Well, you have to start somewhere, right?

There are various reports that efforts to exploit this vulnerability go back almost as far as the introduction of the bug to various distributions.

I wonder if someone discovered the bug and sold it to the "vulnerability assessment" industry (which in turn supplies spooks and other government agencies with their exploits so they can perform "lawful interception").
Such a bug would probably sell for a million these days. Or even more.

for Evi Nemeth and the other passengers of the ship she was on.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

Who receives leaks from Microsoft at an email-account owned by a division of Microsoft?
That's as if Snowden had contacted Greenwald from his BAH account.

Insane.

Is that you?

Well, he chose to do differently.
His son is into cancer research. Will be interesting to see what he can come up with.

AFAIK: stock fraud. Back in Germany. A dot.com bubble thing. And before that, he got in trouble for hacking servers/networks (turned it into a pent-test business and sold it for big bucks - that's how he got rich the first time).
He's a colorful personality.

Petrol works for all cars.
Software and OSs doesn't work on all hardware. Esp. mobile.
In addition, petrol stations usually don't get kickbacks from car-manufacturers.
AFAIK, though, a couple of years ago, independent petrol-stations in the UK went bust when supermarket-chains started selling gas below cost for a couple of months...

But hey, if you think that ASUS, Acer et.al. have a viable, future-proof business model: go ahead, their stock is publicly traded ;-)

If your product relies on a 3rd-party to actually attract customers (and/or make a profit), your business model is flawed and you're doomed.
.

Were those 20T of original movies and music or just stuff he downloaded via bittorent?

He could have always bought a sufficiently large tape-library from ebay - but I guess the data wasn't worth that much.
That's always the first pair of questions to ask: how much is it worth and how much would it cost to recreate?
If the answer is somewhere between "I don't know" and "Well, it's not that much", then he just should stop hoarding that much stuff.

He could have built a filer with ZFS and sent daily snapshots to a 2nd filer - but that wouldn't have helped him if the house burnt down...

Except, these days they go to Switzerland, which is close enough to Germany, pays their PhDs better and has much less bureaucracy (and a lot more common sense).

A lot of people still want to go to the US (the US is also *much* bigger, the being able to absorb a much larger number of talented people), make no mistake, but as you point out: the inertia of such a development is basically unstoppable, once it has started.

It was the intranet - I guess they trusted everybody with an AD account ;-)

I believe, though, it's no coincidence that Snowden ended up in the HW office. He was probably aware of the lack of security when he requested the transfer.
God only knows how many guys have downloaded that data before him and sold it to the highest bidder.

Haha, there was this saying in Nazi-Germany: "If the Führer knew", usually directed at corrupt official (state and party) - ignoring the fact that the corruption started at the very top.
Similarly, people in Russia write letters to president Putin today when faced with such issues - again ignoring the obvious explanation that it all starts at the top...

Mostly, because the hardware is getting more and more powerful - and I don't "invest" as much money in my personal hardware anymore as I used to do.
Thus, spare hardware (and dev-VMs) at work (which we have plenty) are faster than VMs at home.
Plus, if we can show a benefit and it will add to the bottom line (or save a lot of time), we do get a project, time and a budget to build it - on current hardware.
We do have a guy (he's now retired, but still contracts for us...) who has his complete build environment for a software (some 60ish VMs) on a server-sized desktop at home. He bought an LGA2011-board with a 6-core i7 CPU and 64GB RAM just for this.

But he has always preferred to work from home anyway.