They want people to settle, because this gives them lots of money for little effort. Having such an extreme precedent can be used to intimidate people so they don't even DARE to make use of their 6th amendment right. I call this legalized extortion!

These organisations ASK musicians, programmers etc. to give usage-rights to the people VOLUNTARILY. If you don't want to, then nobody is trying to force you!

god, how braindead do you have to be, to make such a fuss about a subject that you have nearly zero knowledge about? didn't these morons even read the friggin wikipedia article? or are they just too stupid or too far into their "internet=evil" fanaticism to understand it?

"My god has a bigger dick than your god!"
George Carlin

The RIAA doesn't really WANT that money (they never would have gotten $1.92M anyway), they want a precedent to intimidate other people so they settle (whether the claims are valid or not).

Never forget the RIAAs first announcement after the $1.92M sentence:

"THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON'T SETTLE"

Did you know that the "enabling act" (which gave Hitler total power over germany in 1933) was a misbalanced anti-terror law?

when I was 15 and I had my first PC, I did nothing with it except playing games and my grades nosedived... But gaming brought me together with people who did creative stuff with their PCs (on LANs) - Level-editing, programming, webdesigning,... they inspired me, I started programming myself and today I am a graduate computer scientist who used and still uses the internet heavily for learning.

So yeah, Computers can be bad for your grades, if you don't do anything than playing games anymore, but they can have the exact opposite effect - it depends on how you use them... maybe, JUST MAYBE there is a reason why 15 is not a legal age and you have legal guardians.

They stored the RAW data that had been sent. the raw data CAN include emails and passwords. How did that genius think, how logging into webservices worked internally?

oh and please tell me, how a PASSIVE wlan sniffer (Kismet) can "intercept" transmissions...

Google-Outed Windows XP Zero-Day [...]
his decision to reveal the flaw only five days after reporting it to Microsoft.

Don't you know what ZERO-day means? This is a FIVE-day!

He gave them 2.5 times the time that would be needed to get a fix into all mayor linux repositories. Maybe they wanted to expose how much slower Microsoft reacts to security threats (i.e. how insecure Windows is, compared to Linux and its descendant Chrome OS)

If you are running windows anyway, why bother trying to do ANYTHING securely?

I'd rather trust an AI, which just uses the solid numbers, stochastics and statistics
than some sleazy suit who will ignore all rationality (not that he was that good in math in the first place) and gamble away all my money if he thinks he has a lucky streak...

amongst other things like e-mails addresses and browser history

This is so incedibly wrong...
IF you sent such these informations (OR ANY OTHER) over an unencrypted WLAN (i.e. everybody can read all your data all the time and you're among the stupidest 2.6% of the population) exactly in the second when the google car passed by, then they stored the RAW PACKETS, which MIGHT include some E-Mail addresses (the ones used in the current mails, not your whole addressbook) or URLs that you are requesting right in this moment (NOT you browser history)

IMHO the assumption that google did this on purpose is absolutely absurd, because the expectation value of collected data is so small, that nobody would invest so much into trying it - AND they wouldn't have gone public voluntarily (which they did, but media like to "forget" this little fact...)

Dear Australia, you are now officially on par with the STASI. congratulations!

A Google engineer [published] a zero-day vulnerability in Windows XP
just five days after it was reported to Microsoft

maybe you should look up what "zero-day" means...