I had a very weird interaction with spammers a couple months ago, around the time this hack happened.

I was called repeatedly by someone claiming to be Xfinity who wanted me to upgrade services. I called Xfinity back and they told me that nobody from them would call me, and that they hadn't placed the call.

The next time the spammer called, I told them I didn't believe it was Xfinity. They got indignant and told me how much my last bill was, and when I paid it.

I called Xfinity back and was connected with their Security department.

Somebody has had access to their databases for a while.

Another view, that I heard from IBM architects, was that RISC made sense when transistors were expensive (as the article points out, processors requiring multiple chips to implement) but memory bandwidth was comparable to processor speeds. At that point in history, fixed length instructions and fixed length operands fetched by a simpler processor made a lot of sense.

Skip forward a couple decades, and transistors are (essentially) free, so there isn't a huge cost for complexity. Processor speeds (200/250 ps clocks) are much higher than memory speeds. Now variable length instructions and variable length operands, feeding a more complex decode engine, make a lot of sense.

My Mom's Chemo caused a reaction for her. She had to pre-load with antihistamines before every session. Obviously is different for every person, but for some folks it may not be a show-stopper.

Or they'll take a different vaccine. We may end up with a half-dozen or more effective vaccines.

p.s. One of the drugs my Mom took had a warning not to take it if you had a known allergy to hamster ovaries.

If the sensitive data (FERPA related and SSN) had been encrypted, this wouldn't have been an issue. The hackers wouldn't have had any sensitive data to release.

When I left industry to teach, I was issued a laptop. I asked about full-disk encryption (which was required by my employer in industry). That wasn't an option for my university issued laptop.

In the US, there are three levels for salaries. Some locations (like Westchester, NY and Silicon Valley) are paid 10% over the "salary grid". Other locations, like Rochester, MN and Burlington, VT are paid 10% below the grid. The difference wasn't due to cost of living as much as risk of leaving. Hence VT, which had relatively high cost of living compared with some midwestern areas was 10% lower, because IBMers there didn't tend to leave for other companies.

The 10% deltas roughly corresponded to one band (i.e. title or responsibility level). The "salary grid" gives a range of pay for a band. So a Staff Engineer (Band 7) in Silicon Valley would be paid on the same salary table as a Senior Engineer (Band 9) in Vermont or Minnesota.

The end result was that with IBM's geographic dispersal, many departments had people working on the same projects, with the same responsibilities, and the same job title; with salaries as much as 20% different.

My first thought as well.

Maybe what's needed is a law that requires any "abandoned" API for hardware be open sourced. Or perhaps a law that's similar to automobiles, where there's a required period of time that the hardware's cloud data connection must be supported.

Named after the Lone Ranger's horse.

Figured we'd get there. Whistle and the car comes to you.

I think the word you're looking for is Oligarchy. As in "The United States is functionally an Oligarchy."

If the small time players want to have laws favor them, they need to purchase their own representatives and senators. To paraphrase Lawrence Lessig, we have a system of legal and organized corruption. It's called campaign finance and political action committees. Corporations and the wealthy can spend unlimited funds to influence our political system.

A $5000 per plate dinner isn't about supporting a candidate, it's about purchasing access to the candidate, so that you can tell them your point of view. The $100,000 you give to a Super PAC that supports that candidate hangs on their future support of things important to you.

One of my college friends was acquired by IBM and then laid off. She went to work for another company, and IBM acquired that company and laid her off again. Another was acquired (Rational) and quit when IBM started dictating office sizes and furniture types for various "bands" (the word IBM uses to describe your job level.)

I retired and changed careers after half of my department was laid off and a year later it still wasn't clear what our strategy was going to be.

I worked there over 30 years, knew dozens if not over a hundred people who were laid off. Started in 1992/1993 out of necessity, then it became an addiction. Management seemed not to know how to manage the business any other way.

Their "legacy" mainframe systems handles billions of financial transactions every day.

Using Intel/Linux/Windows is very cool, and companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter build out huge data centers using commodity hardware. It's all quite inexpensive and trendy.

The problem is that an individual Google or Facebook transaction has a value of approximately $0.00. If a transaction is lost, the user hits refresh.

On the other hand, transactions involving credit cards and ATMs have real value. That's where systems with redundant power supplies, self-checking processors (if an error is detected a processor will take itself offline and transfer its work to another process), distributed data bases (DB2), hardware based encryption (all data at rest and in motion is encrypted, even memory contents are encrypted), hot-pluggable hard drives (and power supplies and processor cards), and rigid security protocols (good old RACF) come in. They cost millions of dollars, but as an exec once said in a meeting (referring to an IBM mainframe at a major bank) "you practically have to take a fire hose to one of those systems get it to crash."

Except the Chinese. There are a lot of them. In fact, the Chinese government could make Alibaba the preferred (or mandated) cloud provider to Chinese companies.

Item one is something he literally apologized for over 20 years ago. Item two is something that's never been adjudicated. Two people claim to be Apple employee #12. Can't find anything that disputes that Mark Stevens (aka Cringley) actually worked there other than another anonymous coward post (from last week).

He has ruffled a lot of feathers and made a lot of bold predictions, many of them wrong.

The URL in the top post leads to a story about trade talks. Different source, but the material about subsidies.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eetimes.com%2Fdocume...