A homeless bum can burn down a million dollar house, doesn't mean there's any point in trying to get a million bucks out of him. I'm assuming the settlement was for all Hotfile's actual money because otherwise they'd just spend more on lawyers with Sony getting less in the end, while the $80 million was some kind of imaginary "what we would like to have been paid" damages.

And they say "Say hello to statutory damages, that's $750 minimum per infringement. We don't need to offer you anything, no matter what settlements we've reached in the past. Now, do you want this to be expensive or very expensive?"

I believe that Sony is a bigger threat to me and my welfare than North Korea and the NKVD.

That they moved the news up from 11?

Google Contributor (contributor.google.com) strives to come close by letting you pay a small amount for each ad it replaces.

It doesn't stop Google from collecting your information, though. They just don't serve you ads. Instead, they serve you to other corporations.

Google Contributor does absolutely nothing to stop Google from tracking anyone. In fact, it gives them additional personal information.

Maybe you didn't understand what I was saying. I want to be able to use Google services without being tracked in any way shape or form, and I'm willing to pay for the privilege. Same goes for Twitter, etc.

Until I am able to do that, I'm just going to block ads, use Blur, Privacy Badger and any tool that lets me confound Google's ability to monetize me. I am not a consumable.

Well since we haven't invented human cloning yet - though I can't wait to hear Bennet Haselton's opinion on the matter - that should be the one and only right? I'll take all four pairs of headphones, delivery to the galaxy known as KKs3. Warp speed delivery please, that'll be 7 million years of blissful silence before his radio signals reach earth.

My crystal ball might be a little wonky, but I'm pretty sure that 2015 is not the year of the AMD desktop whether they run Linux or not. I suspect Q4 is going to be another bloody quarter for AMD, apart from the console sales they haven't had any killer CPUs/GPUs for the holidays. So if YotLD happens, I suspect their Linux drivers had very little to do with it.

Well you don't have to be a psychic to know what he's thinking: "How can we get our hands on some more metadata so we show users photos they want to remember?" Do you know what marketers did when they started getting too good at recognizing changes in shopping patterns like women being pregnant and consumers felt it was creepy? They made coupons with anti-offers, like next to the baby gear they were trying to sell you they'd put a lawn mower. That way users felt it was random and then it was okay. Besides that'd probably tie in well with their advertising, what mood you're in is probably very related to what ads you're susceptible to at the moment.

After the hype it seems that story was overblown -- looked like less than 1% were compromised

That's good. I haven't been able to keep up on the story with the holidays and all.

I'm thinking that services like TOR (and others) are the one hope for having an internet in the future that is worth having.

Of course, I have my own opinions but I won't share them because they reflect my own biases.

That may be the single stupidest sentence in the history of stupid sentences on the Internet.

You won't share what you think because it's what you think. Everything you see and think and say and do reflects your own biases. If you decide not to share a single bit of data that is floating around in your head if it happens to reflect your biases, that means you will spend the rest of your life mute, which come to think of it might be best for everyone.

I've just re-read your entire comment and it doesn't seem to say anything at all about anything. Are you a Markov bot? If so, your maker forgot to put in the AI.

One way or another, you pay for your free Internet services.

It's not "one way or another". It's ONE WAY.

Where do I sign up to pay for Google and Twitter and other internet services directly instead of via my private data? I've been to Google thousands of times, and I've never seen a "subscribe" button.

No, there is no "one way or another". You can ONLY pay for your internet services by letting companies upskirt your private communications and personal data. That gives you some idea of just how valuable your private data really is.

Now we have that story of more than half of all TOR nodes being owned by some hacker group.

The Internet has been weaponized against us.

Speak for yourself. Hating on HTML and web tech because you're bad at it is the lamest of the lame excuses. My users much prefer our HTML GUI over our shitty old desktop apps

Sounds like you're hating on desktop apps because you're bad at them .... though certainly that's a common problem.

Upper management are making these arguments because they're afraid of exactly that - if they can't hire the best people, their competitors will and their company will lose out (i.e. they will lose out).

" but anti-GamerGate has harassed far more women than GG has (namely, any)"

That's really how they talk.