Some say Milk Man's come back to the future!

I have points but couldn't figure out how to mod the actual article -1 Flamebait

AUTHENTICATION CHALLENGE:
During your last session, did you (choose one):
(a) Receive email from your sister, Dorothy about her medical condition.
(b) Access your bank account 101000187-33400301
(c) Install a root kit onto 0F13C73AAB0D4E000028038C99D3125A
  [CONTINUE TO LOGIN]

Audi should put a shark on the hood!

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9491253 .... but that's even without a spacewalk.

"The virtual version of Zoe was created by Zoe Graystone herself using hacked rudimentary emulation software capable of duplicating her own V-World avatar. Graystone programmed the copy - a perfect copy - with roughly 100 terabytes of personal information from other databases. This allowed the avatar to access and translate information from medical scans, DNA profiles, psychological evaluations, school records, emails, video and audio recordings, CAT scans, genetic typing, synaptic records, security cameras, test results, shopping records, talent shows, ballgames, traffic tickets, restaurant bills, phone records, music lists, movie tickets, TV shows and "even prescriptions for birth control" - essentially turning raw data into personality and memory." -- http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Zoe_Graystone

I remember this recycled story from around 2008. The Linden Lab executive (who was also one of their main system creators originally) hasn't been with the company now for many years. This was all eons ago, but it's being brought back up in the wake of Snowden. The part about Linden Dollars and the Second Life economy is a little ridiculous, since the money is only useful for buying in-game virtual items. For example, terrorists getting some better high heels for their avatars. You can cash out Linden Dollars, but there are lots of limits and monitors on it, and you cash out through either your verified PayPal account or a bank check mailed to you. Neither of those are in any way anonymous, and they are tightly monitored by the feds at multiple levels. (You could get some IP addresses and in-game transaction information from Linden Lab if you were tracing back some accumulated cash-out; that might be useful intelligence, I guess.) Like any glorified chat system. The idea that terrorists are using Second Life for virtual training is a bad joke. No realistic scenario or actions could be created. You could use the primitive in-game 3D modeling to create a rough representation of the buildings and alleys or whatever. But very little could be communicated beyond that. Avatars can't actually do anything subtle - mainly they can just walk. Arms and hands don't do anything except point-and-click on scripted objects in the world. The scripting can make objects change texture/color and move around. Communication is a very primitive text chat system plus an in-game Voice system that doesn't work very well or reliably. So you could make a really crappy diagramatic 3D model of your bomb scenario, and walk your avatars around it. But you could do infinitely better by just looking at a street map, or Google Earth, and tracing your fingers and talking about it or whatever. Linden Lab advertises that it keeps Chat logs (etc.) for some period, six months was what they said at one point. However, I asked someone there once and they said, "Well, we've' never actually deleted any logs to date." Second Life is an interesting experiment along a number of axis, but it's capabilities are really quite primitive. They tried at one point to sell it to businesses as an online meeting system, and it was such a bad joke they gave up that marketing effort. IBM has an open-source version of the system that is integrated with some other IBM meeting software. There are other service providers running "grids" with the open-source version of SL. You can download the server and client onto your laptop if you want to play with it stand-along (or hook together with some other users and make your own network). But it doesn't have any specially great utility for terrorists. Any more than any other MUD/MOO/Mush type system. That was all just hype, years ago, from when Second Life was exciting and hyped and not understood. NSA monitors AOL chat rooms and whatever, too; it's just exactly the same thing. They didn't understand that a half decade ago when this "news" article first came out.

"Hunting the most dangerous prey of all..."

I'll give you a twelve minute head start..

Ethanol and synthehol: http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/edible-innovations/synthehol.htm
Story from 2009: http://io9.com/5434752/real+life-synthehol-will-get-you-buzzed-but-never-drunk
Trekkie: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Synthehol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxoqVvBWJLk

Is it reasonable to ask if Bruce Schneier can be trusted? WWBSD? A little history might inform your thinking on this question.

One of the early projects that Schneier lead, precipitated by the Y2K date crisis, was a security evaluation of old COBOL system (code-named "ZEBRA") that was still being used by a certain un-named U.S. Government agency.

This mainframe software had not been maintained for some years, except by patching the binary image; no online version of the source code was available. It would be too hard to audit that way, so they decided to upload the original code (from paper), recompile, diff against the binaries, and eventually reconstruct accurate source code for the Y2K bugs and security issues.

Schneier's group decided to use OCR. The source code had been "line printed" on "greenbar" paper, where alternate lines have a light green background stripes for contrast. The problem was that OCR scanners of the day were designed only for black-and-white, and would get confused by the green stripes, and sometimes mis-scan some letters and numbers, making this source code unreliable. This required them to manually read and type in corrections, to about half the code!

Bruce Schneier is an outspoken critic of agencies like the DHS and the TSA, but he has been a consultant for the Government in the past. And as you can see from the above story, he was originally an early proponent of scanners, and only in more recent years has spoken out against them. So it is quite reasonable to ask if Bruce Schneier has ever changed his stripes.

Most people I know (outside of the technology sector) don't quite understand what these news stories mean, and they figure it's probably some kind of partisan or outlier hype. And in any event, it's just another thing that seems like it might be wrong, but they trust the government, and they are resigned to the fact that they can't do anything about it in any event. Surely it will all blow over soon.

If you love trusting these kinds of compression algorithms, I have a Xerox machine I'd like to introduce you to...

I believe it is called "Ender's Game".