As I understand it (and I may be wrong), the accounts were accessed by abusing the "forgot my password" service. Resetting someone's Apple account password on them is notoriously easy, and it would make sense that's the way the hackers did it. I thought they didn't blame "weak passwords" so much as they blamed "weak security question answers" that the "hacker" guessed the answers to.

Then again, I may be misremembering or misreading the stories, I'm not sure if the actual details have been made public.

I call bullshit on that. The iPhone isn't even the #1 phone in the world.

And let me try and make my point clear: Fake-Steve-Jobs was standing in front of a slide showing a camcorder being destroyed, saying that they were made completely obsolete by the iPhone.

And that's entirely bullshit.

Until the iPhone has a user-replaceable battery and removable storage, it will never replace a real camera or a real camcorder. It simply can't.

The last time I used it was Saturday. The last time I tried to take video with my cellphone was ... I actually can't remember. Probably because if I'm going to be taking video of something, I'll generally plan ahead to have the camcorder around.

There's absolutely no way the iPhone has enough storage space to make recording video viable without removable storage. Not unless you're only using it for things like Vine.

Based on the issues as you describe them, I can only assume they decided they'd use their new improved video camera and streamed the entire thing from a new iPhone 6. :P

I only saw one brief bit of the stream, and it was where Steve Jobs Wannabe (Tim Cook?) was explaining how no one used camcorders any more because the iPhone could take better video. Which leads to the obvious question: does the iPhone have a replaceable battery and removable storage yet?

Because I still have a camcorder hanging around and I use it when I want to take a video that lasts longer than a couple of minutes. The entire reason I have my camcorder is so that I can take two hour videos. Then, when the battery dies, I can swap it out with a new one. And if I manage to run out of storage space, I can swap out to a new SDXC card.

Can't do either of those with an iPhone, making it a toy at taking pictures and video. Which is, to be fair, frequently fine. But Faux-Steve-Jobs's idea that the iPhone can replace a camcorder is just hilarious without those two very simple features.

Technically they've had it since last year when they added the ability to do audio-only video calls.

Which is ... still 5+ years too late. But, hey, slightly earlier than you were thinking!

Where do you get this? Because the court documents in the article certainly don't say that. In fact, they seem to be saying that the IP packets themselves contained the IP:

That's not an error message, that's (apparently) an HTTP(S?) request being sent straight to the Tor servers. And the only way I can think of to screw up a CAPTCHA implementation to do that would be to have it construct a complete URL using the host IP instead of just using the configured host name, which would be insane.

Again: according to the FBI themselves, this wasn't "debugging data" or anything, it was packets that were for whatever reason completely outside of the Tor network.

Because we're aware of things like COINTELPRO or, for those of us in the Boston area, remember little things like Whitey Bulger? I don't trust the FBI because they've gone out of their way to prove they are not to be trusted.

The only way I can think of to accidentally do what the FBI is claiming is if he just grabbed an poorly written CAPTCHA program off the Internet and it constructed its own URLs back to the server using the server's IP address.

Why it would do that instead of using the configured server name or, even better, just use a relative URL would be anyone's guess. But it's the only plausible way for the FBI's explanation to make any sort of sense.

(Or, to put it another way, they're almost certainly lying.)

I just checked this by trying to stream something. You're wrong, there's an enforced 30-60 second delay between when you do something and when your viewers see it happen, and it's impossible to reduce this without becoming a Twitch partner. It's more than enough to make meaningful chat with viewers impossible.

This already exists? Granted I haven't tried it recently.

If you read the blog entry, this is talking about Windows 3.1's BSOD. A screen I honestly did not know existed, although Windows 3.1 is so old that I'd have been a kid, so maybe it popped up all the time if you used computers daily back then. I have no idea.

Windows only picked up preemptive multitasking in NT and later 95, so Windows 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked. Apparently if the running program didn't respond to incoming messages quickly enough (presumably a check in an interrupt handler?) a blue screen would appear, and Steve Balmer wrote the text for that blue screen.

Windows 95 and NT don't use that blue screen since the blue screen that appears in 95 is for driver faults (basically) and one in NT is for kernel panics.

This deserves to be seen more, but when the Facebook app launched, it did have the option to switch to auto-play videos on wifi only. But you couldn't disable it on wifi.

The problem for me is that I have a mobile Internet hotspot which means that as far as Facebook cared, it was wifi which meant it could use all the data it wanted.

Thankfully there is now an option to turn off autoplaying videos on both the website and the apps (along with a wifi only option for the apps, but not the website). Of course Facebook should just default to autoplay off because it's a worthless feature that no one I know wants, but if they did that, no one would know that they added this new "feature." That no one wanted.

I never understand how people manage to keep that many tabs open because Firefox regularly corrupts its own session and refuses to restore the previously open tabs. Routinely.

So every couple of weeks I "get" to reset all my tabs back to nothing when Firefox corrupts its own session and refuses to restore the original settings.

And this is on every OS I've used Firefox: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X; it makes no difference, Firefox regularly refuses to restore tabs.

You don't need to take photos using an iDevice to have them end up in iCloud. All you need to do is use a Mac.

If you use a Mac to download pictures off your camera - including cell phones that aren't iPhones and therefore behave like standard cameras and don't require Apple-specific software - by default, your pictures will end up in iCloud. It's part of the "Photo Stream" thing to allow users to stream pictures to the Apple TV that clearly every Mac owner has.

Apparently (and I don't know that this is true as I don't use Twitch that often) you can't reduce it to a reasonable time any more. (Maybe it's changed?) All I know is that people I know who do stream games where they want to have audience participation (things like having the stream direct the choices they make in an RPG) have switched to using HitBox due to the amount of lag between when they do something and when the viewers see it.