Where, exactly, do you anticipate wearing them that how they make you look matters? Your argument about Google Glass is somewhat founded. But not Rift. Hell, the whole point of Rift is that if you and the other people in the room are all wearing them, to each other you look like the ripped manly warriors slaying Orcs in the forest rather than a bunch of flabby gamers waiting to cancer from the radon in your parents' basement.

If Random Joe doesn't share it with anybody, they probably don't give a shit. The NSA is perfectly happy to let Random Joe sit around enjoying his porn collection. But when people start working together, they get interested. They care if Random Joe is going to share it with somebody at somepoint. And they're real interested in that. Even if they never decrypt it, they can tell that Random Joe uploaded it, and Random Bob downloaded it. Now, the interesting question is what is the relationship between Random Joe and Random Bob? That connection between those two is valuable information, and you can get it without ever decrypting the actual data.

By making all the writers that they license to use the technology incorporate anti-piracy detection software in the driver? Then use some kind of unlocking scheme so that the hardware will only write when using their drivers? That sounds about right.

Do we know for a fact that it is Yahoo that is in fact driving this change? Maybe it was a strategic decision that has been in the works for some time. Without transparency into the organization, we don't know for sure where it came from.

The other thing to remember is that its fun to scream at corporations about censoring you, but most of the stuff we use is funded by advertising. If the place becomes a pornorific cesspool, their ability to get legitimate companies to advertise there will vanish, and then the thing will likely be gone. It's just like the old free press argument. It applies to YOUR press. If some other paper won't print your letter to the editor, buy a press and start your own paper. Or create your own Tumbler. If your proposed culture is really that much better, people will move.

Yeah, but how do you know it's a honeypot, and not just a normal 404 situation? If you start excluding every site on the internet that has missing pages in one of its indexes, you aren't going to have a very good data set.

Which is another way of saying "not producing anything useful, until something sufficiently unlikely that it may never happen, happens, and then producing services of immeasurable value". The point is, we're willing to pay them to do something for which there is no guaranteed return on investment. That's a good measure of how much we value life.

That's exactly the point I'm trying to make. A miracle is something that happens against incredible odds. Something that is inexplicable. This event could have gone a variety of different likely ways, and it went in one that was pretty positive. That's good luck, not a miracle.

From Wikipedia:

Going slightly off topic, but still on the topic of the crash, I'm getting sick of hearing how this was a "miracle". It cheapens the word to say so. I would say it was fortunate that it wasn't worse. The plane could have flipped over instead of spinning. The contact with the sea wall could have been worse. There are lots of things left to chance. But, overall, these kind of crashes tend to be pretty survivable these days. Calling it a "miracle" cheapens the amount of effort that goes into preparation for this sort of thing, and also tends to give you this sense that it's not your responsibility to do better.

There's a reason that people can get off the planes in 90 seconds. There's a reason that the fuel doesn't get spread all over the runway in a crash like this. There's a reason that the interior takes longer to catch fire than your sofa would under the same circumstances. It was engineered that way. The plane costs many millions of dollars more than it needs to in order to fly for just these reasons. There were fire trucks and fire fighters just sitting around getting paid doing nothing, just in case something like this happened.This was planning, and the willingness to spend large amounts of money and effort to protect human life. Plus a bit of luck. But not a miracle.

That's the point. If you have low tech, script kiddie type malware, which you found, it means that you were very, very vulnerable to uncommon, highly targeted malware. The stealthy kind that even nuclear physicists don't notice.

If they truly believe that it was the work of a nation-state, there is every reason to think it isn't cleaned up. Stuxnet didn't even reside just in computers. It infected programmable logic controllers attached to centrifuges, and then could re-infect computers on the network after they've been cleaned. If you really believe that Russia, or China has really compromised their network, and you have information that's worth more than a million dollars to them, then you should assume that everything (printers, routers, video-conferencing equipment, everything with a jack, plus the bios of all your computers) may be infected.

People tend to view $170,000 as a lot of money. But it's not. Computers for office workers can easily run under $1000. Hourly labor to clean things may be $50 per hour when you include overhead and benefits. And you're not even sure you got rid of the infection. If you mostly run apps that are resident on hardened servers, use imaging to make it easy to deploy new PCs, and don't have a lot of high end hardware, it may make sense to just replace everything with clean hardware. Honestly, for departments where you do think that there's stuff that sophisticated attackers may want, it may make sense to occasionally do this kind of purge occasionally even if you don't know there's been an attack. Take a look at the Sony Playstation breach for an idea of what getting compromised can cost. It's a hell of a lot more than $170,000.

Now I'm disappointed. When I saw the title, I thought there was gonna be a funny punch line.

At least this one sounds sufficiently evil. "Secured Debt Obligation" sounds like it should be secure. "Credit Default Swap" sounds confusing, and probably not something you would want to mess with ("Why would I want to swap defaults?"). But Dark Pools? That sounds good and evil.

It seems to me that if this works, and you can't get it off, it will probably just get your laptop thrown in a trash bin, or chopped for parts. Mildly satisfying in terms of pissing off your thief, but rather questionable with regard to helping you get your stuff back.

In our city, it depends a lot on how it was stolen. If you left it unattended at a Starbucks and it disappeared, good luck. But if you lost it through a burglary, the cops will often go to the trouble to track it. Same with xBoxes that use Live. Because sometimes when they track one of these, they find an entire garage full of stolen electronics.

Some people mod insightful instead of funny because insightful grants karma, and funny doesn't, IIRC.