True. This is a technology that gets less useful the more it is used. Even if you're an idiot crook, you don't have to be a genius to understand when your crook buddy says, "Hey, I got popped for taking the drugs that are on the special holder. Don't take those."

Seems like the only purpose of this article on CNN was to generate page views by people who were fooled by the headline and summary into believing that it actually was meant to be in preparation for a zombie attack. It seems to have worked really well. The purpose of it on /. I don't understand.

The devices were not looking for "a specific frequency", and, in fact, the detections were not at the frequency the FDR/CDR were supposed to send. They were "close", and part of the reason they had confidence in the finding is that after AF447 was found, they tried out the transmitter and noted that the frequency was off by a little.

Transponders were left on during 9/11.

This is a patch to IE, not XP. IE is not EOLed. They have committed to fixing bugs in IE. It just so happens that the easiest way to patch IE is via Windows Update. This is a non-story that's being treated as though they actually patched a security bug in XP.

It's like a sick joke! They have a site that shows how much data they can mine (with your permission) and then they can do whatever they want with it?

What is this "second password verification screen"? Was it secondary identification questions (like mother's maiden name) or the same password again? I don't have an Xbox, so I have no idea what that means.

Good question. I can't imagine the code that would generate this bug.

If you encrypt, it's not very convenient to do what the person in the article did: link to a video. His IM buddy would have to download/decrypt before seeing the video. Your point is well-taken, of course. But leaving for another cloud provider is likely not going to make things any better. Cloud storage, by its broad definition, is sacrificing security for convenience (to some extent). You can certainly mitigate that via encryption, but at the loss of much of the convenience, especially when it comes to this particular use case, which is the sharing of a video.

Not for long.
From your own link:

QR codes could easily store enough. But I'd be more worried about:

Isn't that what I already said??

One other thing they could do would be a unique barcode or other machine-readable sequence on each pod, and then have the machine phone home to make sure that the code is valid and hasn't been used before. Any word on whether 2.0 requires an Internet connection?

The great thing about that idea is that slashdot'ers could systematically disable all of the real pods :-)

True. One of the comments in TFA mentioned that this could be used for bank/credit card phishing. I thought that was an important insight to note. I think you'd get even more people blindly calling their bank based on a number on Google Local, and one could listen in and get all sorts of card numbers, social security numbers, secret passcodes, etc.

It *could* be had for that amount. The 40kWh model was only really "available" for a few days. A few hundred people were grandfathered in.

Hate to be nit-picky here, but that's not true. It's a great idea to not use malloc() in a real-time application, for reasons of performance. But it can't overflow the stack.

Unless you call it recursively :-)

I think it would be pretty hard to overflow the stack by use of local variables. I mean it's easy to cause, but you'd pretty much always see it if you've even tested the program once. The best reason I can think of for not using local variables is that globals are easier to debug.

This should be rule number one for this type of application.