deleted_account

Therein lies the contradiction. You presume the author isn't expecting solutions and yet he's justifiably irritated because other people aren't helping. I don't think he's justified at all.

So many presumptions about how other people should react and behave: expressions of love should be like this, auntie should know she doesn't understand...

Aunt Sharon has to be willing to meet you halfway

No, she doesn't; she needs to hear, "I don't need advice, I need you to listen."

Of course poor Aunt Sharon doesn't understand. And no, the onus isn't on you to make her understand. Unless you want her to...in which case, it may take some effort on your part to frame your emotions to her experience.

Even then you may only meet part way. Which you'll have to accept, but not as a failure.

What am I reading.

Edit: That sounds snarky; didn't mean to be. It just struck me that a lot of energy was put into choosing The Best[1] data center and still there was down time.

[1] http://dcurt.is/the-best

Tragic.

You managed to think yourself into a corner where a law protecting personal privacy from corporate misuse is an attack against your freedom.

I'm leaving now; don't follow me.

The thing is though: these guys aren't secret vigilantes. 25 years ago they'd be war-dialing every number in their city prefix ('cause Mom and Dad would get pissed if there were long distance charges on the bill) or moping around 2600 meet-ups trying to show off their homemade redbox.

Now a days they're running LOIC, or WordPress-backdoor-du-jour, or (if they're l33t) `wget --mirror` on some herp derp county website looking for dox. Lists like this are bound to get stumbled upon. When they do, they become currency on irc, redeemable for a modicum of street cred.

Eventually, it falls into the hands of whoever managed to register today's Anonymous twitter account and it gets shoehorned into the political agenda of some teenager who stole "Essential Bakunin" from the library, but hasn't gotten around to reading it.

Anonymous is really embarrassing themselves. Trying to connect the dots from doxxing "management at community banks" back to Aaron Swartz is so cringe worthy I can only shrug and assume they're doing it for the lulz.

row row fight the powah, I guess.

By your analogy, COPPA would be the law that prevents people from collecting and selling children's organs. Because kids are gullible and and it's easy to convince them out of a kidney or two.

Except replace "organs" with "personally identifiable information companies want in order to market shit to you."

But here's the distinction: the "protection of privacy" is not a subset of the "protection of children."

You're throwing COPPA into the same bucket as every other misguided attempt to shelter children from the boogeymen of the Internet. That's not its intent; you're misinterpreting it.

Seriously, go read it (http://www.coppa.org/coppa.htm). You're getting your jimmies rustled under the pretense that COPPA has anything to do with protecting children from the "evils" of the Internet.

Honestly, I would think this crowd would be more disappointed that "banned from nearly any site" has become synonymous with "unwilling to submit all your personally identifiable information."

I have little sympathy that such a casual disregard to customer's privacy would come to bite them in the ass multiple times.