GLENN’S SHOWNOTES

Apple, Facebook pay women to freeze eggs

The two tech giants are apparently prepared to shell out to pay for egg freezing procedures, with the idea that women can progress their careers without having to worry about declining fertility.

Facebook has already begun offering the “perk”, according to NBC, while Apple will be making it available from the new year.

“We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families,” the company told the BBC

For female employees at Facebook and Apple, the answer is around US$20,000, according to NBC news.

Facebook gives female employees US$4,000 in “baby cash” to spend as they wish, while Apple offers adoption support and up to US$15,000 for fertility treatments.

Emma Rosenblum, editor of the Etc. work-life section of Bloomberg Business Week, said many women describe freezing their eggs as an “empowering” experience.

Vodafone gives away free international calls

Vodafone is offering unlimited international calls to its customers this weekend to commemorate its 21st anniversary in Australia.

The telco’s customers are able to call any landline or mobile phone in USA, China, UK, India, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and New Zealand for no cost between 00:01am Saturday 18 October and 11:59pm Sunday 19 October.

“There is no limit to the number or length of the calls,” said Vodafone in a statement, although a fair use policy does apply.

The offer is available to all existing customers or anyone who joins the telco on or before Sunday. Prepaid customers who don’t have international calling included in their normal service can still make free calls to the 10 designated countries over the weekend.

Apple overtakes Asus in top five best-selling PC brands

Global PC sales in the third quarter totaled over 78.5 million units, a decline of 1.7 percent from the year-ago quarter, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

5. Apple

Apple hopped onto the top five list over Asus by selling 4.982 million units in the third quarter, for a market share of 6.3 percent.

4. Acer

Acer notched 11.4 percent year-over-year growth, selling over 6.6 million units worldwide, for a market share of 8.4 percent in the third quarter.

3. Dell

Dell sold 10.4 million units worldwide during the third quarter, up 9.7 percent from the year-ago period and good for a 13.3 percent stake in the market.

2. HP

Hewlett-Packard sold over 14.7 million units worldwide during the third quarter, for a market share of 18.8 percent. The company’s quarterly sales represented a 5.1 percent increase from a year earlier.

1. Lenovo

Lenovo continues to be the top PC vendor in the world. It had a market share of 20 percent in the third quarter and sold over 15.7 million units, up 11.2 percent from a year earlier.

iPad Air 2 expected at Apple event this week

A report from 9to5Mac suggested Apple is working on iMacs with Retina displays, noting the Yosemite beta includes references to resolutions up to 6400×3600.

The iPad Air 2, meanwhile, is expected to come with an anti-reflective coating.

A report from Re/code last week suggested this event will be less glitzy than the iPhone 6 launch, which included a performance by U2. There will be an event in San Francisco as well as a European one in Berlin, held at the Apple Store on Kurfurstendamm

Microsoft CEO apologises over women pay gaffe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8KN3-0ZPH0

At the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Phoenix on Thursday US time, Nadella said in a fireside-chat style discussion that women shouldn’t seek raises. He said women who don’t “lean in” throughout their careers will instead find they have an advantage.

“It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. … I think that might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for a raise have because that’s good karma. It will come back,” he said, according to a recording of the event.

“Somebody’s going to know, ‘That’s the kind person that I want to trust. That’s the kind of person I really want to give more responsibility to’… The reality is your best work is not followed with your best rewards.”

Nadella tweeted an apology following the event, saying he was “inarticulate”. Nadella also sent out an email to Microsoft employees in which he said he answered Klawe’s question “completely wrong.”

Women execs are prominent in Microsoft overhaul

Microsoft (yes, I’m aware it’s not in California) seems intent on bucking that trend. To recap, after shuffling the business units, the four women in the top ranks are:

1. Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer.

2. Julie Larson-Green, executive vice president, Devices and Studios.

3. Lisa Brummel, executive vice president, Human Resources

4. Tami Reller, executive vice president, Marketing

Compare that with say, Apple, which is so dominated by white guys in the exec ranks it could be mistaken for a lacrosse team.

Google’s public DNS goes offline

Around 10pm AEST Monday night, users at the Whirlpool forum reported problems with reaching the Google DNS resolvers at the 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and complained of experiencing packet loss.

The outage was confirmed by Yunhong Gu, the team lead of Google’s public DNS, who said the service was off-air for around half an hour at 1100 hours UTC.

Gu did not say what caused the problem, but a source at an Internet provider said traffic to the Google DNS servers took unusual long routes, going via Sydney to the United States, which in turn suggests a configuration change was being rolled out.

Google’s free to use public DNS service is used by a large number of organisations. In March last year, the company boasted that it served replies to 130 billion queries on average, peaking at 150 billion, from more than 70 millon unique IP addresses.

Ireland set to close ‘Double Irish’ tax loophole

Ireland has come under sustained attack from Europe and the United States over the past 18 months for its tax rules that allow multinational companies such as Google and Apple to cut their overseas tax rates to single digits.

Among the most criticised parts of the Irish tax code is the complex corporate structure whereby a multinational can channel untaxed revenues to an Irish subsidiary, which then pays the money to another company registered in Ireland that is tax resident elsewhere — usually in a tax haven such as Bermuda.

This means there is little tax to pay in Ireland. The fact both companies are Irish led to the term “Double Irish”.

Ireland is set to bring in new measures in its budget on Tuesday that would mean all Irish-registered companies would over time automatically be deemed to be tax resident in Ireland, the sources said, bringing Irish law in line with U.S. and British rules.

At risk for Ireland are the 160,000 jobs — or almost one in every 10 workers in the country — who are employed by the more than 1,000 foreign firms that have set up an base in Ireland to benefit from its low 12.5 percent corporate tax rate and flexible, English-speaking workforce.

In last year’s budget, Ireland’s Finance Minister Michael Noonan made it illegal for a company registered in Ireland to have no tax domicile at all, but kept open the loophole that let them nominate any country they liked as their tax residence.

The measures cannot be signed off until the cabinet meets for a final time before the budget is presented at 1330 GMT on Tuesday. Companies already incorporated in Ireland will likely be given a set time to change their accounting structures, while new companies setting up in Ireland must abide by the new rules.

Bono apologises for U2’s iTunes album release

Speaking in a session on Facebook, the star said the move was a “drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity”.

In response to a questioner who told him it was “rude” to impose their music upon everyone, Bono said: “Oops, I’m sorry about that.”

Apple later released a one-click tool enabling iTunes customers to remove it.

The music was made available for free to more than 500 million iTunes customers in 119 countries last month. It has been reported that around 5% of those have downloaded U2’s latest opus.

Bono’s apology comes after rock legend Iggy Pop criticised the band for “giving away music before it can flop, in an effort to stay huge”.

what about win media player? [pic]

Devices being remotely wiped in police custody

All the data on some of the tablets and phones seized as evidence is being wiped out, remotely, while they are in police custody, the BBC has learned.

Cambridgeshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham and Durham police all told BBC News handsets had been remotely “wiped”.

And Dorset police said this had happened to six of the seized devices it had in custody, within one year.

The technology used was designed to allow owners to remove sensitive data from their phones if they are stolen.

“If a device has a signal, in theory it is possible to wipe it remotely,” said Ken Munro, a digital forensics expert with Pen Test Partners.

Romance fraud

A spokeswoman for Dorset police told the BBC: “There were six incidents, but we don’t know how people wiped them.

“We have cases where phones get seized, and they are not necessarily taken from an arrested person – but we don’t know the details of these cases as there is not a reason to keep records of this,” she added.

A spokeswoman for Derbyshire police confirmed that the force had had one incident of a device being remotely wiped while in police custody.

“We can’t share many details about it, but the case concerned romance fraud, and a phone involved with the investigation was remotely wiped,” she said.

Episode 409 – Aussie Tech Heads Shownotes