A very interesting point, and one on which I agree. To date, companies haven't cared much about cybersecurity because there's no fiscal benefit to spending all that money. This case may indeed change that.

No, liability insurance pays out according to the terms of the contract.

If I were writing an insurance policy to protect a company against hacking, I'd sure as heck include clauses that require the insured party to take certain steps to protect that data. *If* such terms were part of the contract, and *if* Sony didn't abide by the terms of the contract, then the insurer isn't under any obligation to pay out.

It all comes down to: what were the terms of the policy? None of us knows that, so we're all just taking WAGs on this issue.

Yes, but....

Most liability contracts have clauses that require the insured to take certain measures to reduce their risk. If this policy does contain such clauses, and Sony didn't take those measures, it certainly stands to reason that the policy won't pay out.

It all comes down to what the contract says. Since that contract hasn't (as far as I'm aware) been released, all we can do here is guess.

Your wife may not have committed the crime the police were investigating, but she may have committed several crimes by making the recordings. If your wife didn't need a lawyer before, she likely does now.

Unfortunately, in order for that to happen, a case would have to go to trial. It appears the police departments involved have been smart enough not to let any of these cases actually go to trial. I remain optimistic that, when one of these cases finally does make it to trial, courts will in fact interpret the law consistently with loads of case law that have found that an individual in a public space has no expectation of privacy. Hopefully, the court will throw in there the public good that is served by videotaping law enforcement officials in the line of duty as well. But I'm not as confident in that one actually happening.

...I'd bet a lot of money that napkins hold up BETTER than hard drives and floppy drives for data retention. It's hard to beat ink on paper for longevity.

This doesn't explain it.

American consumers are watching companies abandon customer service and outsourcing these functions to overseas companies that employ call-takers that have no knowledge of the products they support, no ability to do any real troubleshooting, and no authority to give any help at all outside the script on their desk.

India isn't the cause of the problem; it's the symptom. When we call and talk to someone in India, we're not upset at India, we're upset at the company we're trying to do business with, which has let us down. Talking to someone in India is simply the indication that the company we're working with doesn't care about us as customers.

I'd be happy if they'd just provide competent support, at any price. We have ~10,000 SUN servers and Oracle is happy to let my servers sit out of production for weeks at a time when they can't figure out the cause of a problem. If my software platform didn't have redundancy built in at the application layer I'd be losing millions of dollars a month to this. Dell, HP, or IBM would replace a server if they couldn't get it back into production. Not Oracle. Oracle will "research" the problem for weeks on end while my server sits, powered up, but out of production.

It wouldn't. But neither would an antivirus program.

The Gameduino handles the video output. Any input device you'd like can be connected to the Arduino that's running the show.