From what I understand Anonymous just attacked Freedom Hosting and the various CP sites on Tor through Tor itself. That only takes knowing the site's .onion address, which were apparently all listed on the Hidden Wiki. It doesn't take much high-tech knowledge to read a URL then DDoS it.

And the disadvantage is that if Anonymous gets names of innocent people on the list by accident, they've given them a death sentence (also all the non-innocents as well). The Zetas' rival gangs will probably kill (or at least try to) everyone on the list. Anon better be damned certain about those names they release, or they're no better than the drug gangs themselves, and will have bloodshed of innocents directly attributable to their actions. (Which will make it easy for the US government, among others, to declare Anonymous a terrorist group and start a serious crackdown.)

Yes and no. If you want to have an account with a large national bank, pretty much all of them have jumped on the "charge a fee for using your debit card" bandwagon already. Regions did it recently, and in a very, very scummy way. They notified customers of the change with our statement for August, which arrived the first week of September, notifying us that the change would be effective in September, and first charged on the October statement. I had less than 2 weeks to get an account setup with another bank (I went with a local credit union, and am much, much happier, also charged much, much less for the privilege). As it was I barely got it done in time, needless to say I'm still pissed, even though I'm no longer a customer (nor will I ever be one again). Other banks have apparently given more of a 30 day notice of the changes, which is more reasonable, but still not exactly allowing for long-range planning. (Personally I think they should have given 90 days notice on the changes, that would give everyone time to change banks without causing problems.)

Given the short notice these banks have been giving on dropping this new charge on people I won't go that far. But anyone not already working on moving to a different bank is one. The only way BofA and the other big greedy banks will possibly learn anything is if customers abandon them in droves, and they lose money due to it.

Frankly it feels like banking is devolving into a pre-1990s state.

I think he was referring to the on-disc content part of Microsoft's policy with that remark. Requiring on-disc parity means that the PS3's Blu-Ray storage advantage is wiped out in favor of the inferior DVD discs the Xbox360 uses. Storage-wise there's a definite inferiority there, and MS appears to be using policies to try to negate this disadvantage. I doubt any of the big publishers are terribly amused by this.

Like the threat of violence stops them? They go out there no knowing they could get the death penalty and yet still do the crimes. The "real hardened criminals" are sociopaths and will not stop doing their crimes just because they may be beaten/shot/killed. Using them as a justification for police violence is akin to using the threat of terrorism to take away our civil liberties.

That's a bit different, California attempted to get really creative and define any California citizens that participate in Amazon's affiliate program as justification for Amazon needing to collect sales tax. The theory being that the person receiving affiliate payments being located in California means that Amazon had a physical presence in California. It's a rather bogus legal argument, once that's unlikely to withstand court challenge anyway and was done solely to target Amazon on behalf of (mainly) Wal-mart. (Wal-mart is leading the campaign to try and get states to pass these types of laws.) It was also a rather predictable outcome, Amazon has done the same thing in every state (except New York, where it's fighting the law) that's passed a similar "Amazon Tax" law. Hell, when Illinois passed their version some businesses and individuals left the state. California legislators should have known the end result would hurt the state, they passed it anyway, so California residents should be royally pissed off at them, not Amazon.

Amazon's stance on this is that for states where they have no physical presence whether the need to collect state taxes is something that should be decided at the federal level. I think that's a fair stance. Amazon does collect sales tax in states where they have a physical presence (with some exceptions, for example Tennessee gave them a deal where they didn't have to in exchange for building some distribution centers there. The new governor's trying to renege on the deal however, which will probably end up hurting Tennessee badly (why would any business want to locate there if they won't honor their agreements?))

Personally I think the whole thing is stupid. Amazon's hurting brick and mortar sales because they're able to offer products much cheaper. Even if I had to pay sales tax when using Amazon I'd still buy stuff there because I'd save money.

There are still better ways to handle it from a PR standpoint. You can blame it on nebulous "increased costs of doing business" for example. Going around and channeling Marie Antoinette with that latte remark was remarkably stupid, and is going to haunt Netflix for some time. Raising prices will always upset your customers, but saying things like that infuriates them.

Netflix is still handling this atrociously from a PR standpoint. If it's due to the studios demanding more money (reports are it'll be considerably more, not a small amount more) then they need to tell their customers that. "Sorry, but licensing costs are going up as we have to renegotiate streaming deals with the various studios so this price increase has been forced on us from outside." Then consumers will direct their anger more at the studios, instead of Netflix. Saying something idiotic about the price increase being "a latte or two" is more or less guaranteed to make the PR situation WORSE. Much, much worse.

Well seeing as the people with those names actually did try to go to Israel to protest, yes, I'd say the people were stupid enough to use their own names in public groups to plot their protest and Israel was able to block them from entering the country. Now that it's happened once however, I don't expect it to work again, at least not as well. Next time Israel (or whatever country) will need actual confirmation from Facebook/etc. to get real identities, and they might not be able to get that information.

And they didn't put them on any kind of general no-fly list, they denied them entry to Israel, which is well within Israel's rights. (They don't have to let anyone enter if they don't want to.) If they'd put them on a general terrorist no-fly list that affected their travel to other countries it would be outrageous, but they didn't do that, so no, it's not more outrageous. Using someone else's name would have had no impact on that person unless that person was also planning to travel to Israel.

I'd be royally pissed off at you, more so than whatever I was blocked from. But that's not the issue here, the block was very specific (only preventing people from being allowed to enter Israel), not blocking them from traveling in any other way. Sure the potential is there, but so far it's not happening. I also don't see many other countries trying this and as I noted above, it's not something that's likely to work effectively a second time.

I can't say I like this kind of thing, but Israel is within their rights to block entry to anyone they want, and there's no indication Facebook provided any non-public information to Israel in this case. So as much as I don't like it personally, nothing really shady's going on, and one would hope people using false names for something like this would pick a name of someone who was unlikely to be impacted. That is, make sure to use a name of someone unlikely to be traveling to Israel as their cover name for discussing a protest in Israel.

Unfortunately, being in a wreck, even if you had no responsibility (the other party ran into you and you were obeying all traffic rules why they weren't) can raise your insurance as well. So this doesn't work as well as you might think. Plus dangerous drivers can sometimes manage to cause others to wreck (trying to avoid getting hit by the dangerous idiot) while they manage to avoid actually colliding with anything themselves. And of course they're not about to hang around the scene of a wreck they indirectly caused to get a ticket in those cases, so their insurance remains unaffected.

As much as I dislike Zuckerberg, in this case it sounds like this guy is a total scam artist. Facebook hired a linguistics expert to compare the E-mails Ceglia claims prove his case against known E-mails written by Zuckerberg during the same time period. The results are not encouraging for Ceglia, and are quite convincing. There's some significant differences in writing style, and there's well established research that writing styles are mostly fixed, people write the same way routinely unless deliberately trying to do otherwise. You'd have to believe that Zuckerberg deliberately wrote differently in the Ceglia E-mails, something which is very hard to buy into. After that his lawyers resigned on him, a very, very bad sign for him. Sounds like the judge concurs, he's not buying it either.

If he had Firefox, and was using Windows (most likely) he also had Internet Explorer to fall back on. What are the chances that both browsers would stop working with the filing system on the same day? Not looking good is it? Why didn't he try using a colleague's PC instead? Odds are getting even lower here aren't they? There's just too many ways he could have gotten around this that it's very, very hard to believe. Plus, Righthaven's not exactly got a good track record of respect for the courts, which is why they were having to file this response in the first place. So, you'll have to forgive us if we fail to give them the benefit of the doubt, they've kinda lost all credibility a long time ago.

No, the newspaper group/company was involved in this highly and the real plan was that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to sue and try to get money the way Righthaven's been doing, but... they wanted to avoid any financial liability to themselves in the process. So they provided seed money to setup Righthaven, and then setup an agreement where they only gave Righthaven the right to sue for their copyrights. The newspaper company kept ownership of the copyrights, and if Righthaven's scheme failed, then the newspaper company couldn't be hit with sanctions and/or lawsuits because Righthaven did the suing, not them, honest!

But it's not working out that way for them. Righthaven seems to be run by lawyers who got their bar license from a Cracker Jack box who have committed numerous and serious mistakes. Failing to reveal that the newspaper company had a pecuniary interest in the lawsuits is getting them into major, major trouble, as is not actually owning the copyrights. And at least one person that Righthaven targeted has filed a counter-suit against both Righthaven AND the newspaper company. Personally I hope the counter-suit gets to go forward and that more of those targeted join in and go after the newspaper company too. This whole thing appears to have been their brainchild, not Righthaven's founder, and they were deliberately trying to game the courts.

Not everything on Usenet (not even all the binary stuff) is illegal copies of copyrighted materials. There's plenty of legal stuff too. So yes, trying to make an ISP block an entire site is censorship. Especially since none of that material is actually available from Newzbin2. You can get NZB files from it, which you'll need to use with an actual Usenet provider to download anything illegal. Newzbin2 is basically an index, nothing more, it's not even quite equivalent to a torrent tracker because you can't connect directly to Usenet to get the stuff via the site. The NZB files just tell your Usenet client how to ask a Usenet server to find them for you.

Even if this is true, this is Amazon's problem how exactly? Perhaps if the goal is really to catch those lying on their taxes then a law requiring companies to report affiliate income paid to CA residents would be a more appropriate solution. Not that such a law would be without issues, as it attempts to impose a regulatory burden (compiling those reports isn't free) on a company that has no physical presence in California.

And frankly, I think you overestimate how big a problem this is. Most people running a website as a business are going to be honest with their taxes. It's just not worth the risk to lie or fail to report, and it's not like most of those affiliates are raking in huge amounts of money.

So... they made so little money that the state was owed nothing anyway and this is a problem how? Amazon's supposed to pay taxes that the affiliate wouldn't have owed anyway just to prop up California's government for the hell of it? Did you even think about what you're saying at all here? It makes no sense, this isn't an issue at all.

Sounds more like you're expecting people to pay taxes they don't actually owe just because of some hand-waving. What tax burden? If they weren't making enough to owe taxes anyway the state's already declared that activity as not being a burden (or at least, not enough of one) to bother taxing the individual. If the person's lying on their taxes, the issue is with the person who's doing the lying, not Amazon/eBay/etc. This isn't a crack down, it's a money grab, pure and simple.