It's a good thing Microsoft's hardware divisions do not use any parts imported from Asia.

Oh wait....

George R.R. Martin has stated in the past that he has directed his notes and unfinished writings to be destroyed when he dies. So, if we want this series concluded, he needs to finish before he dies or depend on fanfiction (which he opposes).

Just because you do not frequently encounter it, doesn't mean it isn't used by others. darkComet is not a trojan. A trojan is something that either installs some sort of malware or is itself some sort of malware under the guise of being a legitimate application. Also, having a secure OS does not prevent a trojan, because the software is installed willingly by the person administering the machine.

darkComet is a normally useful tool, that is being used by a trojan called Blackhole RAT(the actual trojan they should be talking about in this article). There are plenty of trojans and other malware out there using netcat or VNC to control machines remotely, does that mean netcat or VNC are trojans?

And unless this has been stated otherwise, once they realized they had more data than they intended to capture, they brought it to the attention of the government of each country this happened in. The best analogy I can think of right now is if they were running scans find what frequencies were being used by ham radio operators in what locations and found that they had recorded snippets of conversations. I'm not sure if that is a good analogy though, is it illegal to record from a ham?

Can you explain why there are far fewer exploits for Apache and *nix than for IIS and Windows? Linux and UNIX web servers are the vast majority in every marketshare evaluation that I have seen. Being that these servers can contain valuable information about hundreds or thousands of individuals instead of one desktop user, it would seem those should be the bigger target. It is true that Windows has gotten far more secure after they overhauled the code and adopted a similar security model to many *nix distributions, however there is still a huge marketshare of people that have not upgraded to those versions.

While I agree that this case seems shady and unnecessary, I actually believe the wifi data was most likely gathered by mistake. Sure, it was a big goof, but they threw together a wifi scanner to aid in geolocation that worked by having a wifi adapter in promiscuous mode listen and saved that capture for later analysis and playback to create a database of SSID to location mapping. Only those operating both on an unsecured network and using unencrypted communication (e.g. over ftp or http) had any data collected by the capture. While they should have put more effort into this and filtered the capture to only catch SSID and/or BSSID information instead of actual packets, it was still a relatively harmless issue. Anyone sending sensitive data over open wifi with no encryption might as well setup a radio station and broadcast it (which they are actually doing from a technical standpoint, anyway).

I'll vouch for HP. We deal with a lot of school districts that have been switching from Cisco switched networks to HP and have nothing but good things to say. Uptime has always been comparable, prices were always lower, lifetime warranty is included, and firmware updates do not require a subscription. If you enjoy sinking money into Smartnet and expensive equipment, go ahead.

If everyone did this, it might save the post office and eventually reduce the amount of junk mail. All on Capital One's dime!

So Canadian laws apply to job titles of employees of a US company? Sure, there are protected titles here for certain things like Medical Doctors, but "engineer" is not one of them so it is free for the taking.

You are getting cause and effect mixed up there. The games themselves are not the cause for addictive behavior, just an outlet. Like eating or reading in your examples. No-one is saying that people that have an addiction to games do not have a problem. We are saying the games themselves should not be blamed. Should food or books be blamed for your examples? Video games are the new popular item that people are afraid of. See the history of movies, music and D&D for more examples of this happening. It will likely be vilified until some measure of censorship is placed on it to placate the masses of lazy parents. Then, some new popular thing will be found to vilify.

Aren't they pretty much at this stage? iOS, Blackberry and WebOS are not licensed out to third-party manufactures as far as I can tell. So that leaves Symbian, Windows Phone 7, Windows Mobile, and Meego as competitors in the licensed mobile OS arena. Symbian has fallen by the wayside. Windows Phone 7 is getting lukewarm sales. Windows Mobile appears to be all but dead. Meego is on what, 2 phones right now?

I love my EVO, but I wish Google would force the manufacturers' hands in providing timely updates. They do require some sort of licensing before they allow the Marketplace and other Google apps to be included, so they should have made this a stipulation.

Could you enlighten me on how a video or audio cable are a fire hazard? I've never heard of one that didn't carry a minimal amount of DC power. I will grant you that if you have a tangle of wires including power cables that it could create a potential fire hazard.

Someone could potentially port a software emulator like PCSX2 to the PS3, however there is only 256 MB of RAM in the PS3. I haven't tried running PCSX2 personally, but I would imagine that even without a full desktop OS to contend with that those resources would be a big constraint.

Depending on your usage/network availability I would recommend either LastPass or a combination of KeePass and a file-syncing solution like dropbox.

If anywhere you would need your passwords you have internet access, LastPass is completely web-based and has good phone integration with mobile versions of the site and apps.

If you may need to access your passwords with no internet access available or do not trust a third-party with your passwords, I would recommend KeePass and a file-syncing solution. It uses an encrypted database file and a lightweight piece of software to access this file. It is cross-platform (including mobile) and has portable versions for when you are working from a thumbdrive on a computer you do not own.

I support network equipment for a living, so I need to be able to access the passwords for those devices even if I do not have network access. Thus, I use KeePass and DropBox to sync it with my computers and android phone.

Or they equated vaccines with the placebo effect, which are completely different things. In fact, neither icebraining nor I even mentioned homeopathy, so who exactly is projecting here?