None of which is validation of the information.

It'll be interesting to watch how much of this is going to end up being disclosure, how much a witch hunt and how much targeted disinformation. It's already far too popular to destroy peoples' lives by accusing them of kiddie porn, now you can make an anonymous account on Github and add your enemies.

We seem to forget too often that the more vile the crime, the more sure you need to be that you actually have the guilty party. Falsely accusing someone of a petty theft is bad, but it will be forgotten. Falsely accusing someone of murder, rape or kiddie porn, not so much.

Sadly, this seems to be the case for many recent sexual harassment cases, which is bad firstly because it turns innocent (not necessarily morally good, but criminally innocent) people into victims of the system and secondly because it muddies the water when it comes to real cases. Too many of these "angry ex-lover" cases, and people will tend to believe that actual cases are of the same kind.

You can feel very trapped in relationships, ask any of your married friends. ;-)

Seriously, over the Internet, when it's not really an actual relationship - yes, she does have attachment issues.

Psych problem or not, when you're sending nude pictures to someone who's not your significant other, and you're not in the sex industry, then you should realize that something is not as it should be.

As long as it has an "off" switch, they can do what they want.

I actually like my cars to be quiet, one of the reasons I like driving BMWs and am very interested in electric cars.

Robocop is not even close to a corporations-rule-the-world dystopia. Try cyberpunk. WTF happened to /. that people bring up a stupid 80s movie instead of Gibson and Sterling.

True, a unified "EU VAT" would be ideal. But given the realities of politics, it's not something that will happen within this decade.

You're right, it's not that the OS doesn't matter at all. If you run your home on any kind of windows, I believe you are incredibly smart because you just made sure that if you're ever accused of a crime, you'll be among the 1% that can make the insanity defense work.

But for the question of connectedness and building a smart home infrastructure, the focus should not be on choosing the right OS, but on defining the right protocols. Once that is done, the right OS will win by merit. But if you go about it the wrong way and look for picking the right OS first, then you'll create lock-in effects and very soon the right OS will become the wrong OS.

...did not receive useful information about information security.

Fixed that for you. I know the frustration, I've been there many times. I do agree that management decisions can affect information security dramatically. However, I don't think it's management stupidity. Or rather: A different kind.

I believe there are two kinds of companies. Those that understand information security and those that don't. You can spot them by one simple thing: Those that do have a position - the CISO or similar - whose job it is to translate between management and information security. Those that don't have nobody and suffer from a management and an information security that speak different languages.

You're right, there are three kinds of companies. There are also the criminally incompetent.

This one million times.

I'm so amazed at this mantra of "corporations good, government bad" that gets repeated ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that I'm about one inch short of deciding that the entire USA is some kind of religious nutjob cult to the god of imaginative economy.

I don't want government nor private corporations into my house to watch me 24/7. But when I think about the potential consequences, I'm more afraid of corporations and what they would do with it than of the government.

Literally my first thought on reading the summary: "Someone doesn't know what an OS is."

In a properly engineered environment, the OS of the individual components shouldn't matter.

Good points with solid first-hand experience, thank you.

Yes, it's an additional burden and I don't think the two-data-points requirement is great, though I can't immediately think of a better solution that isn't trivial to game.

The problem is that there's no good way to make the rules better. Keeping business-country-VAT is an open invite to more Amazons to incorporate in low-tax countries. Putting a only-applies-to-more-than-one-million-revenue-companies exception on it would mean the same thing has different taxes depending on whom you buy it for (and would utterly destroy small shops that happen to be in a high-VAT-country).

No matter how you skin the cat, the result is ugly.

Amen. The fault lies entirely with the security "industry", which is unfortunately not as mature as it would like to be.

I am actually writing a blog, which I will not link here, where I try to be better than the usual crap. And there are some very good blogs out there. The majority, however, are basically stream-of-consciousness of some dude on some topic.

True, I mixed them up.

For my hometown, this exists. It will check a number of options including public transport, car rental and taxi service as well as walking.