If you need to be that horrible to get this award, then it must be very prestigious indeed. I mean, there was that Citi Bank disaster, for example, it's nothing in comparison to Sony but as horrible as it was it's nothing in light of Sony. Think of the honor the CEO is having bestowed upon him. Heck, this was possibly worse than the ping of death. What do you compare it to?

Ok, I know this is just DNS and not some network-level hijacking, but crap like this is exactly why we need net neutrality. Capitalizing on customers' traffic by redirecting their searches (or otherwise interfering with customers' activities) is type of behavior net neutrality activists have claimed will happen for a long time, and that ISPs have claimed will never happen. Odd that the big players aren't the culprits for once (they're probably scared of regulation after the bittorrent scandal), but I'm sure if this is successful, or if a corrupt judge somewhere rules there is nothing wrong with what's going on, then we can expect to see all the big players stepping in and this will become a lot more widespread than it already is.

The lawyers WERE the monkeys. Can't anybody else see that? They're beating their chests over some pictures, demanding compensation (in bananas), and monkeying around with the judge over how far their "property rights" extend (being territorial).

Basically, the IRB (also sometimes referred to as "ethics review committee") signed off on this. Now, once he's about to publish the results, they pull the plug.

Putting aside the university's hypocrisy (believe me, I can think of far worse privacy breaches), give me one good reason why collecting this kind of aggregate, anonymized data is ok for an advertiser who is studying how to most effectively manipulate people into buying something and generally won't even let people opt out of tracking, but it's not ok for a sociologist to publish aggregate statistical data from mined Facebook profiles. Advertisers are a lot less ethical about it than academic researchers.

This is just propping up the already large, uninnovative, and anti-competitive companies like Microsoft and Apple, while leaving smaller companies in the "dirt road" of domains. In the future, we can consumers to look for .BRAND, and blow off anybody with .com/.net/.org/whatever because they didn't pay the small price of $185,000. It's not like the market is unbalanced now or anything, so what could this hurt? Thank you, ICANN, for putting the big players first.

Phishing means tricking users into divulging sensitive data, usually a password. It is just one type of social engineering. What is being described here is another form of social engineering, where users are told instead to install malware or something like that. It is not phishing, or even spear phishing. When you get a lot of information together to plan out an effective attack on human psyche, it's called pretexting.

That word. I don't think it means what you think it means...

Lobbyists lie. News at 11. Good that law enforcement is starting to realize it now though. Now if only their laws were looked at with this kind of scrutiny...

Think of pain in a psychological, adaptive sense, where it's an undesirable stimulus that lessens the chance we will perform some kind of behavior again. I think that's what is being picked up by an MRI. Not the immediate reflex that causes you to pull your hand away from the glowing red thing on the stove, but the part that causes it to hurt afterward, leaving a strong memory of the situation.

However, I did have a psychology professor last quarter tell the class you can lessen the effect of a break-up by taking pain medication. He said that most anti-inflammatory medications are believed to affect a certain part of the brain, which is incidentally the same place triggered by a break-up. He told us this right after Valentine's day, apologizing for not getting to that point in the curriculum a day sooner.

Well, that's the bank mentioned in the original article. I don't bank with them either, but I've had similar nightmarish experiences with other banks.

Erm, I meant to say they'll pass the loss onto customers by not reimbursing them, not "write it off as a loss".

I am not a lawyer, but I believe legally the customer is liable for ATM transactions, except in a case where the card is stolen, AND the transactions happen no more than 72 hours before the report, and then I think your liability is capped at $50. Any reimbursements would be at the bank's discretion, so if you have a good, sympathetic bank(er), like it sounds like you have, you might get off the hook. I've had my fair share of disputes with banks that like to pin things on customers, and they're generally not as cooperative or polite about it.

If somebody, for example, does this or this, and you see it on your statement the next month; or even if you used your card soon after it happened (can't claim the card is stolen) but didn't check your statement online until later that night, you're stuck with it.

I didn't need to do "research" because I had personal experience to back it up, and no amount of research would have led me to your experience. Banks, in general, try to pin these things on the consumer instead of eating the loss, especially Bank of America.

The people who withdrew money from this ATM will probably never get their money back, since customers are always fully liable for ATM transactions. The banks will just write it off as a loss, which comes right out of their customers checking accounts. Worse, if the people don't notice they'll even be held responsible for trying to pass of counterfeit bills they thought were real.