Does anyone actually use Google+? I signed up and then immediately stopped using it. Let them drop my account if they can't verify my identity. Google+ just isn't something I'm interested in, and if they want to enforce rules that I don't want to obey, I just won't use it. If they do that with my email, then I will just move to another service.

*Hint* When someone changes their initial theory from something that can be quantified (ie. "global temperature will increase because of man-made greenhouse gases") to something that can't be quantified ("ie. global temperature will get both hotter and colder in different parts of the world") it means they have realized their initial theory was incorrect and they are scrambling to find another theory.

Basically, if you're telling me that the theory of climate change is now "Some places will get hotter and some places will get colder", then there is nothing that can disprove the theory, since, yes, there will be parts of the world that will get hotter and parts that will get colder. It's a meaningless, nonsensical theory at that point.

That's like saying "Greenhouse gasses will cause more humans to die in some locations, and more humans to be born in other locations." I will always be able to point to some areas of the world where the birth rate has increased, and others where the death rate has increased.

Most illegal mp3s have comments in the ID3 tags. Write a program that goes through and strips all the ID3 tags and replace then with your own. This will also do the trick of modify any MD5 checksums. After that it would be hard to prove anything, unless they isolated the audio data and used that specifically to try to detect exact matches. But then it would be hard to prove anything from that.

Lulzsec is funny and clever, but they haven't attacked a really big name site. But if they were real hackers, they would have tried to take down Facebook, E-trade, WoW, etc, something to generate an enormous amount of press. Instead, they've attacked small sites, security companies that didn't exist until a few months previous, and they attacked the CIA website. They've generated a lot of light, but not a lot of heat. For someone with their level of coordination, they certainly are trying to get themselves caught by posting on Twitter, going on IRC, leaving voice traces, etc. I don't buy the idea that they are complete nihilists, it's too exhausting.

The only thing I can think of is that these guys really are CIA, and they're trying to get blackhat credibility, in order to infilitrate and take down Anonymous. Sure, there's some collateral damage, but it's for the "greater good", right? My only hope is that I'm wrong, but I doubt it. The fact that they've teamed up with Anonymous after only a couple of months in existence makes me think I'm right.

Someone just cashed out a large deposit of bitcoins, and these nerds and bitcoin miners just got played. 3 months ago, this thing was less than $1. Now it was $30? lolz Someone made some good money, and waited for there to be enough liquidity for them to be able to cash out and raped the order book. This is a classic accumulation/distribution (a.k.a pump and dump) pattern where a few buyers suck in a multitude of retail fools by slowing raising the price through accumulation, and then once retail fervor hits, they dump it and get out. It's so stereotypical, it's a cliche, and I guess bitcoin just fell for it as well. I only wish I could short this thing, it's going back to below $1.

We will punish Google's claims of hacking with MORE HACKING!

On a similar note to this, since hashing can be defeated with rainbow tables, does anyone have any authoritative information on the state of rainbow table cracking? I just from a previous post that lulzboat cracked their passwords using rainbow tables, and looking through the password file, the passwords were substantially more complex than what I would use. Are rainbow tables at the state now where using special characters and numbers aren't good enough anymore? How long do we need to make our passwords? Does anyone like Bruce Schneier give guidance on this now?