Maybe I'm old or out of touch (or both) but for the life of me I cannot think of a reason for that number to be more than maybe 1% outside of some lazy programmers.

I'm disappointed, I expected to see the quack with his copy/pasta claiming that EVs cause more air pollution than gas cars by now.

I did not need that image...

Wow, the zip-bomb link is interesting. This is why I keep coming to /.

Going beyond "a termite mound or a species of squirrel", we are now at the level of pond scum.

"Security flaws" are not necessary in a lot of these cases, for the most part if you can reach the TV's IP address you can get to the camera because they put **NO** thought into securing it any further than that.

The same can be said about building automation systems, security systems, HVAC systems, etc. I worked in physical security (key cards, cameras, alarms and the like) for over a decade and a half and the utter lack of security on many of the products was appalling. For example AMAG, the second largest vendor of key card systems, only supported MSDE or SQL 2000 with no service packs until 2012. The most expensive security camera that I ever had to install had one user, root, with a hard coded password of 1234 which could not be changed (we only installed those once, at the customer's insistence. Nice camera though). Cisco's miserable excuse for a video system only worked with XP with no service packs (when SP2 had already been issued).

The Target breach was through a remote access connection for the HVAC installers, rather than through the hardware. The entire company used a single easily cracked password on all installations to allow anyone in the company to service any site, and when they were granted remote access they just used that same password. This is unfortunately common throughout all the construction trade, we had a list of passwords that we had ferreted out used by other companies. I could have logged into any installation done by three of the six largest security installers in North America, and probably half of the others.

More likely they probably won't even bother to kill the camera, just create another press release saying they did.

Without getting paid, anyways.

If it's got the Apple logo on it there will be no shortage of suckers.

I suppose it is mostly the first one. Of course, the emotion it evokes is mostly disgust and anger. The second also evokes emotions. Milder, more positive ones.

Whichever way you spin it, it's a scam. Perhaps fraud even, though I don't know about the legalities around setting up these kinds of funds.

"It includes customer names, driver's license numbers, and social security numbers"
I'm wondering why they collected this data in the first place. Well, name and address, sure. But the rest? Maybe it is needed for car insurance and auto loans, but aren't those usually handled by partners?

BTW most (maybe all) countries in the EU have SSNs, even if they are called something else. (Here it's a "citizen service number"). But you generally don't give that to companies..

I don’t get the obsession with flying cars anyway. There’s a Dutch company working on one, that is road legal and should soon receive its airworthiness certificate. Sounds great. Until you see the price tag and realise that this thing is a crappy car and a meh airplane, and costs more than a nice car and better airplane.

I don't think we should expect to see steady progress toward a climate solution, I think it's going to happen quite suddenly after some combination of the technology to do it getting cheap enough and the climate producing enough "shit's getting real" moments for a large fraction of the first-world population. At that point either we'll get our asses in gear and set up oceanic and atmospheric carbon sequestration megastructures all over the planet with maybe a little SRM sprinkled on top, or we'll be too distracted or impoverished to do anything about it for some silly reason or another and all the disastrous predictions will come true because this is a problem we're collectively too stupid as a species to solve. That's a real possibility.