Apart from the fact that you're mixing UPDATE syntax with INSERT syntax, substitution is perfectly valid so long as each string has been sanitized in the correct manner for a particular database connection (that is, not addslashes()). For the MySQLi client library, it looks like this:

$fname = $db->escape_string($fname);
$lname = $db->escape_string($lname);

Don't get me wrong; it's bad practice to escape manually unless you're using operator IN on a database client library that supports neither array parameters nor named placeholders (such as MySQLi). But code that correctly uses $db->escape_string() (or the equivalent for other languages or database drivers) should be safe from SQL injection, just as code that correctly uses htmlspecialchars() should be safe from script injection.

But how long do you keep these mirrors around, in case there's a screw-up that goes undiscovered for a while?

Against the uploader of the torrent, not against the site. OCILLA shields compliant providers from liability for uploaders' actions.

So which is Battlefield Earth? Or is it a cult classic only to those actually in a cult?

Yeah, because Flash drives are such a secure way to move data...

I'm assuming that Sony, being a very large multinational company, has a very large Intranet, which means at various points its going to be traversing the open Internet at various points.

Unless you're advocating Sony lay down its own fiber and then turn off its gateway routers....

I'd be interested in knowing the details of the attack. Was it a "social engineering" attack of some kind (ie. a virus-laden email that someone with high privileges opened)? Was it a vulnerability in their networks? I've heard someone with high level admin privileges had their account hacked, but in what way was it done?

The organization I work for is a contractor for the government of a North American jurisdiction, and yesterday morning I started getting reports that some sort of virus-laden emails were flowing out of this government's networks. Sure enough, within a half an hour, I got emails from a contact I have within this particularly agency, with an attached ZIP file with an SCR file inside. That has to be one of the oldest ways that malware has been transmitted in Windows system, I saw my first virus-laden SCR file somewhere around 1997-1998.

Apparently this critter is so new that by the time we checked, only a few AV companies had caught on to it. Even worse in some ways is that it appears that it made its debut on the very government servers in question, making me think this was a targeted attack. So you have a combination of a brand new virus of some kind that won't get caught by the scanners, lax email rules that allow the opening and execution of executable file types (not that blocking EXE variants doesn't mean some bastard won't be firing off a compromised PDF at an unpatched system), and users who through a combination of laziness and ignorance happily take the final step.

With this particular attack, there would have been no problem if Outlook had been configured not to open these kinds of attachments, and in an Active Directory environment, that's pretty trivial, so some of the blame has to go to this government agency's IT team. But still, even with the best safeguards, where users just happily click on any old attachment, it doesn't exactly take a rare alignment of the stars to have malware planted in a network. Sure, it won't have root privileges and won't be able to propagate itself via more sophisticated means, but it appears in this case it didn't need to.

So I do agree to some point that there are finite limits to what any person or organization can do to secure itself against a determined and directed attack. But there are ways to make such attacks much more difficult, and more quickly captured before they wreak too much harm.

What would you label Al Gore "the polar caps will be gone in twenty years!!!" and the people who believed in drowning polar bears?

What do you call people who said weather would be extreme and unbearable within a few years, but it never happened.

These are extraordinary claims, yet they are proven false time and time again. THE only thing Science has proven, is CO2 levels rising. The rest of the predictive outcomes have been largely falsified.