I'm pretty sure I recall reading that most of Lizard Squad's botnet, the one used to attack PSN and XBL, is comprised of rooted routers.

Thanks, that explains everything nicely.

We had that in the US for awhile. I remember when my city was serviced by Time Warner Cable and their RoadRunner internet service. At one point, Time Warner was forced to offer competitors the ability to sell cable modem service. Earthlink and AOL entered the market. As a RoadRunner customer, I could fire up a sniffer and see all the .earthlink.net and .aolbroadband.com ARP traffic flying past; all three vendors were sharing the same coax, and it was working just fine. I don't recall quite what happened, but that arrangement didn't last very long, I don't think a year had transpired before ELN and AOL were booted back off the pipes.

Is there a preference or a killbit to block McAfee from hitching a ride? Java's installer lets you set a registry key to suppress the Ask.com toolbar offer from appearing, would be nice to see something similar for Flash.

The first thing that comes to my mind is "charm bracelet," telling me that Windows is now the preferred OS of 10 year old girls. It's still missing the Hello Kitty Explorer, maybe that'll show up in a later preview.

When? The CIA had insect sized drones in the 1970s. They "terminated the program," yeah right; they've probably progressed to fully functional ladybug sized models by now.

Sure they do, it's just full of negative connotations. To the average American, DNA is the stuff in blood, saliva, semen, hair, and fingernails that lets the police identify and catch criminals. And when you ask them if DNA should be in food, that's where their mind goes; of course there should be warning labels on food that might have somebody's blood or saliva in it. I would bet money that a majority of respondents to the survey assumed that "DNA" equals "human DNA."

So he made bomb threats and swatted someone? Fucktard trifecta is in play.

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Links posted to reddit mostly come from elsewhere, too. There are vast swaths of original content, but that site remains a news/link aggregator at its core, just like Slashdot.

One of Slashdot's biggest problems IMO is a lack of timeliness. By the time something hits the front page here, it's often old news; not just by an hour but by several days. News has become increasingly social and people want to discuss everything, but attention spans are growing shorter, which does not bode well for a site consisting mostly of stale stories. I know that by the time I see a story here, I've often commented about it (and exhausted my mental tolerance for debate on the subject) somewhere else. Today was actually pretty decent with the stories about FBI fishing expeditions and police spy radars being showcased while the news was still topical.

I confess, I don't ever go to the firehose and vote on whether or not stories are any good. If the editors are relying on readers to push stories to some greenlight threshold then I guess I'll share in the blame.

That horse has already left the barn, they even poked fun at Google's internal setup with a doodle. There was no enormous shitstorm. Google responded by encrypting their internal traffic (or announcing that they did, anyway) and life went on. Millions upon millions of Americans simply don't care, and millions more actually want the government reading everyone's email because they think it protects us from them ay-rab turrists. Until the surveillance apparatus somehow fucks up football or The Voice or Pawn Stars, nobody's going to give a shit.

You'd have a decent chance of involuntary commitment to a psychiatric hospital.

I am not afraid of terrorists. I am not afraid of religious extremists. I am not afraid of murderers, rapists, drug dealers, drug addicts, carjackers, burglars, home invaders, "active shooters," or copyright violators. No, the biggest threat to my freedom comes from my own government, and that makes me sad.

This drives me crazy. It's not the law here but it's become custom, I suppose due to helicopter parenting. I live near a school bus stop and every morning there are a dozen or more vehicles crowding around that corner. They're creating traffic hazards trying to park amongst each other, with doors opening at random as kids decide they want to go talk to their friend in another car, etc. This isn't just in the freezing cold or the pouring rain, it's every day.

What's the point of having the school bus at all? The parents obviously have the time to drive their kids a block and a half to the bus stop and then sit there waiting for half an hour until the bus shows up. The school itself is less than 15 minutes away, just drive them there.

Yes, Google (or Bing) for bing rewards bot. You, too, can raise your utility bill while earning a whopping $5 worth of credits per month to apply to your XBox Live account. Don't quit your day job just yet.