It may prolong it though, if it continues making the news due to lawsuits or criminal prosecution, or re-introduce it once it's subsided.

Unfortunately the addage, "three may share a secret...if two are dead," applies perfectly here. All of the system/software security in the world doesn't matter if someone that is authorized decides to violate the trust of the other party.

Money, important as it is, is impersonal. Any given United States Dollar can be exchanged with any other United States Dollar in the context of being fiat currency and it is irrelevant to the owner, and a perpetrator that steals a Dollar from someone has no further power over the victim and cannot continue to harm the victim after the original theft. In the case of banks, there are laws governing the culpability and liability of a bank to its depositors, to the point that the FDIC forces banks to shut down and merge when they get overleveraged to prevent a complete failure.

As to the personal side of the money angle, if I don't follow good practices like attempting to protect my PIN, then perhaps I deserve the headache associated with having to deal with the bank to get the matter resolved.

On the other hand, naked pictures are personal, and the argument can be made that the continued distribution is further victimization when the pictures were made in private and were redistributed without permission. It gets murkier when one considers the copyright belongs to the photographer, not the subject, but if the distributor is not the copyright holder then in the past, the subject has been considered a victim.

On the same vein, this is not the first time that celebrities have had their personal photos redistributed by someone other than the subject or the photographer. Off the top of my head, Kat Dennings and Scarlett Johansson were recent victims of this, and there have been numerous redistributions of private photos unauthorized by both the photographer and the subject, and more still that were unauthorized by just the subject, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.

If they were taken off of an Apple server/service, then yes, Apple might bear some culpability, but based on what I've seen, Apple is no worse than anyone else, they all fail. The entire industry needs an enema, everything from the communications protocols that our data transfers happen on to the user credential policies is flawed, and that includes the servers, services, and underlying code that makes it all work.

I still think that you're describing an asymptote situation, one where we can quantify what we want the situation to be, but where as much a we strive for it we never actually get there.

We'll never get there because fundamentally, we like dirt, scandal, sensationalism, dirty laundry, whatever you want to call it. That fundamental vulnerability will always cause someone to seek-out other vulnerabilities, and every technology has them.

Way too many faces for them all to be fakes.

I remember fanbois going on about how Macs don't get viruses, but I don't remember Apple stating that.

I think that qualifies as, "enjoying the fruits of it"...

I am happy to blame the victim in all circumstances where the victim was presented with the information needed to understand the odds of it and to avoid becoming a victim in advance of it happening. The crux of the matter is that I do not *only* blame the victim.

More than a decade ago my pickup truck was stolen out of the parking lot of the apartment that I lived in. I didn't have a steering wheel lock or other immobilization device on it and per my parents' advice only had liability coverage, as it was an older truck and only worth a couple-thousand dollars Unfortunately I had also just been laid-off, and couldn't afford to buy another vehicle and left with none. I bore at least some responsibility as I did not make an effort to see how theft-prone these trucks were, did not use anything to make the vehicle a harder target, and didn't have the insurance necessary to deal with it. My parents also accepted some blame in that the insurance situation was their idea, and they let me borrow a vehicle until I found work, then they bought me a cheap vehicle and I paid them back as I could afford to.

Blaming the victim does not mean demonizing the victim. It means there's an understanding that the victim took unnecessary risks and suffered the consequences of those risks when the odds fell against their favor. This is a cruel world that we live in, and while it's nice to think that maybe some day people won't commit acts against each other, that is never going to happen and we all have to do our part to protect ourselves, as again, we can only affect our own behavior, not anyone else's.

Her words at an awards show where she commented that if she showed a tit she'd break the Internet, then reached up for her decolletage, throws a bit of a wrench in that analysis. The venue was far too public for her to let her guard down, and it flies in the face of a carefully cultivated image of higher standards in a vein like that of Taylor Swift.

My home is connected to the street network. That doesn't mean I expect anyone with access to the street to have access to my home.

The real issue here is trusting Apple to manage the lock on your front door.

That my house is connected to the street network is why I have locks on my doors, a fence around my backyard, locks on my windows, curtains and blinds on my windows, and a security system. I follow my own due diligence to attempt to keep people out by making it hard for them to know what stuff I have, as difficult as possible for them to get in such that they have to break laws in the act, and I have a means of detecting if they force their way in otherwise.

It's wrong of people to attempt to steal my stuff, but just because it's wrong doesn't excuse me from making an effort to ensure that it doesn't happen.

Stop. This is the fault of allowing users to use devices with no training. Standard I.T. data security ON THE PART OF THE USERS would have prevented this. If you dont understand the device you are using, seek training, or dont put sensitive info on it. Its not ok to be a moron in the Information Age.

I used to feel that way, but I don't think it works that way anymore. There's too much tech to be able to keep up with it, even for computing professionals. There are too many things that we're dependent on that we only get to see as a black box. There are too many vulnerabilities constantly discovered and often times left unpatched (Heartbleed anyone?) that are out of the user's control.

Yes, there are some things that the user can control, but there are plenty of things outside of that control, and plenty of other things that stop working if the user doesn't allow various services to be turned on or available. In some ways it's our own Chilling Effect, but those are the breaks when one wants to foist interconnectivity on everyone and everything. It means now that everything is potentially subject to review by everyone else.

the screenshots were probably the biggest mistake though. He identified extra nodes (quite literally with the machine names) that made it much easier to cross-check real-world "networking" to other people and the organization that he works for. Or worked for, as I expect that come tomorrow he won't work there anymore as his sheer presence will be damaging to the company. Heck, if he used company resources and the FBI comes calling, all of those computers in the screenshots will probably be confiscated and the company will effectively wither on the vine.

If he hadn't been showboating he might have managed to stay anonymous enough to be left alone.

You get a shot at seeing boobies and all the sudden all those complaints you have about the NSA peeking at your files goes flying out the window. When that's brought up all the sudden we've got something worthwhile to spend our mod-points on. Cute.

No one really wants to pay taxes. We will seek out any and all provisions of the tax code to pay as little tax as reasonably possible. At the same time many of us will make the argument in favor of higher taxes on groups of people that can afford it, even if we ourselves are in that group. Warren Buffet and George Soros have both said it and they would be greatly impacted by it.

It's possible to advocate against a behavior that one engages in without simply being in denial. It's possible to advocate against government data mining and against computer hacking in general while still enjoying the fruits of it, understanding that one may eventually no longer be able to enjoy the results if one gets one's way.

Well, when I got my phone that uses "the cloud", security was never a marketing feature touted. Come to think of it, the only cloud-served phone that I can think of that really talks about security is Blackberry, and that seems tenuous at best.

Some are freaking-out though, or at least their publicity management people are. From what I gather, someone started tweeting they were fake, and apparently the more were released to prove they weren't.

I do expect that the leaking of such images could cost actors some roles or cause other damage. Family-friendly movies might not cast them if the controversy would hurt the bottom-line of the movie, or these could end up pushing the actress toward the casting-couch. Or, as we've seen with other actresses that have gone off the deep end in concert with nude photos or public indecency photos, they could end up with a reputation that means they don't really get cast at all.