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A Technical Issue

I don't like Apple products, in general. The reason why I don't like them is because they're overpriced and proprietary. In the case of their iPhones, for example, you can't replace the battery. For that, you have to go to a store (where, naturally, you'll be pushed to upgrade). Now there's another reason, expressed in the words of one Erik Johnson of Lindenhurst, New York:

I think the phone melted my pockets shut and I had to rip my pants off. A couple of people said they could smell my body burning.

Johnson had his iPhone 5c in his pocket on Valentines Day when he bent over to pick up some keys, and the battery exploded. He spend ten days in the burn unit at a local hospital, with second and third-degree burns to his inner thigh.

Tech expert Ronald Gerber says the smallest bit of damage to a phone’s circuit board, or the use of third-party charging devices, can cause the battery to overheat and spew lithium lava.

Johnson used his Apple cable exclusively, but possibly at some point dropped the device. That's unknown. Interestingly, on Saturday evening, my wife's iPhone became very hot, so she took it into the local mall and replaced it. Probably a good move.

Personally, I use an Android phone, and for a couple of reasons: I can easily replace the battery if desired, and when I was phone-shopping, I found a cool little smartphone for forty bucks. Perfect! I'm a fairly aggressive shopper; I look for deals, and I grabbed it.

When the guy went to ring up the sale, he suddenly had to go get his manager. The two of them huddled amongst the phones for several minutes, and subsequently the manager came over and rang up the sale. "You just got the deal of the month," he opined. 

When I asked what he meant, he said that the phone sells for $180 but had been mis-marked, so I was getting it for $40. The sales terminal wanted the $180, so he did his override thing. I love a good deal. Better yet, I signed up for iWireless, which uses Sprint and T-Mobile networks. No contract; you just add airtime. And since I do a lot of shopping at Freddie's, I get iWireless credits. Just for buying the groceries.

So, when it's time to add airtime, I just tell iWireless to add it from the "credits" account. I haven't paid cash for airtime since I got the phone. I love a good deal.

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Amazing. Had To Read An Idaho Paper To Find This.

I've looked, on occasion, for months in an effort to establish exactly how much cash was wasted on Retread's Cover Oregon thing, because the $300 million number bandied about by The Zero and The Portland Tribune wasn't really cutting it. I knew darned well that it had to be far more than we've been told. I knew, for example, that Oregon kicked in some $25 million as well, but finding out finding out the who, what, and how much was turning into a snipe hunt.  But yesterday, The Idaho Statesman broke it down better than anything else I've found:

MONEY SPENT

— $240 million - amount Oregon paid to Oracle for developing both the exchange for individuals and small businesses and for public assistance modernization projects. This was funded in part by a $300 million federal grant. The remainder of the federal grant went for salaries, marketing, communications, community grants and other administrative costs.

—$23 million - additional state money spent on the failed modernization technology project.

—$9.1 million - spent through the end of 2014 to hire hundreds of temporary workers to manually process paper applications.

—$6.6 million - amount Cover Oregon paid Deloitte to assess glitch-filled exchange and provide future options for the state, as well as to transition the state to HealthCare.gov.

—$1 million - amount paid for independent assessment of Cover Oregon project by First Data, and for services of turnaround expert Clyde Hamstreet and his team who took over Cover Oregon's reigns at the height of its failure last spring.

—$1.9 million - attorney's fees for legal fight against Oracle and federal criminal investigation into exchange failure.

---

MONEY STILL TO BE SPENT:

—$30 million - estimated amount Oregon will pay for adapting Kentucky's Medicaid system. The federal government has promised to pay 90 percent of it.

—Unknown - amount Oregon will pay Oracle to host the Medicaid system until December 2015.

—Unknown - amount it will cost Oregon to build a website for small businesses to obtain health coverage for employees.

—Unknown - amount it will cost Oregon to modernize the state's legacy social services computer systems.

—Unknown - additional legal fees for Oregon-Oracle lawsuits and criminal investigation.

As you can see, there are still a number of "unknowns" involved here, that will doubtless run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, $346.1 million has already been blown on it, and taxpayers are on the hook for at least another $30 million, so we can call it $376 million. And counting.

By the time this is all said and done, we're easily looking at total expenditures well north of half a billion dollars for "affordable health care".

At least it's a start; I got some of the answers to the questions that have been nagging at me for a while. It kind of figures that Oregon news media keep tossing around that $300 million figure, when it obviously had to be far more than that. And poking around in the state computer systems is, I discovered, kind of an exercise in futility; certainly, the numbers are in there somewhere, but they're all in different accounts, so you can't get there by running a straightforward series of searches. And unlike reporters, I don't get paid for time spent pawing around in the various databases.

Still, tenacity often pays off; you keep rooting around on a fairly regular basis, and eventually something will turn up. As the old saying goes, "even a blind hog, in a forest of oaks, will uproot the occasional acorn".

What can be said for certain, at this point, is that our former governor - the health-care expert - and his sidekick, Patty McCaig, along with a cast of supporting characters, spent hundreds of millions of dollars (with more to come) for nothing. This is actually worse than the CRC fiasco in terms of millions of dollars wasted.

Destroyed Lerner Documents Discovered

Ditto for the hard drives that were supposedly trashed. Republicans on the House committee seem less than amused:

The IRS belatedly told Congress it may have lost some of Ms. Lerner’s emails after her computer crashed, and asserted that the backup tapes didn’t exist.

But under questioning from Mr. Chaffetz, Mr. Camus said it took him only two weeks to track down the backup tapes, and when he asked the IRS depository for them, the workers there said they’d never been contacted by the agency itself.

Republicans said that was stunning because IRS Commissioner John Koskinen repeatedly assured Congress the emails were irretrievably lost.

“I think they have misled or lied to the committee,” said Rep. John L. Mica, Florida Republican.

Oh my, say it isn't so! Democratics on the committee are grousing that the inquiry has dragged on too long and has cost too much money, , but the Inspector General has now begun a criminal investigation into the coverup.

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FCC Ushers In A New Era In American Lawsuits

It seems unlikely that Comcast and other broadband internet service providers are going to let this Net Neutrality ruling go unchallenged. A number of Republicans seem pretty upset with it as well. Having followed the arguments for and against, it doesn't seem that over the long term it will have the disastrous effect claimed by some opponents; broadband providers will continue to provide slow speeds while jacking up subscription rates, and the FCC ruling imposes no new taxes, fees, nor regulatory paperwork.

FCC issued net neutrality rules back in 2010, but Verizon challenged them and won. This new ruling is much tougher.

The FCC previously passed net neutrality rules in 2010, relying on some of its weaker authority, but the rules were largely overturned after a Verizon lawsuit.

By winning that case, Verizon inadvertently opened itself and all other Internet providers up to even stricter rules. The new rules go beyond the net neutrality rules passed in 2010. And this time around, the FCC is applying the rules equally to fixed and mobile broadband, whereas its 2010 rules went easier on Verizon's wireless subsidiary and other cellular companies.

Want high-speed, low-cost internet? Move to S. Korea.

Retread's First Squeeze Gets Desperate

Cylvia Hayes is asserting her constitutional right against self-incrimination in an attempt to block the release of work-related emails she sent from her personal accounts.

Hayes asserted that right in a lawsuit filed Thursday against The Oregonian/OregonLive in Marion County Circuit Court. She has been under a state order to turn the emails over to the news organization.

Sorry, Cyl - but since you communicated by email with state employees, copies of which are on state servers, they're public records. You kind of out-smarted yourself on this one.

In her complaint, Hayes insists turning over the emails would violate her Fifth Amendment right.

"Ms. Hayes' constitutional rights," the complaint argued, "supersede the Oregon Public Records Law."

Well, they would if you hadn't made them public records, Cyl. If all emails were held strictly on your gmail accounts, you could mount (pun intended) such an argument. But since they're on state servers, you shot yourself. Public records law applies, and if incriminating evidence is in there - as seems to be the case - you lose. Again, Cyl: when you communicate on state systems to state employees, you have no expectation of privacy.

You should have stuck with stroking Retread's ego and telling him how much you love him.

Domino's Unavailable For Comment

Those wacky ISIS guys have taken to Twitter, vowing to invade Rome and throw homosexuals off their "leaning tower of Pizza".

Pizza-pizza!

The Italians haven't exactly reacted in panic-stricken fear:

Manhattan Project Redux

The NSA has its own little Manhattan Project, and like the original, it's designed for attack - not defense.

There are update mechanisms, dozens of plug-ins, a self-destruct function, massive code obfuscation, hundreds of fake websites to serve as command-and-control. One of the NSA’s malware plug-ins can even reprogram your hard drive’s firmware, allowing the implant to survive a complete disk wipe—a feat that’s been demonstrated by computer scientists under laboratory conditions but never before seen in the wild. “The group is unique almost in every aspect of their activities,” Kaspersky concludes. “They use tools that are very complicated and expensive to develop, in order to infect victims, retrieve data, and hide activity in an outstandingly professional way.”

Oh, and by the way: if you have a Lenovo system, it's so thoroughly compromised that your best bet is probably to encase it in concrete and drop it to the bottom of the ocean.

Former Oregon Governor's Email Shows Corruption

Former governor Retread resorted to the Sgt. Schultz argument (I knew nothing, I saw nothing!). Those were outright lies. Not only did he profit from Sativa Hayes' influence-peddling indirectly, their finances were - like some 98% of all live-in lovers - commingled. When ethics issues were brought up, he stonewalled, and then suddenly called for the Ethics Commission to investigate, earlier this year, promising that he and his girlfriend would "cooperate fully". That was yet another lie, as he'd been working behind the scenes to dismantle any such investigation:

For four years, Kitzhaber stated on state financial disclosure forms that Hayes was a member of his household, which would suggest their finances were linked. But at a Jan. 30, 2015, press conference, the governor suddenly said he wasn’t sure that was the case.

Kitzhaber’s decision to begin monthly deposits into Hayes’ account when her contract work lapsed, however, shows money she had been earning from consulting was money the governor didn’t have to spend. Therefore, it appears that Kitzhaber benefited from her contracts.

Kitzhaber’s shifting position on whether Hayes was a member of his household was part of a legal strategy devised by lawyers hired to defend the governor and the first lady against complaints filed with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission.

Kitzhaber and Hayes wanted to establish that neither was dependent on the other for money—a strategy intended to knock down the assertion that Kitzhaber benefited from Hayes’ contracts.

The strategy is spelled out in an email exchange between the governor and Steve Janik, a Portland lawyer representing Kitzhaber and Hayes before the ethics commission.

“As I understand it,” Kitzhaber wrote to Janik on Dec. 22, 2014, “we will make the case that: (1) Cylvia is not a public official, and (2) that she is not a member of my household — and therefore that the OGEC has no jurisdiction in the matter and that the complaints should be dismissed.”

Janik agreed. “We will argue,” the attorney wrote back that same day, “that because Cylvia is not a member of your household, her activities pursuing private income cannot be attributed to you.”

But the email exchange reveals something else: Despite the defense they were mounting, the governor and first lady had no interest in a long fight with the ethics commission.

“We will convey that we are willing to take this all the way and have a strong case for prevailing,” Kitzhaber wrote to Janik on Dec. 22. “But the end game is not actually to have the complaints dismissed but rather to negotiate a stipulated settlement agreement in which we might acknowledge some minor mistakes we may have made and have the matter resolved at the March [2015] meeting. Do I have that right?”

Janik’s answer: “Your summary of the strategy is correct.”

Merry Christmas! Or so he thought. Things were already falling apart, but he thought he had a plan that would keep his girlfriend in the money while admitting only to "minor mistakes". There were no mistakes, and this was anything but minor. It appears that some people didn't understand how this whole email thing works.

NSA: All Your Data Are Belong To Us

Tapping your phones and tracking your internet data was evidently insufficient.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) has infected hard disk firmware with spyware in a campaign valued as highly as Stuxnet that dates back at least 14 years and possibly up to two decades, according to an analysis by Kaspersky Labs.

This isn't a trivial thing to do; those folks have some pretty serious technical chops. Hacking the disk controller firmware is not only really sneaky, it's impossible for any but the most skilled IT wonks to discover. And the spooks managed to do just that on over a dozen of the top drive manufacturers' devices. Western Digital denies any cooperation, and state that they didn't hand over the source code for their controllers; other manufacturers seem to be keeping mum.

What this means: data can be retrieved from the drives even after they've been deleted. You could use military-grade, multiple overwrite software to "wipe" the disk (which takes around a day to accomplish, by the way) and then install a fresh OEM copy of the OS - and the data that you thought were gone could still be recovered.

In point of fact, the Equation Group, as they're referred to, generated much of the code and evasion techniques subsequently deployed in the Stuxnet and Flame malware exploits, as the hex dumps reveal identical lines of code. Note: the embed link takes you to The Register's story, but if you're really wonky, you can find  examples of code dumps at Ars Technica. 

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The "Gig" Economy: Throwback To The 19th Century

Companies like Uber may get a lot of buzz, but they're not innovative; these throwbacks to the late 19th century aren't likely to have an especially long shelf-life because they'll ultimately end up being sued straight out of their high-tech offices.

Not being responsible for employees’ taxes and benefits allows companies like Handy to operate with 20% to 30% less in labor costs than the incumbent competition, leading to eye-popping numbers like Uber’s $40 billion valuation or Instacart’s latest $220 million round of funding. Lose this workforce structure—either by a wave of class-action lawsuits, intervention by regulators, or through the collective action of disgruntled workers—and you lose the gig economy.

"Sharing economy" company Handy, which matches service providers such as house-cleaners to clients, is a case in point: they've raised $42 million in venture capital, but they're facing a class action lawsuit from angry workers that may cost them as much as $600 million. This whole "sharing economy" thing isn't the panacea that its promoters claim; the principals make a lot of cash, as do their lawyers, but the workers get the shaft.