Well they claimed Mitnick was capable of starting World War III from a prison cell, so I guess SWATing someone should be easy.

Why would he use an anonymous VOIP service to call the police, only to tell them exactly where he is?

There's a corporate website I worked on that (still, years later) sets a cookie named "Flavor" with a value of "chocolateyChip." It passed code review without objection, so why not? Things like that are harmless and I don't really think they're unprofessional. A lot of companies could probably stand to lighten up a little.

Yes, and Nixon would be considered liberal by modern standards. The Republican party has shifted American politics so far to the hard right that today's mainstream Democrats are barely left-of-center, and they're still railed at for being "socialists."

I've had to interact with a few services that use questions like this for authentication. Invariably, they ask things about me that even I don't know. "What was your monthly payment on the auto financed through GMAC in 1995?" With three close choices like $261.17, $263.41, and $264.28, so I can't ballpark it. Do people really keep records for a car they paid off 15 years ago?

It doesn't spread across the land by floating through the air, but it sure sucks when a fly ash dam breaks.

They appear to have fixed the problem by taking the entire application offline. Brill[i]ant!

He tried; Comcast doesn't do that (and I suppose this is why).

NSA isn't supposed to be collecting most domestic signals in the first fucking place. I'd rather not legitimize or excuse that behavior, I don't care who it might help track down.

I don't see that as a likely scenario. For one, most people who sign up for cable modem service are going to do whatever the nice people at Comcast say to do, which is why these "xfinitywifi" spectrum-blasting hotspots are showing up in the first place. And the users who are a bit tech savvy are damned sure going to want their own cable modem and router (whether it belongs to them or they rent it from Comcast) in their own home, to ensure they get the best speed possible.

Technical support forums all over the web are full of people bitching, whining, and moaning that they don't get satisfactory speeds from the CPE installed in their own home. Do you think everyone is going to order service but decline the equipment, with some master plan to use the neighbor's signal that's even weaker than what a router in their own home could provide?

Apps in the Play Store have always been subject to DMCA takedowns, along with the shenanigans DMCA makes possible. The "legitimate apps being held hostage" scenario already happens. For example, someone ripped off the Camfrog app, then filed a false DMCA complaint alleging that the real Camfrog app was infringing. Camfrog appealed the DMCA notice, and Google responded by taking down the real app for a day or two.

In fact it might have. Reporting the issue immediately would have given the affected emergency services a chance to get the message out via television, radio, Facebook/Twitter/etc. and use the opportunity to remind the public of the non-emergency numbers. A few days ago my local PD's domestic violence hotline had some kind of outage, and a temporary backup number was all over the news right away. A 911 outage would affect a lot more people, and the sooner they know to put out the info, the better.

Radar and laser don't apply to me if I'm speeding. Right? Oh.

FCC rules don't apply to me using interesting hardware to intercept cellphone traffic. Right? Oh.

Regulations don't apply to me if I want to sell firearms to people in Mexico. Right? Oh.

Yep, this seems par for the course. We peasants can go fuck ourselves while the ruling class does what they please. I mean we can't expect them to reveal the horrific things that are going on to protect corporate trade secrets. Sheesh.

Of course it isn't newsworthy. Give it a decade. Once the entirety of the story has long since blown over, then they'll issue their official response.

That's how the government operates now. Just when you've completely forgotten about your FOIA request, they'll finally respond with hundreds of pages of fully redacted content, because they can't endanger old corporate trade secrets. What an excuse. They don't even bother playing the National Security card anymore, they straight up admit that business trumps all.

Sorry, can't give you any insight into how the government operates, it might jeopardize corporate profits!

I think it's worth mentioning that Google didn't necessarily want to go public, they were forced to do so in 2004 because they had a certain valuation and a certain number of shareholders. 10 or 11 years ago, I really believe that "don't be evil" was part of Google's culture. Once they were wedged into becoming a publicly traded company, all bets were off. Shareholder profits uber alles.