After he was arrested and placed in custody is when he stated that he would only give the password to the mayor, not becuase it was a rule or directive but becuase Mayor Newsom was "the only person he felt he could trust".

I haven't followed this case very closely so forgive me if this has been answered elsewhere, but do you know why the mayor didn't just take the password from this guy and then hand it over to the new admins? It doesn't seem like too big a hassle for Mayor Newsom if 20 minutes on the phone would have actually helped the city avoid significant costs and problems.

Mr. Childs could then say any problems with the network from that point on were the mayor's fault for handing over the passwords to those less competent and that would have been the end of it. No huge court case needed.

Soon (now?) they can generate captions of everything heard (or sung) in a video immediately after upload and match the captions against lyrics and transcriptions of copyrighted works or even just search them for specific keywords. Then they can flag those videos as possible copyright violations or even prevent them from being displayed until after being reviewed by someone.

I'm not saying captioning isn't a good idea, only that it can be used for more than just assisting the hard of hearing.

I normally I'd love this sort of thing. I pour over logs in my spare time - for kicks even, but this video just bored me. For nearly half the video this thing never goes beyond "look! people in different countries are active at different times!".

Even the few things that almost start to seem interesting leave you unable to gain any insight because there is just no information. There isn't any useful data to work with.

What this fails to provide us with is what kind of traffic this was in the first place. Any reasonably large site is going to get hit with all kinds of background noise, and so the fact that they found themselves with large amounts of "traffic" from 'nearly every country' doesn't surprise me.

This seems to be nothing more than an example of a very dull and uninformative way to display a large collection something very very common.

Sadly, microsoft doesn't seem to have anything you can do to fix this.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/979352.mspx
It's seems all they advise will only reduce your odds of getting hit (by helping protect against the methods they've seen used to exploit it) and reducing the damage done after IE runs the malicious code on your system.

What they should be suggesting is that people not use IE on the internet (if possible) until this is fixed.

'0 day' exploits are everywhere. What matters to me is that once discovered they are quickly patched or at the very least, a work around that actually prevents exploitation is provided.

I'd be interested to know more about the social engineering aspect of this attack. Was this more of the usual attempts (something that really should have been caught by anyone who knows better than to open random attachments and click links from strangers) or was there something much more involved that allowed the attackers to gain sufficient trust that any one of us would have likely fallen for this. Did the attackers spend months building a strong level of trust with the people at these companies or did someone click an on E-card?

The last time I looked into thunderbird 3 all the mail was no going to be stored in an mbox format and wouldn't be stored in anything close to plain text. That's a deal breaker for me. I love the ability to grep a folder or even the entire inbox. The search in thunderbird has always been lacking but no matter how much the search is improved in thunderbird 3 it can't be good enough to replace the speed and power of what can be done on the command line.

If that's still the case and I had to switch to anything I'd go back to using to fetchmail

"we'd be using our 1200bps modems connecting to the local BBS and swapping email over fido."

exactly what I did in the old days. As long as computers are around, people will find a way to connect them and connect themselves to each other using them. I suspect that while dial up might not be answer people run to these days I could see people setting up wireless networks within their own neighborhoods, and extending them into WANs that cover a good part of their city.

"I don't think they will cut off customers. It would be a huge support hassle for them. We lost connection the other day and they sent out a tech guy the next day. That can't be cheap considering they are all contractors." They shut them down already. This is just a way to cut costs by automating the notification process and giving infected customers a chance to clean up the problems themselves before they spew enough spam that a disconnection is needed. I certainly hope that they disconnect customers who neglect these notices and allow their computers to continue being used for spamming, phishing, etc. until they've re-secured their systems. I've seen ISPs doing this sort of thing via walled gardens with a lot of success, and I hope it catches on.

Can I use that excuse too? I need to evade/cheat/avoid paying my income taxes because "I can't afford to do business here anymore" either.

I'm so tired of this idea that corporations should be able to do things which would fast have me inside a jail cell if I were to try doing them myself. I also have a pretty hard time feeling sorry for giant corporations who make billions in profits each year, considering the number of other advantages, resources, support, and security they have over the rest of us. I think they'll live. Even if companies needed to pay a higher percentage of total income in taxes then most of us, it won't have as great an impact on them then it does for the average guy working a 9-5. The ones that couldn't make it if they had to start paying their "fair" share of the tax burden most likely don't deserve to continue existing anyway.

Games do well enough for now at expressing emotion within the limits of graphics/voice acting/script

What I'd like to see are:

1. controls sensitive and natural enough that your character is able to clearly express how you are feeling with no effort on your part. If it's done well how your character moves and his expression will change without you even realizing it

2. NPCs that then respond to your emotional state at the time.

I sometimes wonder if this hasn't affected me.

I've played a whole lot of adventure games and now every so often I'll see some random discarded object lying around on the ground somewhere and I get the odd feeling that if I picked it up and carried it around eventually I might figure out where I can use it for something.