A timeline of the unconstitutional “Amazon Tax” in Illinois

Today marks one year since Illinois Circuit Court Judge Robert Lopez Cepero ruled that HB 3659, Public Act 96-1544, was unconstitutional. Affiliates within the State of Illinois were cut off by most companies such as Amazon and eBay after the bill was signed into law. As a result, Illinois entered a lose-lose-lose situation by reducing taxable income of its citizens, forcing businesses like FatWallet to leave the state, and gaining no further sales tax revenue. From many conversations that I have had, confusion and denial of the Use Tax (Line 23 currently) on the IL-1040 has also led to many people continuing to pay no sales tax on Internet purchases in their annual income tax filing.

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How do you keep track of dozens of screws during a hardware replacement?

At a previous employer, I was an HP certified technician. It gave us faster access to hardware replacements and a good rate for reimbursement to compensate for me performing the labor. It was pretty much an all-positive experience but performing the hardware replacements could vary from an easy two second process to a more complicated motherboard replacement in a laptop. It’s still not that difficult but it was laborious to keep track of all the screws that have to come out to get down to the hardware. I think the record I encountered was 70+ screws in one laptop that had to be completely disassembled.

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Exablox aims to simplify storage

Exablox came out of stealth startup yesterday at Storage Field Day and detailed their storage solution. From my understanding of the company and their product, they wish to bring an enterprise-grade storage appliance to market that is usable for all businesses, not just those with storage engineers. They want to provide a solution that is not too costly, too complex, nor too time consuming.

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Sync and send large files and folders across devices without the cloud with BitTorrent Sync

Being able to send large files from one computer to another has been a problem without a perfect solution for a while. The prevalence of broadband did not solve the problem but only made it more noticeable. For smaller files, you can send them as an attachment. For larger files, you can involve a third party like Dropbox or a file sharing locker to upload the file and send your target a link to the file. Even that can be tedious and make you wary of the third party’s security. When the issue was recently brought up in a thread of a forum I frequent, the group seemed to have decided that setting up an FTP server on your computer and giving the target the credentials to access it was the best solution available at the time.

BitTorrent has a different idea. The company introduced BitTorrent Sync. It is now available in Alpha to everybody.

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Security reports released from Microsoft, Symantec, and others

Microsoft, Symantec, Verizon, and Trend Micro have all released security reports recently. There must have been enough time since the last quarter ended or something else coordinating them.

The reports cover topics like data breaches, vulnerabilities, exploits, hacktivism, malware, and more.

If you are a security-minded individual, give these a read through to learn about the latest trends in information security.

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Is a notepad a secure place to keep your passwords? Password Minder thought so

One that’s going around the web lately is poking fun at the Internet Password Minder infomercial. Infomercials are hardly known for their quality production and fair representation of their product but for this, even the concept is flawed.

The infomercial states how problematic passwords can be and suggests their product, essentially a notepad with labeled lines for user name, password, notes, and URL, as the ultimate cure.

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Disk versus Disc

I have noted to myself before that the spelling difference between ‘disk’ and ‘disc’ is problematic. At the time, I was not able to find any discernible difference in meaning, just personal preference.
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Microbatteries presented from the University of Illinois

The portable electronics revolution is riding on the miniaturization of electronics (chips and other components) but it also requires batteries to power these devices. Batteries have been falling behind while other components are innovating and optimizing to become smaller and increase performance.

News out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this week announced microbatteries. “The new microbatteries out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.”

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