I appreciate software is different than engineering, but the collaboration, mentoring, and comorodory of an open office environment really helps build the business for us. While I do have an office

You like the open office environment, although you have your own office... how nice. Open offices are really nice as long as it is someone else dealing with being packed in like cattle.

One of the requirements of PCI compliance with the credit card companies is that you don't use default passwords in any equipment tied to the card transaction.

Which makes this even more interesting. Based on the password and the fact that a paperclip is required I know the specific vendor and equipment to which the article refers, despite the authors going to great lengths to omit that information. The vendor is a big one and their equipment is involved in millions of electronic payments made every day. You could even say they are "the way to pay." In fact, they are involved in PCI certification for most production deployments involving their hardware: most, but not all, because certain deployments using default configurations do not need additional certification, just a quick verification that IP addresses and the like are properly configured.

I understand the need for a default password, but it really should be changed. That being said, the encryption keys are not accessible using that password. They are stored in a hardware module that self-destructs if you tamper with it. They can only be set in one of two secure locations both controlled by the vendor: if you attempt to use any other means to mess with the keys, bye-bye memory card that stores them. This is bad, but not as bad as it sounds at first.

If there's a real incident in progress, this wouldn't work. They'd either not answer, or be compelled by the people with guns to tell the cops that everything is a-okay.

I agree, nobody would answer. From the summary, nobody even has to read the article for this one:

...claimed to be holed up in the town's closed public library with two hostages and a bomb.

I might be missing something, but if you encrypt the plaintext by XOR ing it with itself, wouldn't you get an easily decryptable to letter frequency attack cypertext?

You get a string as long as the plaintext consisting of NUL characters (0x00).

Also, this author probably doesn't have a security clearance, so pretty much all the sources of info he is going to have access to is going to be by definition declassified.

By definition, classified information released into the world and publicly available is still classified. It still has legal protections, including being a felony for distributing it.

In practice in 2015 this policy is ineffective, but it is still the law. Back when a leak meant photocopying secrets and giving them to the Soviets it made more sense. Now that we have the Internet, Wikileaks, Snowden, Manning, et al. it does not make a lot of sense but it does not have to as long as we are talking legal definitions.

Just stay away from as many chemicals as you can.

You do realize that everything is made of chemicals, right?

Exactly this. A well encoded DVD is plenty good enough for anything other than very large screens and for people with insanely large screens they won't be buying 4k because it will cost more than their homes.

Nope. I have a 46" 1080p HDTV and sit around 10 feet from it. I have compared DVD and Blu-ray versions of some of the same movies that I bought on both mediums. The difference is night and day. If I watch on my 1080p computer monitor, 23" and I sit about 2 feet away, it is even more noticeable.

DVDs annoy the piss out of me because they are so blurry. Blu-rays might not be the high-resolution king anymore, but they are certainly not blurry.

The Github projects being taken down contain source code that is definitely somebody's intellectual property in each case. And by filing fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, these porn sites are misrepresenting themselves as the owners of that intellectual property.

I know this is Slashdot, and asking someone to read the article is a bit much, but nobody is removing projects or any IP from Github. They are demanding that Google remove the links from their search results. From the article, emphasis added:

Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by companies representing various porn companies in the last month alone have resulted in dozens of legitimate GitHub URLs being removed from the search engine's results, TorrentFreak first reported.

The exact same text appears in the summary at the top of this page. You do not even have to read the article, just the summary!