In my state it's illegal to operate a motor vehicle without having the physical license with you. They can certainly look you up as you described, but you'd get a ticket for not having your license in addition to whatever infraction got you pulled over. I wonder how long before it becomes a crime in Iowa to be in possession of a smart phone without the state-mandated identification app installed?

Do you or I have access to that database? No. It isn't open to the public, which makes it private.

Not for mathematics, I hope!

I don't think the SJWs could have stated their goal more clearly themselves!

I used to subscribe to TotalFark for $5 per month, it was worth it for the ability to see and comment on all of the non-greenlit stories. When Fark started going downhill, reddit came about; now I pay them $4 a month to suppress ads (natively) and access extended features. I see a lot of promise in the "freemium" model, not just for discussion sites but for pretty much any type of service. You build out something basic and provide that for free, then offer some combination of ad removal, better access, and bonus features for those who are willing to fork over a couple of bucks.

I haven't yet found a compelling reason to pay for Slashdot, though. Maybe if they gave subscribers a Bennett filter?

Piracy has been the norm for 20 years and has been mainstream for at least 10 of those years. There is no lack of new content that I've noticed. Lack of new ideas, maybe; recently we've seen that even Sony's own employees are tired of the same formulaic Adam Sandler dreck coming out year after year...

Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, there's a lot of quality programming recently that's making money hand over fist, piracy or no piracy. Half of it is even on free-to-air TV channels to start with.

I think his point is that even billion-dollar enterprises, who can well afford to hire entire teams of information security and risk management professionals if they cared to do so, frequently don't bother. While IT in general is seen as a cost center and is often woefully underfunded, it at least exists, because management recognizes at some level that without employees to build and maintain that infrastructure, they wouldn't be able to check their email or load up their dashboards and revenue charts. Information security has no such tangible or visible benefit, and thus falls into the category of "why would we pay people for that?"

The Sony case is interesting because this time around, unlike TJ Maxx, Target, Home Depot, et al it wasn't millions of faceless plebeian customers who got fucked over. No, this time the victim is the company itself. Nobody's going to fix this by issuing a boilerplate apology and offering victims a free year of useless credit monitoring service. The corporation is the one suffering (oh, the schadenfreude!); this actually scares enterprise management types, it's a threat that can be quantified. Sony's misfortune comes with the benefit that it's certainly cajoling a few other companies into taking a second look at their own security situations.

You can opt out of the binding arbitration clause, not that they advertise this fact. I believe you're "supposed" to complete the form within 30 days of commencement of service, but I don't know whether or not that requirement itself is legally binding.

Self-Destructing Cookies is pretty nice for those who find it impractical to disable cookies entirely.

If an insurance company thinks you're lying about a disability claim, they aren't going to bother with law enforcement or medical records or some dubious fitness app. They'll hire a $300/day private investigator to follow you around for a few days and get photos of you at the golf course. He'll be checking all of your social media, he's probably going to be in your credit and phone records as well, via legal gray areas. If it's a worker's comp claim, they'll have him tail you until the day you go back to work. Insurance will happily pay a PI $10K a month to follow a suspected fraudster on a $100K claim. They only have to win that bet one out of ten times to break even.

Internet operated drones? Even with the more modern RCs, even with higher-end transmitters, you still need line of sight to operate them; we're generally talking 2.4 GHz here. Aside from the military, I don't think anyone is sitting around in their flight ops chair controlling RCs miles away. If you encounter a "drone" somewhere, the operator is nearby.

Well there's one camp very actively pushing the speculation that North Koreans did this because they're butthurt about "The Interview." At the same time, several articles report there's evidence that the breach may have been ongoing for more than a year. These two things don't line up; "The Interview" hadn't been promoted or even publicly announced a year ago, so there would have been nothing for the North Koreans to be upset about.

I'm still waiting for the official announcement from Sony and Mandiant (wasn't that supposed to have happened already?) but in any event I'm not sold on the whole Nork idea.

Interesting. That points in a direction entirely separate from the "North Korea did it because they hate 'The Interview' film" narrative...

Who are you going to sue? The federal government must explicitly allow you to sue them. Guess what, they don't do that very often.

Trouble is they're all marked up with Sharpie around the outside...