I don't understand all the people on the net claiming that banning all these accounts right before the RMAH came out was to increase the price of items and thus gain a bigger share. As with all transactional systems, blizzard isn't planning on raking in money from 1,000 people buying $100 items, but from 1,000,000 people buying $4 items. In-game inflation will greatly reduce Blizzard's profit, not increase it.

In the case details it mentions that his paypal revenues were either $900K or $1.2Mil

I sat through the talk about this exploit at DefCon, called "Hacking Millions of Home Routers" or something like that. What was discussed during that talk includes a method for accessing the _LAN_ side of the router by an external attacker. A live demo showed the presenter using the exact same default password "password1" with his published tool. Many posters have argued that Verizon was out of line for using their backdoor port to do password modifications, but given the choice between getting 0wned by either your ISP or some Russian or Chinese hackers, I'd take the devil I know.

The good news is that according to the DefCon talk, changing from the default password makes the attack much more difficult. Perhaps a dead-tree mailer would have been preferable to many, but with exploits being released to so many people at once, quick action is the best course, IMHO.

My relative has a company that inserts local commercials into cable television. Frequently, local companies produce their own ads for him. Every new commercial is digitized, and he sets the volume on them one by one to be appropriate. However, the only way he figured out "appropriate" was by setting it to a a certain level, listening when it played _live_, and then calibrating future ads to the right volume based on that. His ear is the only standard for his ads precisely because the cable provider isn't doing any volume manipulation or standardization downstream of him.

Urist Stormfist cancels drink: Interrupted by Macaque Hulk.
Urist Stormfist has been struck down.

Arcane mages (a specialization) are mages that wear plate. Shapeshifters are mages that spend all their time in animal form. Warriors specialized in ranged weapons are equally competent at it as rogues.
It isn't as simplistic as the review makes it, and I've been quite happy with it.

Using Your Data Center to Warm the Sea?

It doesn't surprise me. With the exception maybe of blizzard, it seems most MMO games are wholly focused on preventing cheating and entirely disregard client security as a result. I would bet that many chat interfaces have gaping holes since they aren't "core" to the gameplay - plus it gives the attacker simultaneous access to the maximum number of players.

Imagine if someone nefarious had (or did) find this exploit first. Account stealing of even 10% of an MMO's playerbase would immediately compromise any financial viability of the publisher/developer. With such a high risk, why is so little time/money spent on finding these exploits?

I don't want to start running my games in a sandbox because I can't trust the industry to take care of itself.