Dear US military and federal contracting wanker-sphere,
I know you were 30 years late discovering this whole internet thing, so imagery and phrases from 1980s cyberpunk still sound super-duper-cutting-edge to you, but can you please stop using "cyber" as a catch-all for everything connected to computers? Thanks.

PS: When you leave a laptop full of citizen's private information on the bus, and a million people's social security numbers turn up on pastebin the next day, that's called "negligence" not "a cyberattack".

An app can hardly be less secure than the current system. Knowing the target's name and room number is all it takes to "hack" most hotel locks - just ask the front desk clerk to make you a new key!

That only worked because the people harmed by having their satellite cards bricked were willfully infringing DirecTV's copyrights, and suing DTV for frying their smartcards would be admitting it in court. At absolute best the pirates might get triple actual damages, but 3x the cost of a smartcard is next to nothing, and then the counter-suits would have been a slam dunk for DTV to win $750,000 statutory damages from each of them.

If FTDI wants to use that strategy they're going to have to contend that every end-user of a device with a counterfeit FTDI chip knew it was fake. Doesn't sound plausible to me, but the US courts are generally tech-idiotic so I suppose it's not entirely impossible.

They're also playing the class-action lawsuit lottery.

In fact, it might be worth the $5 to buy one of those cheap shit USB-to-serial adapters, let them brick it, and hope the settlement is that they have to give everyone affected a genuine FTDI one...

The average user isn't going to have (or be able to write) a secure random word selector. He's going to look at the "new password" field and think up 4 words, and they're almost certain to be related somehow.

The hash of "rrrybgdts" is going to be cracked in half a second with the right ruleset. Passphrases don't help the root problem, that "memorable" implies low-entropy.

All you have, less the costs you impose on others through pollution, use of state services, etc.

We *should* be using L/100km, like everyone else.

And taxing fuel at a higher rate instead of this CAFE silliness. But that's never going to happen because if we know one thing about economics in America it's that all taxes are always bad.

They mandate a whopping three hours a week (oh! tyranny!), and that law has been in effect since 1990.

So they're just like the 1970s cartoons with one real animator and an army of terrible inbetweeners that you're getting nostalgic for, but with more accurate color...

They didn't stop, but they did make it opt-in. If something crashes and you click "Close the program and check with Microsoft for a solution", it still beams the core dump up to the Redmond mothership.

Well, shit. That's what I get for not ssh-ing into a Mac to check.

And it's the developers of all those packages and distros that symlink /bin/sh to bash instead of something minimal and well-audited that we should be screaming at. But "remote root exploit in bash" is sexier (after all, Apple doesn't put procmail on every Mac) so that's what goes in the headline.
 
...and next time someone goes on a rant about systemd versus "the Unix way", remember that daemons passing input from the network to /bin/sh is part of "the Unix way".

"In a Reddit thread under the title “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul” [sic], Mr Wong wrote: “I did not say ‘we won’t ban any subreddits ever’. I said that we don’t ban subreddits for being morally bad."

Mr. Wong, with all due respect (that's not much for the record). Horse. Fucking. Shit.

  If you make a rule against X (and ban X-related subreddits) but not rules against Y and Z, you're making a moral statement that Y and Z are more acceptable than X. There's just no other coherent reading of those rules. If you're trying to make a community where bestiality and racism are considered morally better than leaked celebrity nudes, that's fine - it's your site, but have the spine to fucking own it.

Their business plan was "get acquired by Twitter", and that's not happening.