Even better, of Ofcom goes after someone, costing them millions to defend themselves and risking permanent damage to their public reputation for being accused of a crime, and Ofcom loses the case, will Ofcom be held responsible for their overzealous prosecution and making the accused whole again?

I'm not holding my breath. A law such as this gives Ofcom (another) gun they can point at the head of anyone they choose knowing they never have to pay for any mistakes made along the way. The mere threat of Ofcom having this ability will cause companies to toe Ofcom's line regardless of whether they're in actual violation or not. If Ofcom gets to decide what constitutes "harm" to a child, how long before it's extended to things like "mean words" or "malicious glances" or (even dare I speak it) "unapproved thoughts"?

If ad hominem attacks are your only defense, you realize you're on thin ice. Insults are the last refuge of those without a winning argument. You'll note that at no time have I stooped to namecalling or insults. I don't have to. I'm asking a very simple question that any logical, rational, objective person should be able to answer.

The only silly game being played here is you consistently -- and tellingly -- refusing to answer a very simple, obvious, straightforward question. If you wanted to prove a hypothetical laptop belonged to a hypothetical person, what evidence would you consider valid?

One wonders why you refuse to answer. Is it because you have a standard that, if revealed, would incriminate someone you don't want incriminated? Or that you refuse to state that, for ideological reasons, no amount of evidence would convince you and hence you're not rationally considering the situation?

And again you deflect, so I'll simplify this for you.

Forget for a moment the presence or absence of any evidence of any kind and kindly answer the question. What would constitute evidence of authenticity in your eyes? Surely you must have some standard. State it.

I'll note you evaded the question, so I'll ask again: what would constitute evidence of authenticity in your eyes?

The part you're missing is the government is not allowed to coerce or cooperate with a private entity to do what the government itself cannot. In this case, coercion was not required, as all the major players at Twitter were of the same political mindset (>96% Democrats according to political contributions) and were more than happy to cooperate wherever they could to help the Biden campaign do something that would be illegal if the Biden campaign did it.

If the mountains of evidence that are piled up all saying this is HB's real laptop aren't enough for you to agree it's his, what would be? You're intent on denying the authenticity regardless of every single factor to date showing it's his. So I throw down the gauntlet and ask you to definitively state what would constitute evidence of authenticity in your eyes.

Given the complete apathy of the "hard-hitting reporters" at the NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, etc. in even looking into this story, the lack of "news sources" is a feature, not a bug. When the investigators refuse to investigate, this is the result.

And if the story won't die on its own, let's get Twitter involved to actively censor it! And then you can have Facebook censor it too, citing Twitter's censoring it! And then you can have the news outlets fervently point out it's "not a story worth covering" (a la NPR) because nobody is covering it! And if anybody asks why they're not covering it, just get about 50 former Intelligence officials to pen a letter implicating it as "Russian disinformation!"

It's an unholy circle of ass covering is what it is. This kind of stuff used to be the butt of jokes about Soviet-style government working hand in glove with Pravda. I would wager everything I have that if the parties were reversed and one of Trump's kids had left an incriminating laptop at a repair shop, every news outlet in the country would have jumped on it like flies on shit, because that's exactly what happened with the (now-debunked) Russia Collusion story.

Point #1: now that the authenticity of the laptop has been confirmed, it's prima facie that the Biden campaign knew what was on it, at least in general terms. The Biden family and their associates knew (or at least could find out) what communications they'd sent to Hunter and thus deduce what was likely on it.

Point #2: the FBI -- the nation's most pre-eminent investigative authority, with near-limitless resources to do forensics -- has had this laptop in their possession for roughly two years...and has done nothing with it. Indeed, their utter lack of interest in digging into it is what led to the contents being published via other sources. Numerous sources like Tony Bobulinski offered to cooperate with the FBI to corroborate the laptop contents and those sources were...ignored.

So, on the one hand you have the Biden family being rightly terrified of this information being made public. On the other hand, you have the FBI doing everything it can to do...nothing. The same FBI that vigorously pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax for nearly four years. The same FBI that raided journalists who were investigating the Ashley Biden diary. The same FBI that issued "guidance" on "domestic terrorism" when parents complained to school boards about what their children were being "taught" in school (i.e. Critical Race Theory).

The FBI top brass are all Biden appointees or allies. The pattern here is apparent unless you, like the FBI, are actively trying to not see it. After all, if there is no investigation, it's easy to say "well, you never found any evidence of wrongdoing!"

I'm going to guess some (maybe all?) of this data is stuff these services gleaned from their "free" tax filing services. If that's the case, always remember this maxim: if what you're getting is free, you are the product. With the rise of the information economy, what people know about you is of immense value at the scale of tens or hundreds of millions of "consumers."

MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NYTimes, LA Times, WashPost, Facebook, YouTube, (formerly) Twitter, all of Hollywood, virtually every late-night "comedy" show and college campus versus...Fox News? And the Republicans have a lock on the "media machine"? Seriously?

Your comment is true and hits the nail on the head. However, it overlooks that the Shuttle itself was riddled with engineering compromises. Case in point: the thermal protection system (TPS) tiles were vulnerable to damage by impact debris. Yet the Shuttle design hung the orbiter off the side of a giant tank filled with cryogenic fuel and covered with fragile foam, virtually guaranteeing impact events. There are tens -- maybe hundreds -- of other examples where the overall design was fundamentally flawed. It asked one design to do too much with technology that was both too primitive (by today's standards) and too advanced and untested (by 1970's standards). It was never going to achieve the goal of quicker, cheaper, and safer access to space much like how SLS will never achieve its (ostensible) goals.

The Shuttle is and was a case study on what you get when you design by committee...and when the committee members (i.e commercial launches vs. Air Force) have wildly differing and sometimes conflicting requirements. Add to that a healthy dose of political nepotism and institutional arrogance and you have a very expensive, very unreliable, very dangerous launch system.

Those who do not remember history fail to learn from it. Painful as it may be, this tragedy taught valuable lessons that should not -- must not -- be forgotten.

While you're right about converting various audio streams to PCM is very viable, the same can't be said for stuff like HDR. HDR, HDR10, HDR10+, Dolby Vision...there's nothing out there that converts/handles them all. Personally, Dolby's stance on strict licensing and control of Dolby Vision is the main reason I've avoided it. I put all my media on my Plex, played through a Vero 4K+. There is no Dolby Vision support for this setup, hence I stick to the other formats.

You misunderstand the situation. He was hired to be in charge of security. He pointed out flaws that needed to be fixed, flaws that required other parts of Twitter to change how they operated. They refused to change, authorize, or implement what he said needed to be done, hence he quit.

I've been there where you're telling a board or executive committee this stuff needs to be done. If they're concerned about legal and reputational risk, they listen (sometimes). If they don't give a shit about it and see security as an impediment to bigger paychecks regardless of risk, they ignore you. When the latter happens, you can't be held responsible. Indeed, your only recourse is to quit, otherwise they'll put your head on a spike as a sacrificial lamb when the inevitable Bad Thing happens. Don't think that doesn't happen all too often.

Don't confuse company profitability with executive compensation. While Twitter may be constantly burning cash, the folks at the top are pocketing seven- or eight-figure paychecks and stock options. So long as they're making money, the rest doesn't bother them too much.