They are paying ~$1.10 per subscriber to Viacom, and they want to increase it to a little above $2.

Yeah, I'm wondering how all of this boils down to how much Bell Labs (or Lucent or IBM or whoever owns the Unix copyrights) is going to start suing for using stdio.h, stdlib.h and string.h!

Those header files are the same as the Java API; and if this is a copyright issue then the authors of those works can still claim it (Life+70 years!).

Did it get hacked into before or after you added the two step auth?

Also, are you using Google Account Reports? It now tells you exactly where and how you've logged into your Google Accounts; I think the SMS that you get are actually from this, not the two-step auth.

I feel much safer with the application one-time passwords and two-step hardware keycodes than any other service.

Does your Linode Server have two step auth to access email? And can you do that on your phone?

I believe that Instagram is 100% hosted on AWS EC2 instances and S3. We'll see if they move to Facebook's data centers.

The $1B valuation of that company would not have been possible without using Amazon as their provider. Amazon is definitely doing something right.

Its not a chatterbot. Its CALO. http://www.ksl.stanford.edu/projects/calo/

they are going to use the digg model: revamp the site and lose all their subscribers.

The article is speculating. What you start to hear is that they were storing their password answers as plain text, Sony has never said that their passwords were stored as plain text. Meaning, that the answers they would use to recuperate their forgotten passwords (e.g. "What is your mother's maiden name?") were what was compromised.

Now, combined with the rest of the personal information, I think that the password answers to their security questions may lead to more identity theft than actual passwords.

The A people hire A people, B people hire C people originally came from Steve Jobs, right? The rest of your post is very depressing, and very true.

the internet is the blue e on my desktop!

err i meant the orange smudge around the blue dot on my gnome panel! ;)

That's actually the reason that the US government will most likely never go to a physical denomination higher than the $100 bill.

If I understand correctly, all large electronic transactions (>$10k) are auto-monitored by the banks, and tracked by the government. It is a lot harder to pay someone $50 million dollars if you do it in cash due to the size of the physical dollar bills than if you do it as an electronic payment. Given that the government wants to monitor criminal activity, super large drug cartel type money movement is a lot harder with smallish $100 bills.

$3000 being prohibitive? Try to stuff $30mil into your wallet!