So I'm a little rusty on doing shady things on the intertubes which could get me banned ...

For attackers, the whole automated system would cost only $110 a day, per IP address, and would allow them to crack around 63,000 CAPTCHAs in 24 hours from one IP address without being detected and getting banned.

And I would be doing this ... why?

So I can spam Google and Facebook? Really, it's that lucrative that you'd spend $110/day/IP?

I've never even seen a Captcha for Google, and I really have no idea of when you'd see them, or why you'd pay to break them.

Is the interweb so utterly broken that people are paying to get past to spam discussion boards? Oh, hell, what am I saying, of course it is.

You really, really do not want to know. But it will definitely make your eyes water.

i have to say that you're definitely not using the terms "100%" and "brick" in ways that agree with common usage

I've already said it's not technically "bricking", in that an update leaves a device inoperable. This is more like leaving it completely inoperable in some other way.

But this is from Revolv's own damned website:

What happens to my Revolv service?

As of May 15, 2016, Revolv service will no longer be available. The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.

When I say 100%, I mean it in the mathematically exact sense. The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.

Read that again, one more damned time: The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.

That's right, the hub will have ZERO functionality. It is a useless blob, with no function. It is, bricked.

Make absolutely no bones about it, unless you can give me a different fucking definition for this device will no longer function in an way shape or form, and refute the fact that the company themselves say on their own web site The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work, then, please, do fucking tell me in which my usage of "100%" and "brick" fail to agree with common usage.

Unless you reverse engineer the entire infrastructure, reconfigure the hub to use your infrastructure, and build yourself a control mechanism, are you asserting a non-functioning item is still semantically, a functioning item?

Because Revolv themselves says in no uncertain terms that The Revolv app won't open and the hub won't work.

Nada. Zip. Dead. Finito. No more anything.

I'd call that, for all intents and purposes, bricked. Because the device you purchased is essentially a paper weight.

So, please, feel free to provide alternate facts, but don't just fucking claim I'm using the terms wrong, because if you can't offer anything beyond that, I don't give a shit.

and the FBI's top attorney is worried some of the platform's more than 1 billion global users will take advantage of the move to hide their crime- or terrorism-related communications

The problem is user may attempt to take advantage of the move to hide their perfectly legal and private endeavors which in no way break the law.

As usual, FBI General Counsel James Baker and his kind are outright lying, and asserting you do not have a legal right to do things anonymously or without your government knowing, and that many of those people don't give a fuck what the FBI wants because our rights are not defined by assholes who feel we should have no right to privacy if it impedes the ability of government spy on us.

Why, FBI General Counsel James Baker and his entire family need to be sure their entire lives are made public so that we can be assured he is not misusing his office to conduct illegal business.

The short version of this is: too fucking bad, there are legally valid reasons to have encryption, the world isn't subject to this asshole's definition of "valid", and he doesn't get to decide without oversight or process that he is entitled to any of this data.

But like all these modern fascists, he wants the right to see everything we do, and then decide if it's legal.

Fuck that. I think the entire rest of the world should start using real, hardened encryption the US has no access, and send a big "fuck off" and say it's none of your damned business.

Stop pretending that undermining our rights is necessary to protect our rights. Because that's a fucking lie.

You pretty much need to disable it yourself, which means you need to know to do it.

Microsoft still treats auto-run like it's not a terrible idea.

It's actually kind of scary that anybody would keep doing that.

As far as I can see, Windows still excitedly runs anything it sees.

You're not kidding

Of course I'm not kidding.

As much as it sounds like I'm flippantly describing a level of hyper-vigilance and paranoia which sounds absurd, anything less than that is going to sooner or later bite you on the ass.

Everybody keeps saying "stupid users, it's their own fault". And, really, it's increasingly hard to say that.

You literally have to act like a paranoid nut job around incoming emails these days. It's anything but a normal state for humans. People just don't consistently maintain this level of distrust over a long period of time.

The problem is it takes only about a 1-2% success rate to make spam effective. Probably far far less when it's this targeted.

Say you're in an organization of 1000 people ... the security of your network is determined by the 10-20 most gullible people in your organization ... at least 5 of which will be in management. Think about the dumbest 1-2% of your organization, and think "dear god, are we really depending on them for our overall security?"

And, really, "effort" is a relative term when it's a computer doing all the heavy lifting. It's not like someone has to individually type all of those messages.

It clearly works, or it would have stopped on its won by now.

But the more convincing it looks, and the more information is has about you, the more likely people will fall for this.

By the time you're talking about phishing crafted to this level of detail, it has more than enough information in it to make you think "holy crap, this shit looks real".

The problem is the level of paranoia internet safety seems to require would almost be a clinical condition in meatspace ... and that isn't something normal people have.

I mean, it's definitely not a normal state to consider everything anybody says to you to likely to be a conspiracy to defraud you. But increasingly email, and even incoming telephone calls, require a level of paranoia, distrust, and misanthropy as to make you crazy by more normal standards. The world IS full of assholes who ARE out to get you and ARE actively lying to you.

To your average person who just wants some email and access to the intertubes, doing that would require a level of cognitive dissonance which would cause you to never leave your house.

Fortunately, many of us here already exhibit these traits naturally, and already don't leave the house, so we can adjust to it. But for more normal people, it really is a big leap.

I mean, picture trying to get your grandmother to exhibit as much paranoia as avoiding this stuff would require. Next time you went to visit she'd meet you with a shotgun and refuse to let you in.

In the US, the Democrats and those that support them are oppressive of individual rights

Oh, bullshit.

In the US most Republicans want to overturn the right of women to have abortions. In the US the Republicans want to entrench the right of Christians to discriminate, while wanting to ensure they can't be discriminated against.

Both sides of US politics want to control some aspects of individual rights. But don't fucking tell me that the Republicans do not also wish to do things which are oppressive of individual rights.

Because it is so much a steaming pile of delusional bullshit is isn't fucking funny.

From the outside looking in, US Republicans largely to seek exceptionalism for Christian values, and impose those on others. That's not supporting individual rights. That's some asshole saying that "his" individual rights should trump the individual rights of someone else.

That shit may fly in the US where people believe this stupid narrative. But there is no way in hell you can argue that Republicans and the Tea Party are anything BUT advancing the rights of one group at the expense of another.

But, hey, if you want to defend the right to be a racist douchebag who retains the right to discriminate because you feel god has personally given you permission to be an asshole ... then you should be OK with giving the rest of society the ability to say "sorry, we don't serve bigoted assholes here".

If you think you get to discriminate, while being free from being discriminated against, then I'm afraid you really are just acting like your "individual rights" are more important than someone else because your religion makes you special.

And, I'm afraid ISIS and the Taliban think the same bullshit. And don't give us the bullshit that your Democrats are some evil oppressive regime while your own Republicans want to do the same thing on different issues.

Your hypocrisy and bullshit is your own damned problem.

Liberalism is all about centralizing power in a large government structure and keeping a very short leash on all citizens, convservatism on the other hand is about keeping power decentralized and in the hands of the individual and ensuring that nobody can ever be a slave to an authoritarian central regime.

Do you actually know the definition of those words except as they pertain to US politics and how you think they work?

In many places, "conservatism" is the authoritarian central regime. ISIS and the Taliban are "conservative".

And if you think American conservatives around about centralized power, look at it from the perspective of not being a Christian. "Conservative" in the US means "entrenching Christianity as being the highest authority with the ability to control the lives of others according to that".

Sorry, but you are so clueless it isn't funny. And the fact that you think "conservatism" in the US means any of that shit says you have no real understanding of it, just the fiction "conservatives" in the US like to tell themselves.

The people who want to overturn the right of women to have abortions, or entrench the right of religious people to be assholes ... they only are interested in protecting the rights of a specific group of people, but they actually wish to control the rights of others.

Most highly liberal governments are also highly oppressive? You haven't got a fucking clue what that word means.

The US Constitution is the most liberal document you can imagine.

You might assume that people in the most oppressive regimes wouldn't use the Tor anonymity network because of severe restrictions on technology or communication. On the other hand, you might think that people in the most liberal settings would have no immediate need for Tor

People who live in oppressive regimes need anonymity. People who live in free countries know the value of their liberty and anonymity because they see the threats to it.

I'm afraid I don't see this as particularly shocking.

People who live in places like the UK where they've already said "you don't really get privacy or anonymity because we said so" have likely just accepted that as a fact, because they already don't have it.

People who have more freedom, and people who have less freedom, have a much more immediate sense of what they have, stand to lose, or don't have.

Especially since increasingly the governments of those "liberal" countries are trying to assert that, no, you don't get to have privacy and anonymity, because they'd really prefer if they had 100% access to your life.

If the national police forces of most Western countries had their way, we'd all give up these freedoms so that assholes could pretend they're protecting our freedoms.

Sorry, telling me I no longer have those freedoms isn't protecting them. It's the fucking opposite.

Look, we were already over this earlier this week, with the story that lied about them bricking the hubs

The product will 100% stop working as sold. Period.

They don't even dance around it, here is Revolv's FAQ.

"What happens to my Revolv service?

As of May 15, 2016, Revolv service will no longer be available. The Revolve app won't open and the hub won't work"

Sure, it's not technically bricking the device, but they're throwing all functionality away, telling you it won't work, and basically saying you could feel free to replicate the service by writing your own app, server, and re-engineering the protocol to recreate what you have to recreate the functionality.

But it's a completely dishonest thing to claim that article lied about bricking the device.

You will 100% end up with a non-functioning device, and none of the parts to make it work without a considerable amount of engineering going into it. Like, a massive bit of engineering and creation of infrastructure.

This is kind of like Boeing saying they'll no longer support your aircraft, but you're free to go and build your own aircraft maintenance program by reverse engineering the plane you have. It's pretty much bullshit.

The product has neither functionality nor value without the stuff which makes it work, so for all intents and purposes, they really have bricked the damned thing, because it will entirely cease to function as sold to you.

The hub will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING after that date. That's not just remote functionality, that's all of the damned functionality. And that's what Revolv's own FAQ says.

How you can claim that making it 100% useless is any different isn't the same as bricking is beyond me.

Low quality products exist because of low quality consumers.

Bullshit, low quality products exist because of low quality laws.

What you're suggesting is the worst possible case of "caveat emptor" in which consumers are responsible for companies which make shitty products.

That will NEVER SOLVE THE PROBLEM. Consumers don't have perfect knowledge, they may not have any knowledge.

I'm not going to do engineering assessments of every product I buy to take responsibility for the manufacturer not making garbage.

You don't outlaw stupidity, you outlaw companies making garbage products which aren't suitable for the purpose they're actually sold for ... you sure as fuck don't blame the consumer for low quality products.

This is exactly why all those claims about "letting the market fix it" are bullshit, the market doesn't fix this kind of problem, because the market intrinsically assumes some greed, lying asshole can cheat and leave it up to the consumers to discover that.

The market just assumes that a large amount of people with perfect information are making good decisions, which is a complete lie. And that's why the "free market" is utterly incapable of solving this kind of problem.

From the sounds of TFS, the "size of the largest flaw" is the sheer volume of flaws; this router sounds like it's pretty much garbage.

Semantics about which aspect of it is shittiest seems pointless when the whole thing is a steaming pile of a turd of bad security.

Sex dolls, Real Dolls, and various other things tell me people are willing believe that far more than you realize.