Your nickname suits you very well.

Cigarette smokers who do not recognize the imposing obnoxiousness of their entirely optional habit and the burden it places on society, are by definition, selfish.

As they have made themselves practically dependent upon their habit they will of course defend it tooth and nail. The very fact they made the completely irrational decision to smoke knowing all the negative impacts of it and then go on to *defend* their irrational decision, leads me to conclude they are either plain stupid or otherwise generally irrational, and hence, cannot be reasoned with.

Let me get this right, you've taken my general disapproval of a factually unhealthy and selfish habit which is a general burden on society, and compared it with genocide?

And you think *I'm* suffering psychological pathology?

Cigarette smoking is an unhealthy, selfish habit which is a general burden on all of society, but how does my wanting it to become undesirable through means of laws equate to "exterminating" people? What kind of person are you that you jump to such a conclusion?

Depends on where you are.

Where I am, it is against the law to urinate in public, probably as it is a health hazard and in general the community finds such behaviour unpleasant. Smoking in general public areas is not yet illegal in all places unfortunately.

And even if there are designated smoking areas, why do I have to pay extra taxes so that a council can make a special smoking area in a park, or in the price of my meal, subsidize the cost of the restaurant to build a special smoking area? Urination is an avoidable part of the human condition, smoking is not.

In regards to other unpleasantness, I encounter the way too much perfume problem maybe once every few years or if it's at the work place, that is something that can addressed by company policy. I live in a city and have no livestock farms anywhere near me and if a neighbour decides to use manure in their garden, sure it's unpleasant, but it's once a year and doesn't have the side effect of poisoning their garden.

Cigarette smoking is a selfish habit which is a burden on society and it's negative aspects dwarf any possible aspects, as a member of society it is my opinion we should weigh up whether or not we should really put up with such a burden. The only kind of person who would say otherwise is said selfish cigarette smoker.

I recently moved from Ireland to South Africa and had a NAS, laptop and two LCD screens shipped over.

With the NAS (http://www.readynas.com/?cat=4) I put it in the original antistatic bag and then in its box, padded with a bit of bubble wrap and these packaging air bags. I shipped it with all its hard drives inside.

With the screens I had their original packaging, a simple plastic bag, then placed inside polystyrene packaging then in their cardboard box.

With the laptop (oldish now, so wasn't too fussed), I just put it in a regular packing cardboard box with some clothes around it.

All items arrived fine, perhaps I was luckier than some, but it seems the shippers were reasonably careful with my goods based on the state of the boxes.

For my actual computer, I disassembled it, threw away the case and the rest I put in my checked in luggage, that way I didn't have to wait the 3 months for the shipping to happen. Shipping took a long time as I didn't have much to bring back and it took a little while for enough other people to come along so there would be enough to fill up the container.

You've really answered your own questions.

The fact that you needlessly made yourself addicted to cigarettes is entirely your own doing, many people are highly effective at complicated/stressful/tedious jobs without the need to smoke. Smokers almost always take more breaks than employees who don't smoke and if they don't take regular smoke breaks, then their productivity suffers until they get their "fix". Why should an equally qualified and experienced smoker who spends less time being productive due to their habit get paid the same as me?

It really makes perfect sense to discourage smoking as it ultimately reduces economic output.

As for the story summary, times have moved on since the time of those particular people, humanity now knows better. The world would be a better place if smoking became unacceptable and the newer generations didn't get as easily addicted to the expensive and harmful substance.

This is of course all besides the fact that smoking is an expensive, unhealthy and above all, highly disgusting and typically inconsiderate habit. To me, walking past someone who is smoking is about as pleasant as walking past someone urinating against a wall.

Their compromised database is indeed a very serious privacy issue. From a security point of view, fortunately they used a good enough password hashing technique that it is largely impractical to extract passwords from the dump.

From my experience, with almost all people who have their accounts compromised, it was due to phishing or malware. Consequently, account names in screenshots will probably not make any difference to how many people have account security issues.

The thread indicates it may have appeared during WotLK alpha builds and only contains:
- Account name that was used pre-BNET or otherwise a post-BNET numeric account name. (email address is NOT included)
- IP address of the realm you are connected to, NOT the client IP. (However, this could be used to identify pirate servers).
- The time the screenshot was taken

I suspect it was most likely used to catch people leaking imagery of alpha builds which were not allowed to be made public. WotLK was the last WoW expansion Blizzard tried to keep secret for the alpha, but everyone was leaking it despite very clear NDAs having to be agreed to by all who participated. With their next expansion, they didn't bother with an NDA outside of a very small group of initial internal testers.

I wouldn't call this any kind of breach of privacy as none of the information is personal. An account name can only be matched to a real name by Blizzard and only if you play on their servers.

Of course privacy zealots will say otherwise, but each to their own.

It's not just about features, it's just that it feels like Google properly thought about every aspect of functionality of their chrome for the browser. For example, it took ages for Firefox to implement that tabs don't resize themselves after closing until after you move the mouse away. And even now, the drag handle for the Firefox window is only on the window title area and you still can't use the unused tab area as a window drag handle, where on Chrome it works fine. It's these tiny little details that I really appreciate about Chrome.

That being said, I still love Firefox's awesome bar, works better than Chrome's default address bar by a long shot, if I recall there is a Chrome extension which works the same, I may look into that, but it's not a deal breaker for me.

I always thought of it as a delegation thing which is really convenient for the users of that country. I can pay in my local currency for a local domain name and deal with a local company, rather than having to deal with dollar exchange rates and US based companies which may have vastly different business hours. It also means that things like trademark disputes can be handled locally, rather than one having to deal with US laws. It's also in the interest of said governments to keep money local (for local only businesses) rather than a constant stream of money trickling from their country to some U.S company for no particularly good reason except that the U.S. kind of got the monopoly.

In fact, if anything I think it's the generic top level domains which messed things up. With the U.S. controlling the internet first, no one really bothered with the .us ccTLD and instead used the "default" top level space, while ccTLDs are effectively 2nd class.

I think a lot of the problems with GLOBAL contention of .com namespace would be much less of a deal if it never existed and like pretty much the rest of the world, US entities used something like .co.us / .com.us.

Of course ccTLDs create their own set of challenges for international businesses, who may feel forced to maintain their domain names in all the countries in which they operate, but it also means that a silly local only mom and pop business in the US wouldn't get the the "default" .com address which is greatly coveted by a multinational, but European only company.

I'm not saying I feel this way myself, but if anyone ever wondered why Americans are often stereotyped as self-centred and oblivious to the fact they are only a part of an international community, it's stuff like this which doesn't help them. However, I acknowledge that DNS and the Internet was originally just an American thing and wasn't initially conceived to service the entire planet, but still, we are living in the world we live in, regardless of the intent or lack there of.

Cool story Mr Anonymous Coward. Believe whatever conspiracy theories that make you feel better about yourself, but fooling yourself into believing this is on Blizzard's side will not stop you getting hacked in the same way the next time you play any online game in which gold sellers can make a profit off hacking accounts.

If your account was used for farming, then it makes sense they waited until you cancelled your sub, that way you wouldn't interrupt their activities.

There are various different gold selling companies with different MOs, some steal gold, others hijack accounts and farm.

If you're actually never going to play WoW, then fair enough, if there is a chance you will do so at some point in the future, I advise you report it now while they still have logs and can make a record of any damage. If it's reported too late, the logs are gone and there is no chance of item/gold recovery. Reporting compromised accounts is really streamlined and painless, would take you less than 5 minutes to report it through the website.

Mr Anonymous Coward,

I am just someone who happens to be in the know on this subject, trying to inform fellow Slashdotters in general to not fool themselves into thinking they aren't insecure by shifting the blame to where it shouldn't be.

You are welcome to go ahead and convince yourself it *must* be Blizzard at fault here, but that won't magically stop you getting hacked the same way in the future for the next game or service you use unless you fix the real problem.

I was a Blizzard fan for years before working there, a Blizzard fan while working there and still one today, but I am also a hobbyist website developer, before there I worked there I worked as an IT technician, I am a long time Slashdot user and a fellow gamer.

But sure Mr Anonymous Coward, if you and your friends who got hacked sleep better at night being ignorant on their account security practices by believing this, go right ahead, it's not me potentially making myself a future hacking target.

Inherently with any software, there are sometimes bugs which is of course always going to be a frustration for support staff.

While your mileage may vary between the representative you speak to, most of the people I worked with were all passionate about the games and about giving the best support they could. I know this sounds cheesy, but it made my day when I managed to help someone out with a really obscure issue, or that I got a compliment on the service I gave.

I left the company to start a job in software development, which I am totally stoked about. And even though I tended to undervalue the job of a customer service representative before working there, I will tell you now that decent agents have pride in their work and from a personal sanity point of view I had to come home and feel good about myself and the best way to do that was knowing that the service I gave is the kind I would hope to be given.

I don't know enough about your particular issue to comment on the real cause, but as the launcher is working fine on my 64 bit win7 installation, it leads me to believe thisis only affecting a minority of those users meaning it could be a very hard one for the developers to track down. However, support requests costs them money and I would imagine people are being appropriately pestered to get it fixed.

I can offer some very generic advice, almost always, it was background program's or antivirus interfering with the game. Do try a selective startup with nothing else running in the background and see if it helps:
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/shutting-down-background-applications

Also, keep in mind that for every forum post about that issue, there are likely 10, 20 or maybe a hundred other users with no problem at all and thus haven't posted there. It is one of those unfortunate thing about support forums, you tend to only see the problems and never all the other users with none.

With your use of swear words and capital letters, it's not unreasonable for one to question the rationality of your statements, however, for the benefit of other readers I will say a little more on this.

Even if one were to ignore the difficulty of an employee dealing with all the internal measures against them doing such a thing, there isn't a good enough financial incentive for them to risk a job doing it. No support is outsourced, and as a first world employee, the amount of money they could get from this doesn't even remotely justify the risk to their job. Gold selling in WoW is very low margins making it only worthwhile to third world citizens.

When I left, there were no notification emails for an account being reactivated, as such, unless a friend questions you through other means about being online, you would not be aware your account was activated. Gold sellers use phishing sites, malware and engage an array of other criminal behaviour to hack accounts, as such they are not fussed to use fraudulent credit card details to add game time or even make use of any other scheme they can to get game time on an inactive account.

An experience of a small group of friends does not make a global pattern, wow has millions of players, there is a staggering amount of coincidence as a result. Also, if you and a friend visit some common website which had their password database hacked, then that could very well explain why both of you got hacked around the same time.

Generally, only big companies which have personal details or credit card data actually notify their users of security breaches, a little fan site which only has your email address and password might not even know they got owned, never mind actually tell their users if they found out.

Compromised accounts are nothing but bad news for Blizzard who loses customers, and thus revenue, as a result of them. It is worth it for them to do everything they can to prevent compromises, they have a serious financial motivation for doing so. It doesn't pay Blizzard to be ignorant on their security, it would cost them way more in terms of lost revenue than spending the money to be doing everything they can to keep their side secure.

With the above in mind, what is more likely, there was a failure with Blizzard, or that your username and password combination was unfortunately leaked into the into the hands of hackers.

No one is infallible, not me, not Blizzard and not *you*. However, once one considers how much compromised accounts cost Blizzard, then the only options become that either there really is a somewhat irrational conspiracy and Blizzard is to blame for your compromise, or the more reasonable explanation is that the compromise was completely external of Blizzard.