Well, "use secure and unique passwords" is not really the full story, it's "use secure and unique passwords for accounts which you care about". Specifically, when the cost (small, but definitely existent) of managing more strong passwords is less than the risk (impact times probability) of breach. Which means that some users who do not actually care if their genetic information were to become exposed for anyone to look at will have no good reason not to just use a standard password they use for every account they don't care about.

The secondary victims here are victims because they chose an option which elected to trust a group of people, within which at least one was a password re-user. They shouldn't really have done this if they cared about their data leaking, since it's unlikely that a decent sized group of people will all be worthy of such trust. Although since this is a rather unusual situation which you can't expect users to immediately appreciate the risks of, activating this feature should have had some warning attached. That seems the most sound basis for criticising 23andme in this case.

Well, Customer A is opting to share this data with an unknown group of other people. If this data leaking is important to them, they should consider the possibility that one of these unknown people might leak it. They should only opt to share it with unknown people if they don't care about it leaking.

It was actually more "you trusted everyone in this unknown group of other users!" (Not to reuse passwords.)

Well, the answer to that could easily be "nothing", but it could just as easily be "you can still watch 6000 year old episodes of Dad's Army". While individual storage mediums aren't going to last forever, the big advantage of digital storage is the ability to very easily make flawless copies of things, which gives them an unlimited lifespan - so long as enough people keep doing this, and no technological collapse, oppressive power or extended period of universal disinterest interrupts the process. Which is utterly impossible to predict.

The difference is, or at least should be, that addiction is physiological, whilst dependence is (merely) psychological. If you're addicted to tobacco or alcohol, withdrawal will mean that your bodily chemistry will be going wrong. If it's a psychological dependence, it's just your brain being unhappy. How much difference this actually makes is unclear.

Our corporate masters decided that having "sessions" - logging out when we had no reason to be logged in, didn't give them enough control, so made it impossible for as many people as they could.

"I now have to relearn how my computer works", "I won't be able to do this thing any more" and "I don't want Microsoft spyware/my computer updating itself without asking me" are all potential costs.

The problem is that many quite reasonably regard the upgrade as a downgrade. Even a downgrade which contains spyware. This has been depressingly common in the past decade or two.

It's what happens when you have capitalism. There's unlikely to be a problem with the regulations, there are certainly laws which could be used to prosecute everyone involved in this under UK law, (fraud by false representation comes immediately to mind,) and I strongly suspect similar laws exist in Poland. But they're useless because the main job police and prosecutors of capitalist regimes is to protect capital. So they just don't go looking for all the laws being broken when a large number of people working for a corporation commit crimes like this, the way they would if you or I hacked into those trains to sabotage them. The only way to stop such things is to get away from a society with a ruling class and a working class.

We don't have copyright for the benefit of creators. The reason we have copyright is so culture can be owned by capitalists as capital. You can hardly blame singers for the fact that our society, instead of saying "that's socially useful labour, have some income" as a socialist society would, says "here, have this capital. Maybe you can trade it with some rich guy for a bit of money. If not, have fun making all those legal threats without a legal department." Don't blame workers for having no choice but to function within the system created by capitalists to benefit capitalists. The solution is for all workers to understand that the whole idea of capital is a system of control and wealth extraction to their detriment by the rich, unite as one and say "these powers no longer exist, because we're no longer respecting them". One group of workers sniping at another group of workers makes this harder, no one subgroup can do it on their own.

Grains are also nutritious when served as whole foods with all their vitamins intact, but nasty when the food industry gets their hands on them and processes them into oblivion.

The categories for lesser awards are an odd bunch for games. If I were categorising a set of game awards, things like "best gameplay" or "best difficulty curve" would appear way before stuff like "audio design". "Best narrative", how about "best implemented freedom to do whatever you want and have the world respond appropriately"? They're supposed to be games, not movies.

And I can't help feel it needs some sort of "best non-sequel".

What "system"? Communism is a classless, stateless society, there is no "system".

Anyone claiming to have "communism" when, for instance, countries still exist, is either lying or mistaken. You're probably thinking of countries like the USSR. Those are capitalist, specifically, state capitalist. The state takes all the capital. Russia was a feudal society beforehand, and any good socialist knows that capitalism comes after feudalism.

The idea that the USSR was actually communist, rather than just being run by people who would like to bring about communism at some point in the distant future, was invented by the people who supplanted those guys, seeking only power for themselves. So for instance, Lenin was a committed socialist, he knew and would tell you that they were building state capitalism. Stalin also knew he was building state capitalism, you can tell by the way he hired American capitalists to design things. But he wouldn't tell you that, because he actively wanted to be a dictator and telling people they lived in a communist society and opposing him meant opposing communism was a good way to suppress dissent. And suppress calls for real socialism.

So AC was quite right. Under socialism and communism, your personal property (approximately your house and car and what's in them) remains yours. Private property under socialism is taken not by all the people, that's how you get to state capitalism, but by whoever is using it. "The working class seizing the means of production" doesn't mean the entire working class coming to have all of it in a gigantic pool (state capital) it means the workers of each factory seizing their factory etc. and running it through workplace democracy. Communism comes when means of production don't even need a concept of ownership any more.

Capitalism is a mode of production, a social relation, in which a capitalist owns capital and purchases labour from workers to do the work, taking the products which are produced for their sale value. And a capitalist economy is an economy driven by returns for capital. That's why it's called "capitalism" and not "voluntary transaction-ism".

In fact, capitalism utterly relies on involuntary transactions. Capitalists profit by paying workers less than the value of their labour. Nobody voluntarily trades their labour for less than its value. This happens due to the unequal power relationship between the capitalist and the worker. If no deal is reached, the worker faces destitution, the capitalist just faces not profiting for a bit. This is due to an unfair property system enforced by coercion by capitalist states. Without the state, there can be no capitalism.

Capitalism is in fact dying, or at least having huge difficulties, but it's got nothing to do with the tech behemoths. It's due to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, due to capitalism's internal contradictions. This is now at crisis point, which is why you're seeing fascist or protofascist governments springing up round the world, fascism being capitalism's crisis management mode, its mechanism for removing the limiters and doing anything necessary to keep profits coming. Rather than removing the veto power capitalists have over economic activity and democratising production.

The last time there was this kind of crisis in profit rates and this sort of fascist reaction, the problem was solved by a giant war which destroyed lots of capital. But this time seems more likely to be terminal. There are few untouched natural resources left to exploit, and the economic effects of global warming and other ecological problems are starting to bite and are only going to increase.

My data to bandwidth ratio is way too high for network storage to be a realistic option. Although I do have the starter 2GB of Dropbox for small, important things only as an extra level of precaution.