales never happened, since IBM went with IBM PC-DOS/MS-DOS.

Open Compute Project testing is a 'complete and total joke'

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I question...

I'm not sure what Goldman Sachs etc. need. I would HOPE they would value full reliability... BUT, I remember hearing years ago about the high frequency trading systems they employ beginning to use significantly overclocked CPUs -- the goal seemed to simply be raw speed, to be faster than the other HFT competitors, rather than any view toward reliability. (After all, when these systems HAVE malfunctioned and lost them money, for no reason I can determine the stock exchange has obligingly rolled back their trades for them.)

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

I don't think these guys understand...

I don't think these guys understand what this cert is for. If your "cloud" is servers running VMs, you would likely want enterprise reliability. If you are running software that cannot be checkpointed well (so failure is serious, rather than just resuming off some checkpoint), you'd want reliability.

This is not for that kind of software. This is for the Google and Facebook type of "cloud", which assumes failures WILL happen -- the software performs data integrity checks are performed, data is stored at least in duplicate, and it tolerates a system failing, resuming whatever work it was doing on another system. In this case, I would not want to spend on enterprise reliability features.

UK TV is getting worse as younglings shun the BBC et al, says Ofcom

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Well yeah..

Well, yeah, I've seen people watching FAR less TV here in the US than they would have 10 years ago. Several factors (which may or may not apply in UK):

1) Cost. Cable that went up from $35.95 to about $5 a month about 15 years ago, is up to $80 a month or so now. DirecTV costs somewhat less, and Dish network less than that (both satellite dish services) but still a good chunk of change each month. OTA (over the air), if you have good TV reception you can get "enough" channels (compared to before with analog) that many people have dropped cable or dish but since there are fewer channels to choose from, simply watch less TV.

2) Excessive advertising. One show I've seen is about 17 minutes long -- that is 13 minutes of ads. Who the hell is going to watch that many ads, that's almost 50% ads!!! I watch some TV, but NEVER live -- DVR recorded or downloads only.

3) Simply so many hours in the day. First, people do spend far longer online, so they won't be watching TV when they are online. Second, with the poor economy I've been seeing people work 2 jobs who used to work 1, putting in extra hours if they can. Going back to the cost factor, the average wage in the US is lower than it was a few years ago (not even counting inflation), so people would rather spend time online and read, if they have the free time even for that.

As for money spent on shows -- I just don't see the money spent on shows as a factor. If less money means fewer hours of programming, that is one thing. But, look, they must have spent about a buck fifty on some of those classic episodes of Doctor Who -- man the special effects were... something... -- but they were good to watch. On the flip side, I've seen movies and shows that they spent a fortune on the special effects, but the they SUCKED.

Of course, the big fad (in the US) is this endless collection of reality shows, most of which are virtually unwatchable but cost almost nothing to make. The thing is, though, good writing and good plot just don't cost a fortune, but a lot of shows now blow budget on sets and locales, and other extraneous things (there's a lot of wiggle room in special effects between "1970s Doctor Who" and "state of the art that costs a fortune" for example.)

Did a SUPER RARE Sony-Nintendo PlayStation prototype just pop up online? Possibly, maybe

Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

Somebody's going to be rich...

Assuming this is not a fake, looks like someone's going to get a very nice pay day. This seems like just the kind of thing someone will pay big, big bucks for. Lucky! 8-)