First rule of sheeple: If you're convinced that everyone else is blind and you're the only person who really understands what's going on, you're a sheeple yourself. From a different flock, perhaps, but with similar delusions.

Pardoning them for crimes they've never been charged with in the first place? That would be egregious.

Right, because there's nothing that moves markets like comments on Slashdot. Wall Street is hanging on our every word!

Aw, c'mon, you're not being nearly cynical enough. This is actually an NSA/KGB/TLA/Illuminati honeypot -- they fund this, market it, see who buys one, then they know who to watch in the future. If they can sneak some actual backdoors into it, so much the better, but even if they don't, it's served its purpose.

What is the market for this?

It gets a little better, though -- any species with resources to cross interstellar distances probably has better things to do than gratuitously turn a small-but-biologically active planet into (yet another) molten hellworld.

If the aliens are stopping by to refuel, they'll probably head to Jupiter or some other larger planet with more raw materials.

If they're here as scientists, collectors, or tourists, they'll probably want to leave Earth more or less as it is (modulo some sample collecting), since it wouldn't make much sense to destroy the things they came to look at.

If they're here for the delicious human-steaks they heard about on the Intergalactic Home Shopping Channel, they're doing it wrong -- rather than traveling light years to round people up, it's much quicker and cheaper to just download the recipe and assemble the ideal human-steak locally in their in-home matter assemblers.

If they're here for other inscrutable alien reasons, they may not bother with Earth at all, or even notice that there is anything unusual or interesting about it.

I didn't do anything crazy like RTFA, but according to the summary they are just going to leave them there and ignore them.

I read the article here a couple of days ago where he "outed" the pair and got the impression that vDOS had been active for more than just two years.

Brian Krebs writes that he has obtained the hacked database of an Israeli company that is responsible for most of the large-scale DDoS attacks over the past (at least) 4 years.

They are 18 now? Most of their misdeeds would have been performed as minors, and I'm a bit sceptical that they started when they were (at most) 14.

The Internet's favorite explanation

What AirBnB could do (in principle, at least; dunno if this would be practical) is partially anonymize their customers so that it was difficult or impossible to determine an applicant's race from his application. Then property owners would be unable to make decisions based on prejudice, since the data necessary to do so would not be available to them.

The same thing Domino's does when their pizza deliverymen are destroyed or stolen -- call the police and have the perpetrators arrested.

Except this time they'll have video records and GPS tracking data to make it easier to find the perpetrators.

Smart watches will become as popular as Smart phones only when they become functional enough to completely replace Smart phones.

Until then, most people aren't going to bother carrying around (and recharge) two devices when carrying around one will do.

Through this leak we have learned that Apple is planning to announce an iPhone 7 and iPhone 7+ -- something nobody would ever have been able to guess otherwise!

Thanks Slashdot, for once again providing us with Stuff that Matters!

Continuously falling forward, only to stop yourself at the last possible moment from landing on your faceby placing a foot into exactly the right spot to counterbalance your ridiculously top-heavy and unstable vertical stance?

Thanks, but I'll stick to sitting in my chair and eating Cheetos.