We could make him so fat he damages his own joints... Damn, he even beat us to that bit of parody.

I don't think NK is a satellite state in the usual sense of the word. China certainly shields NK, but its reasoning isn't always clear. NK does act as a major counterbalance to US interests (Japan, South Kore and Taiwan). At the same time, NK seems extremely suspicious of China and some believe that at least part of the reason for the latest purge was to cut out members of the regime with too close a ties to China.

So we should burn any movie script that dares insult some violent tyrant, lest they get upset? Should we also stop publishing reports on said tyrants? Just how much would you like the West to appease the likes of Kim Jong-Un?

I'm not comparing features, but penetration.

Likely Java. Microsoft and its astroturfers like to tell themselves faerie tales about how the big players are all bending to Redmonds, but it's just the same pathetic wishful thinking that had Redmondites insisting Unix was drying and everyone was moving to NT.

Oh bullshit. Java dwarfs .NET.

Because freedom in North Korea would be the worstest thing ever.

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.

The minute Microsoft made Activesync sufficiently robust, BB's cause célèbre evaporated.

Remember when RIM opened up its network so the Saudi and Indian governments could spy on BB users....

Judging by sales, that group is pretty damned small and it is very questionable that it is large enough to keep the company afloat.

Go pump BB's stock somewhere else.

Thank goodness a movie like Life of Brian wasn't released in these knee-trembling times.