I'm sorry, but as much as North Korea sucks, this hack just gets better and better...

That statements so unbelievably ironic... Sony and the MPAA are trying to squash these very document releases with the same tactics they use to try and stop file sharing... but this time it's to hide their own collusion, racketeering, bribery and likely other violations of federal law. I wonder if the other inmates will appreciate her opinion that piracy is stealing when she's in the state pen...

You know... I was pretty sure it was NK as well...
But it's really getting fishy.

For example, why was the CIA meeting with Sony just a month prior to this happening?
http://radaronline.com/exclusi...

And it even specifically says the talks were about Sony and other studios helping them with, what can only be described as, propaganda.

Something... and I don't know what... but something, is up.

First world problems? If you've never been to the 3rd world, you're not allowed to use that line. It just makes you sound like an idiot.

I've been to the 3rd world, specifically Africa. Everyone has cellphones. EVERYONE.
People that don't have homes, cars, a bed... have a cellphone.
Why? So they can keep in contact with their family, in case of emergency. Most people have 2 phones, or at least 2 sim cards so they can be on 2 networks at once, just so they don't miss a call.

You find booths like this on every street corner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

I had better cell coverage there than I do in the states.

You mean like the fact that Boeing already works very closely with the CIA/NSA and therefor this thing is 100% guaranteed to have a government backdoor per-installed AND the purchase of such a phone would automatically put on a watch list that would result in pretty much all of your traffic getting logged anyway?

Not perfect... more like, this phone likely does exactly the opposite of what it advertises.

That's not true. "The Beach Boys" didn't release anything. The rights to their work were stolen in the 1960s by their manager and sold to A&M records:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
A&M is owned by UMG:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
The largest Music publishing company in the world who's owned by Vivendi:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...
Who's worth nearly $50 billion, and has profits in the $3 billion/yr range...

and you wonder why copyright laws get changed in their favor... lol

When arguing about copyright law, always keep in mind... the people that "own" these copyrights are almost never the artists or their families. Business own then and the attempts to extend copyright into perpetuity has absolutely nothing to do with rewarding the creator of the music. It has to do with extending what was usually a theft from an artist, into a theft from mankind as a whole.

Watch the following movie for more details on that side of the business:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
I don't like 30 seconds to mars, but that movie matches what many of the musicians/bands I've met have said about the industry.

And here's an article written by Courtney Love 15yrs ago... and it's also pretty much dead on:
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/1...

The real pirates are the music labels.

Right... and that's why you always pirate windows.

It's sad that the pirated version of an OS is better than the legit version, but with windows it's a fact.

Until a local hospital calls you to let you know your kids got a broken leg...

You could be right, but given TOR's design, it doesn't even matter if the feds wrote it, they still couldn't figure out your identity. The feds would have to own all the nodes in the network, which is possible... but if they did own all the nodes, it wouldn't really matter if they wrote it or not now would it?

All that said... there are easier ways to hide your identity on the internet.

They had access for over a year...
http://www.businessweek.com/ne...

Sony didn't even have rudimentary security established. Pretty much any teenager with basic skills could have taken them out.

How much it would cost the EPA to mandate the change? Nothing!

We humans already have engines capable of doing it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
And remember, the probes would be robots, so they could handle hard deltaV that would kill us.

Complete nonsense.
I keep reading about this attack, like it was magical...
Then there's an article on Slashdot today about programming being a superpower?
I'm starting to think this entire thing was designed to have this very affect.

So what's next? The government protects us? We need more electronic surveillance?

Hacks based on Zero-day exploits are hard to protect against. But they are smash and grabs, and once you see the data leaving, you shut things down until you can patch. But this Sony thing? They had basically complete control over their entire infrastructure. No hack would ever result in that kind of control unless Sony basically had no protection or planning at all. Which is what I think this was... Sony being completely irresponsible. The fault here is with Sony. Yea, the hackers are bad guys to... but there's absolutely no reason they should have gotten what they did. In particular the Executive that had the entires companies Salary in an XLS document on their hard-drive should be fired immediately.

No, some statisticians have actually done the math. Basically if you built such a thing and it could only do something like 25% of the speed of light, it would only take them 300,000 years to overrun the entire galaxy.

I think the answer will turn out to be that the universe is in fact crawling with life. But space fairing intelligent life is very rare.
Take for example, Mars. I think we will find life there... and heck, pretty much every planet. But it's going to be single celled... if it even has "Cells" at all.
Then lets assumed complex life did evolve on a planet... what if it's a ocean planet and they're aquatic? They're never going to figure out electricity, they can't even experiment with it. They're not even going to be able to do fire much less a rocket. What if they're terrestrial but the gravity is slightly stronger... rockets are nearly impossible as it is, imagine if we were at 2g!

And remember, we still have a very good chance at wiping ourselves out before we ever get to another star.

ooo... and I should add...
Soft disconnects are done frequently for people that plan to reconnect the phone.
"I'll be in Florida for the winter but I want my number back when I get back!"
The phone company charges you a small fee to hold them number, they disco the number in the switch so it doesn't lead to the line but they don't physically disconnect the line because that would involve work and they'd just have to reconnect it later anyways. So when you get back home they just reprogram the number and viola...

I suspect when your parents explained that you were away at college but would return, they likely did something like that for you to.

That's a soft disconnect.
They deleted your number in the switch software but didn't physically disconnect the wire.
It happens all the time, and, in fact, is required by law in some areas.
Some counties require the phone company to have a working phone with 911 access in every home, even if it's abandoned. So they have to send techs out with police escorts to install phones, just in case some hobos move in and have an emergency.