I don't have any opinion on the motivations of Lulzsec. I'm more concerned about what happens now.

Try not to think of "Lulzsec, the annoying and dangerous cracking group, just busted open a porn site. How evil of them."
Think of "A goddamn porn site was compromised. What does that tell of the security in adult industry? What does that tell to the victims?"

In short, it's irrelevant who cracked them. The milk's on the floor, too late to cry.

Someone pointed out that Lulzsec is definitely doing a good job at pointing out security flaws that should be addressed. Why did a porn site have such lax security? Why is a porn site storing passwords in cleartext? Aren't they aware that quite a few of their members might not appreciate being advertised as members? Should people be more concerned about the security in porn sites? Not everybody minds being advertised as a member of a porn site, but since a lot of people obviously have a problem with that, should the porn sites provide additional security measures for people who are embarrassed to admit this stuff publicly? (e.g. not store details that might identify them, such as email)

But your system assumes that you will be personally present at the Poo Reserve at all times. It hinges on our trust that the Poo will always be either collected by the Reserve or destroyed according to a secure standard operating procedure. As the brilliant Chinese strategist Sun Tzu said, "a man's gotta go when a man's gotta go". The Poo deposits may occur at weird, unpredictable times. What assurances do we get that there are absolutely no out-of-record deposits and all deposits occur at exactly specified manner? What if 100% genuine, DNA-verified Poo, which is not used for backing poocoin and shouldn't officially even exist, ends up in a place where it can be collected by the black market? Or the terrorists? Or the terrorists who run the black market?

Now, you may be thinking, "surely everyone can collect Poo! You don't need to be a specialist! We all handle Poo every day!", but secure collection of Poo is a surprisingly complicated matter, which is best left to the experts. What passes for everyday handling may not be enough when there's money in the line. Just goes to show that you shouldn't design a new currency if even a non-expert like me can see big fatal flaws in the system!

Yeah, except it always pays to ask one crucial question: What demands?

They're already subject to the laws of the countries they currently operate in. If the governments find out that Google is doing something illegal, you bet they should take action - and there might be a good reason why they're not doing anything right now. Like, no illegalities happening that they know of.

Laws of one jurisdiction don't necessarily apply to another. If Google gets busted in one country for doing something illegal, they won't get busted in another country unless a similar law exists there. And, frankly, if your democratic country is planning on quashing a frigging search engine for not building an alternate reality, perhaps it's just an indication of a really big problem somewhere else.

If you have to back down from some market because you cannot adequately serve your customers, that's fine. If you have to back down because you're worried that it might expose your global nefarious crime syndicate that's illegal everywhere, maybe you shouldn't run a crime syndicate in the first place and focus on legal endeavours instead.

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" - Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG, 2005

...nnnope, I'm pretty sure that that wasn't an excuse then, and it sure doesn't sound like an an excuse now.

Look, I'm not an electronics geek. Here's the thing I know about flashlights: there's a battery, there's a lamp, and there's a switch. I'm sure you can figure out how to hook them up together with a bit of wire. If not, there's plenty of "fun scientific experiments for schoolkids" books that tell you how. Frankly, I was surprised and flabbergasted that this wasn't the first illustration in Wikipedia article on electrical circuits. (Generator and resistor? Bah! Give the kids an example of a circuit that does something...)

I guess it just highlights one unfortunate side of the terminology: "open source" is just how things are - even before someone specifically decides to call it that way. We might as well call it "commonly accepted knowledge" and "stuff that's too obvious to even go into in great detail". If you want to build a flashlight, just about everyone already knows how to do it, or can find someone who does.

That said, this could be the world's first non-trivial and very cool open source flashlight. All I'm saying is that the boundary is kind of blurry and it's hard to say if it really was the first. =)

Eh. You're basically correct - except for the technological point. There are generic terms. Twitter is a microblog. Facebook is a social network. The actual problem is that Twitter and Facebook are closed systems - you need to be a Twitter user to follow someone on Twitter, you need to be a Facebook user to talk to Facebook users. The difference is that the other examples you list are federated: you don't need to use wordpress.com to set up a blog, you can go to Blogger instead, or just install any of the dozens of blogwares on your own webhost - and it all works out.

Both microblogging and social networking are becoming federated systems, though; the standards that define the interchange between hosts (ostatus, activitystreams) are being developed at the moment.

Except that's not the repository model's fault. Sure, you can try to install and run, say, a Windows 3.1 app in modern Windows - and the first things you'll say is "it works really wonkily, if at all, and it was not very easy to uninstall because it left crap all over the filesystem". Yes, you could unpack the .deb and stick it in a non-Debian/Ubuntu system, or older version, and it might work. (If not, the package maintainer is fully within their rights to say "See? Told ya it wouldn't run on libc5.") The value of the package management is that it knows what files belong to a package and which versions of the librariers are known to work.

But if an employer wants your Facebook username and password, that's completely acceptable - after all, they just need to make sure you're not talking behind their backs!

*sigh* Remember the time when things were much simpler? The service provider said "don't give your password to anyone", and you said "of course not, duh." And that worked. It still works.

Then why the hell do programmers spend 90% of their time doing 1) user interface code, 2) error validation and 3) doing stuff to accommodate various usage patterns? In other words, if humans truly grok software, and human/computer interaction is basically just a matter of finding a common language, why do programmers have to make the software to serve human needs and human limitations? Why do humans keep not getting or disregarding the software? Why do people make mistakes while using the software? And most importantly, why do humans sometimes outwit the user interface to reach new brands of failure - damn those cunning bastards?

Inquiring computer guys want to know.

Well, that's almost true. The problem isn't increased complexity, it's that it's a more complex interface that isn't probably as well defined as the current std{in,out,err} interface is. It's possible to have a more complex interface and make it sufficiently bug-free, but in order to get there, it should be well-defined and not "hackish".

Basically, the bottom line is this: everyone knows Unix shells are limited in what they can display, but this is how they were designed and this is how you're stuck with. It may be simple, but at least we know it has been implemented in a way that we know is hard to mess up. If you want to reimagine how Unix shells operate, you need some pretty big changes in application side and come up with a well-defined, likewise hard-to-mess-up interface.

This isn't to say that such an interface couldn't be implemented with backwards compatibility (just look how well some X11 apps cooperate with command line tools). And, of course, losing backwards compatibility would be foolish because, like it or not, Unix shells do work just fine right now and graphical bells and whistles might not be appropriate for all uses.

After seeing the original Chanology clip with the speech-synthesis voice, I was ready to call them Monotonous...

What if Bin Laden already had a copy of the entirety of Wikileaks? If his hard drive would be leaked to Wikileaks, you'd get a Wikileaks leak that... included a copy of Wikileaks. You know, a leak like that might not do wonders to the allegations of excessive self-importance of the project.

What that meant was that you need to actually make some preparations before you migrate the site to the next major version. And these preparations can be pretty extensive. Especially if you're depending on the functionality that doesn't come out of the box (since a lot of Drupal functionality comes from non-core modules). Software that isn't massively customised or extended (e.g. Bugzilla) tends to fare better over upgrades.

I've not used Drupal much, but - hint hint - this is the same situation as every other damn package that depends on external modules has. I've actually yet to see a "professional" anything that you can just stick in and go, because "professional" software sort of assumes that the user knows what they're doing and are making actual plans so that the end users won't end up suffering in the unlikely scenario where the said professional somehow fucks up.

The bottom line is this: it's your site, you've decided to make some tweaks that lead out of the Boring Defaults zone, and the software can no longer guarantee that the upgrade is entirely smooth. It can, and should, facilitate it as far as it's possible. But ultimately, it's you who needs to say "Sorry, boss, we really need the Tweakulator module and it's not compatible with Mega-CMS 2.0 - but it's coming. We'll need to delay the migration until it works. Because if we did it now, we'd not have the same functionality and people would complain."

Yeah, anti-Soviet propaganda is still profitable these days. The Finnish radiation authorities still tell people to boil mushrooms well in certain parts of the country (to get the pinko commie hippie influences out, obviously - all mushrooms are suspicious by default), and in some areas of Sweden and Norway reindeer have to be given fodder because the lichen are still contaminated by communism.

...this will only lead into a bloody feud with the Church of Emacs and their Esc-w and Control-y. ...I mean, M-w and C-y. Don't look at me funnily, brethren! A honest mistake! Just trying to educate the public unwash'd who know not the Naming of the Keys!