What he means is that there are rainbow tables available for many MD5 hashes. There is software that can search hundreds of thousands of possible hashes per second. You don't need to calculate the MD5 hash over, you just have to do a simple text compare, followed by a lookup in the rainbow table. If you have a rainbow table of the major hack sites in which you're interested, I bet it doesn't take more than a second or two to determine if the hash you sent is of one of those sites. Maybe that doesn't fit your definition of easily enumerable, but it fits mine.

Respectfully, that's not an argument; it's a rant with a basis in reducto ad absurdem. I'm not saying I disagree with you (or even that I agree). I'm pointing out that you did not refute a single point with anything approaching valid logic.

I cannot conceive of a circumstance where I would be intimidated by any item, while in the absence of belligerent people. The presence of belligerent people on the other hand, may intimidate me without the presence of that item. It's clear to me that items are not what make the world dangerous.

Not to pick nits, but you should really use metric units in your measurements. 1 imperial fuckton = 1 metric asston.

That sounds like some sort of horrible Zen mantra. Or something from Philip K. Dick.

That will only work for maybe 200 years. Example: the 2nd amendment's "shall not be infringed" bit that's been blatantly ignored for the last few decades. The founding fathers made that as clear as they could, yet we're still screwing it up. What makes you think we can make our intentions any clearer for any longer?

I'm a fan of AC/DC but you do have to admit that it seems like the albums were written by a sentient compression algorithm with permanent angst. "Winrar presents: the AC/DC Collection"

Why aren't people impressed with the compression ratio AC/DC achieved?

Yeah, I wish iTunes would let me buy just the last chapter of a book so I can learn whether the butler did it or not.

At first glance I thought, "Hee, the Onion is funny". After reading TFA I thought, "Sheesh, I wish this was an Onion story".

Here we have a risk that requires mitigation. If you owned the facilities in question you would know your disaster preparedness and would know how much effort you are willing and able to put into enhancing it.

But since you don't own these facilities you have to trust the companies that do own them to do what you would do (or better). The only real controls you have are in negotiating the initial contract (regarding SLAs, especially) and in designing your system to withstand a failure of one company to protect their facility. That means you have to either buy resources on both coasts from one company or buy resources from multiple companies whose facilities are geodispersed and make sure your code/platform understands and deals with losing one or more of them.

The leggy gal on the sales team won't tell you any of this. I think most people don't find out about it until the disaster actually happens. It's pretty much like any other piece of your tech stack: the vendors will whitewash the risks and your job is to see through that and manage it.

I submit this isn't a risk caused by the use of "the cloud" (egad, do I hate that term!) so much as a risk that's part of any IT project and you deal with it the same way.

So to answer the original question, maybe a CAT 5 hurricane can take those facilities down but the question you should be asking is, "Have we completely understood the risk to the business and have we taken appropriate steps to protect it?".