Gandalf's horse was Shadowfax, not Equifax.

I'm pretty sure HIPAA laws (in the US, anyway) would prevent such activity, for the same reason(s) that California deemed it acceptable to retract their requirement that HIV-positive people disclose their situation with potential partners.

Uranus, like Myanus, loses atmosphere often. I usually blame it on Dogsanus.

OK, so if I grab your spare key under your front door mat, did your Schlage deadbolt get "picked"? No, poor OpSec. If I drop my key fob to my car, and you use the remote open door feature to find it and steal my car. Did GM's laser cut key database get "hacked?" No. GM isn't at fault because I made a mistake. A hack is when someone gets a system to act in an unintended way. Ring is performing as expected: put in a valid username and password, then gain entry. They don't report to have biometrics or other means to authenticate it's you. Hell, a sophisticated threat would clone your phone anyway, making the 2-factor call your phone as well as his. This happens often for higher value targets, but rarely makes the news because the threat is much more sophisticated. That said, yes, you're right. Ring could add sophisticated measures but it's not my bank account we are securing. They're cameras. All of mine are outside so I really don't care if you hacked my 4 Ring cameras. You would see my neighbors doing their laundry and me leaving every morning and coming home 6 hours later. This is why my Echo Show has the camera disabled 99.999% of the time. Hack it and you see nothing.

Right. Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD do it. This is what separates good engineers from geniuses. To me this is the classic Android versus Apple argument as well. Sure you can do everything on both, but the Apple is more polished. A 2nd grader and a 72 year old can figure an iPhone out without instructions. As you mention, you can spend hours on it, just to be hacked anyway. Or, just buy the Ring and turn on 2-step authentication like you probably should do anyway (RPi, or commercial).

That's akin to saying, "I have absolutely no sympathy for idiots who buy a house when someone breaks in and stabs them. This goes for garages too." The person who took over their account is breaking the law. Period. Not everyone understands security and often re-uses passwords. Do you realize Titan, Schalge and Defiant reuse keys for deadbolts and door locks? Is it ok if I use a set of keys to get into your house and steal everything? "We have no sympathy for idiots who don't understand tumblers and pins of the locks inside their home." How about your car? How about I hack the OBD2 system to make your transmission shift into reverse while you do 70mph down the highway? "I have no sympathy for idiots who don't understand their cars on-board diagnotic system." How about your grandmother who is in intensive care at the hospital? Hospital Wifi is known to be unsecure. Do you have zero sympathy when a hacker shuts down her life supporting systems? Grandma deserves it since she doesn't understand encryption and information security, right?

Turn on two factor authentication and don't reuse passwords. That's the simple lesson here. This 'Crap' you mention has saved a little girl who was kidnapped right in front of their house, led to arrest and prosecution of home invaders who nearly killed a homeowners dog, and cut down on crime in many areas.

I think 9/11 is so far back and most Americans are so apathetic they either didn't know or have forgotten 9/11 wasn't the first attack. It wasn't the 2nd. It was in the teens.. Meaning we were in well over double digits. Khobar Towers sound familiar? USS Cole sound familiar? The Twin Towers in NYC had already been bombed once before. We ignored them. We "kept our troops at home." Problem is, the camps in Afghanistan kept pumping out skilled personnel who learned how to bomb and kill people.

Imagine you have a meth lab next door. Would you tell the cops, "Well, don't invade their home. Just arrest the street dealers. That will solve the problem. Leave the meth lab alone." That's exactly what you're saying when you say, "Don't invade Afghanistan." We had to invade Germany to stop Hitler. We had to nuke Japan to get them to stop suicide attacking throughout the Pacific, and we had to invade Afghanistan to stop the Osama Bin Laden sponsored and Taliban (the government back then) hosted terrorist camps. We also invaded Iraq to get them to stop shooting at F-16s and threatening neighbors, but that narrative has been hijacked by the whole "no WMDs found" false flag. Any one recall how many UN security resolutions were passed telling Saddam to knock his shit off?? Anyone? How many talked about WMDs? (hint: almost none)

The problem however, as we learn everywhere is, "Power abhors a vacuum." If you take out one evil power, you are an open host to what ever else can take its place.

Correct. 350k was nothing compared to the rate we were losing soldiers as we island hopped and tried to defeat Japan. They also refused to surrender and would fight to the last person. They were also convincing local populations to commit suicide rather than wait to see what happened when the Allies liberated their lands, although some were also just murdered. Hard to say how much is fact and fiction in these stories. For anyone skeptical, take a look at how many Russians died kicking Germany out. 26 million... and that was mostly on defense. Going onto the offense makes attrition rates go up.

Beeftopia seems to be the only response I've seen that really understands PsyOps (Psychological Operations in warfare), and the differences.

I worked at Home Depot for over 5 years, and have spent time inside the loss prevention office. They are not face scanning and tracking you through the store. If they are tracking you, it's a guy who's watching a dozen camera feeds and switching between them. If they catch you stealing, it takes awhile for them to take the video from the different cameras and make a CD for the arresting officer. The time depends on how long you spent in the store and how much you moved around.

Those cameras on the aisles are stand alone and not part of the system. They're really just to make you aware they're focusing on that high-theft part of the store (e.g. power tools in Hardware, and $90 circuit breakers in Electrical). Each store has a staff of Loss Prevention, and most employees will ignore you even if you're an obvious thief. They are instructed not to touch you and in some cases I was admonished for asking them "Can I help you?" I got pissed because your thieving takes away money from my bonus. My store probably easily lost over $1M a year to thieves. If you walk in, grab a torch from hardware, a bluetooth speaker, and a $90 Klein electricians backpack.... everyone in the store knows what's happening. And walkie talkies... I did the math. For every pair of walkie talkies sold, 2 were stolen. $200k sold in a year, and about $600k stolen.. just in walkie talkies from my store alone.

Yes, they track people by sales receipts and your Drivers License. This is how they catch people who fraudulently return very high numbers of products. Usually it's stolen but not always. Again, you're robbing the people who work there when you fraudulently return products. That "shrink" reduces revenue, which reduces the employee bonus.

Well, if I'm not allowed to repair my machine on my own (if I'm so inclined), then I guess I don't have to worry about paying to have the broken product taken to the dump. I can just drop it on the sidewalk of these "authorised repair" facilities and get something else. They want to control the stupid thing that badly, they can take care of its disposal.

The other alternative is to jerry-rig a fix anyway. If they don't like it, too damned bad.

Enact VoterID.

We already need identification for all sorts of things in society: buying alcohol, tobacco, registering a car, getting a job... Proving who you are to vote is not difficult at all.

In a growing number of states, Real ID standards are mandated. Without a RealID-compliant license, for example, one cannot do something as routine as getting through airport security.

For certain political parties to claim it is "racist" to require ID to vote because certain minorities cannot get an ID is, in itself, racist.

The problems VoterID would solve would far surpass the crap ideas floated by the Democrats in the Senate.