Its funny... I read everything on the FP today (except the salshvertisiments) on Hacker News yesterday or the day before. Fearless prediction: we will get a Flappy Bird article by Tuesday.

Probably what at least part of that $4.5B is for.

idk, hijacking the back button is pretty low even compared to beta.

Seems like it should be an ask slashdot.

The key line from the transcript is "yes, it is limited bandwidth to cloud providers". You can translate that bad English into : "Verizon is limiting bandwidth to cloud providers" and get incensed or "Verizon has limited bandwidth to cloud providers" and have a complete non-issue. Given how unlikely it is that a low level CSR is going to know about Verizon's super secret throttling system I'm going with the latter.

They do, but not often. http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/...

IF your bank or e-commerce site isn't using HTTPS run away, if they are this thing is at best useless.

There is something called PlanetFactory that I think you could use to do that.

This is really only true because not very people run ad blockers, if there were there would be tons of money in getting around them and plenty of engineers willing to spend their time getting around them. Its not really even a very hard problem, there just isn't any money in solving it.

I assume the satellites themselves have minimal delta-v so how do you end up covering "large swaths of earth" with a bunch of satellites launched at the same time from the same craft?

As art its kind of neat. The technique used in the shot of the 42nd street/grand central platform I could easily see used in normal movies. There is a market, he just needs some advertising...

It's a thing. iPhone theft is the number one crime in NYC see http://www.uproxx.com/technology/2013/11/14-crime-nyc-iphone-theft/ among many others. As someone who lost an apple device to a mugger... this still seems like a horrible idea.

There were a few copy cats IIRC... but they didn't make much of a splash. Since BIOS and OS vendors have been of the issue they didn't for 20+ I'm fairly skeptical that on the breadth of the claim. Plus since we would know they didn't force upgrade everyone's BIOS, and we would know about it if there was a patch to fix the issue in the Linux kernel this is most likely an OS specific issue.

In other words they probably turned over a 0 day Windows exploits to Microsoft that would have allowed writing to the BIOS because there became aware that some other nation's NSAlike agency had become aware of it.

What happens at a lot of places is that whatever is required to balance the cashier's till is taken out of their pay. So you likely aren't stealing from the store, but from someone who makes minimum wage.