I support the corporate death penalty. If a company fucks the american people badly, the american people's government should have the right and obligation to revoke the corporate charter and put the corporation up for bid. The existing shareholders would get $0.

With that risk, we would see all shareholders demand that companies operate in a manner that puts the american people first. Security and ethics should come first, before profits.

"260 characters ought to be enough for anybody."

The 255-260 character limit was part of NTFS, when there was hardly a difference between the filename and the file path. It's like nobody at Microsoft has ever needed a long file path, or surly they would have fixed File Explorer.

"...perhaps a genuine QA/QC attitude might emerge."

Not a chance of that happening. When I last dealt with Microsoft, all of the Windows QA had been sent to China in order to have script monkeys test the hundreds of "happy paths". There was no QA along the lines of "throw bricks at it and break that shit".

Actual Windows QA is only done by hackers.

It might work: "That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Can anyone really tell if an email is a genuine email from Apple?
Can anyone really tell if an email is from the FBI?
What about phone calls? Is it really the FBI calling?
What about snail mail? Is it really the FBI's letterhead (not a fake letterhead)?

I think the answer to all of the above is "no". Everything can be faked, spoofed, and tricked.

A military advisor said: "Cyber attacks can be acts of war if they cause physical destruction. The US Department of Defense law of war manual states that some cyber operations should be subject to the same rules as physical, or “kinetic” attacks".

In this case, the pipeline operator chose to shut it down because the billing system was hacked. The pipeline has no physical damage. I would suggest that we change the law of war manual, because there can be a heck of a lot of economic damage without any physical destruction.

Even if it gets laundered, it's gotta come out somewhere. The intelligence agencies are professionals at following money. If a random Russian housewife suddenly controls an account worth a few billion Rubles (millions USD), that's going to get noticed. Right now, any sudden changes of wealth is putting a bullseye on that person's forehead.

The solution to ransomware is to change the risk/reward ratio. Right now there is far too much reward for very little risk.

In American history there have been other gangs of thieves; cattle rustlers, horse thieves, pirates, etc. When the risk/reward ratio changed, by harsh punishment such as hanging, the thievery ended.

URLs are not forever. The only value of an NFT is the URL. The entry in the blockchain for the NFT contains a URL and that's all. And that URL is not going to last as long as a painting on canvas.

Port-a-johns in any US city would require wheelchair (ADA) access. That's US law. Instead of being the size of a port-a-john, it has to be the size of a small cottage. And because it's actually a small cottage, homeless people love them. The idea has died in every US city that has tried it.

European cities has had them for at least 25 years, many are fully self-cleaning,
Sanisette: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Exactly. The numbers are probably something like:
      "1,500 low intelligence adults who answer junk phone calls were surveyed"
      "1,500,000 high intelligence adults who do not answer junk phone calls were not surveyed" /lies, damn lies, and statistics

I smell BS. .... "account IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers,..." is not publicly viewable information.

I used to buy my kids Visa prepaid gift cards for on-line gaming. These were non-reloadable cards that cost face value.

One nice feature is that when the balance was down close to over $1, I would set the card aside for use on websites that required a credit card. The websites would validate the credit card with a $1 fake charge, which would be approved. I used the same $1.25 remaining balance gift card on many game sites.

I saved a lot of money because countless games would have sneaky in-app purchases that were attempted to be charged.

If this is OK, then Jeff Bezos should shed the Washington Post. We can't allow a large e-commerce company with media holdings.

"intercept, track, and collect communications" - who does that sound like? American intelligence agencies.

I strongly suspect that Google is collecting this data at the direction of American intelligence agencies. Violating wiretapping and privacy laws is the least of their problems. I bet the US government pays this fine for Google..to the US government.