AOL turned themselves into a media business and actually owned a lot of high traffic websites like The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, and Engadget. Can't really see that worth $4B either, but it's not like they bought a dial-up business.

Yahoo probably still has Alibaba shares I assume? That might be worth quite a lot, much more than Yahoo is worth.

Umm... Albertsons just bought Safeway not too long ago. We saw how well that went.

Wow, that does make the firing even more ridiculous then. No wonder they immediately got job offers from other companies.

It's crazy how all these big sites are regurgitating this story with the sensational headline and not one bothers to do a basic fact check. All they need to do to have someone who knows Chinese translate the social media posts.

Reading other accounts of the story (I expected better from you, WSJ!), the server was not hacked. Instead there was a buy button on a web page, and these engineers wrote javascript in a web browser to click the button for them. I'm not clear on the exact technical details (the articles and posts did not detail them), but it sounds like you could keep clicking the buy button via javascript to get lots of orders.

Eh, they did it with the Galaxy 5, which I'm still using today. It's just a question of whether they are willing to do it.

I would imagine the "Login using Google" at third-party sites wouldn't work w/o this:
https://developers.google.com/...

Google Wallet might not work too smoothly either What Paypal does is display a message that you're being redirected and waits a few seconds before redirect, and I've seen other sites do this too. Does Google do the same thing?

The article basically says the steps to exploit this are:
1) Get the user to visit your suspicious website/link.
2) Get them to click on a login using Google link that sends them to google.com/continue?= (something like this)
3) They enter their Google credentials
4) It redirects them to your fake login page that says wrong password.
5) They enter their Google credentials again, and you steal them.

So, really, you could omit steps 2 & 3 and just send them straight to the fake login page. In the end, the only real problem is entering your login details on a non-Google domain. Paypal/Facebook/Steam/etc. all do the same thing.

They tried to do the Apple-style memory cash grab with the S6, and consumers said no thanks. Good to see they learned their lesson. Everyone wins!

Wrong. The money was not of illicit origin. But they told the guy they planned to commit a crime with the BitCoin he gave them. That's what makes this case weird.

It's like those plug-n-play wireless routers back in the day. Who needs instructions when it works out-of-the-box.

True, but there's a bit more to the story.

What drove Hostess into the bankruptcy in the first place was bad management, lack of investment into their plants, etc., you know the usual. That management squeezed what they could out of the company, took their bonuses, and left the sinking ship.

They then brought in a new CEO, and he put out plan to right the ship. That included pay freezes/cuts. Two of the unions agreed to the new contract, and one of them double-checked the numbers, and they agreed management was not lying about this being needed.

One union refused. The union leaders recommend to their members to let the company go bankrupt, go to auction, and then the new owners would give them a better contract. Now, it should have been obvious that the new owners are likely going to be company in the same business, and like any merger, a ton of jobs would be lost. Indeed, that was the first thing that happened, where 2/3 of the plants were closed. These were well-paying jobs too, not something you can find baking just anywhere.

In conclusion, irresponsible management drove Hostress to the brink, and that one stupid union put the final nail in the coffin.

And that is exactly the very valid point that was made - that is willingness to commit computer trespass and ask for money does not necessarily equate a willingness to release secret company information.

I can switch the question back onto you - why would the criminal not just threaten to release the info then? Wouldn't that be better at compelling you to pay the ransom? I'll try to make an educated guess here: I bet they are trying to give themselves an excuse for their behavior or they are following some sort of self-imposed rules for their skewed sense of ethics. Would they release it if ignored? I don't think you can assume one way or another.

The problem is that Siri will always get my requests wrong and keep manufacturing me the wrong junk.

But seriously, I don't think much will change. Even now, you can pitch a tent and live off government assistance and charity for food and clothing pretty easily. YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO WORK TO SURVIVE if you live in a first-world country.

So, someone from two hundred years ago probably thinks you're in this no-money paradise you describe. So you tell them - what is this no-money paradise like? What, your #1 expense is fighting over housing in a prime location that a limited number of people can fit into? You keep changing the goalposts by finding more "essential" services?

I wonder sometimes, if we're at the peak of society now. That in the future, we'll be faced with overpopulation, overpollution, and war, and we just don't know how good we have it now.

FTC did a great thing by declaring ISPs utilities. They were trying to get approval for fast lanes (so they get charge you for Internet access AND then they charge Netflix, Facebook, etc. again to send that data to you expediently while exempting their own services from that charge to give themselves an edge), and the chairman, who was a industry insider, just totally surprised them by letting his conscience guide his actions.

However, he didn't invoke price controls on them, and I think we're either going to need that. ISPs have been merging and buying each other out at a alarming rate such that there are only a few players in the market (and only one choice in many neighborhoods). They are making billions easily, and they are trying to make billlions more by squeezing every dollar they can out of consumers who need this vital resource. How much can they raise the water rate and you'd still pay it? That's what they are trying to do with Internet service. They have plenty of capacity. They are not decreasing the rate of low-bandwidth users. In fact, rates have doubled in just the last few years, when you used to be able to get $30/month if you called retention whenever your promo period was up. They are just trying to make more money off of high-bandwidth users. I'm not against metered service, but low-bandwidth users aren't getting a break. If you look worldwide, everyone else pays much less for much higher capacity Internet and cellular service. We're getting screwed.

Agreed. The copyright decision by the appeals court was just horrible, and as the article suggestions, this only softens the blow, but the big elephant is still in the room.

I think a better example would be a different sized tire. Other manufacturers can also make replacement tires of the same size. Or a radiator. It would be like Honda suing a generic manufacturer for making a radiator that fit the connections in a Honda. You don't have exclusive use for the size and shape of the connections.