Having now taken the time to read the article through to the end, whilst it's given me a moment's smug amusement at the possible discomfiture of those Apple Mac owners who have, over the years, themselves smugly blamed my Windows disasters on my own stupidity for not owning a Mac, I'd tone down the laughter to a wry smile on learning just how devastating an impact that event had on that guy's life.

If a techno journalist can be hit like that (and his profession and association with 'Wired' was actually why he was hit) what chance is there for the rest of us?

Some good lessons in the article, most of which I've introduced into my internet life, and it's good to see that as a result of the hack all the organisations involved have beefed-up their systems to make it harder for it to happen again. Although you'll notice I didn't say "prevent" there!

Made me wonder just how hard Yahoo tried to close down the type of hacking I experienced (pretty mild I realise now) when my email system and wi-fi-connected phone contacts were compromised. Had Mat Honan not been who he was and working for the mag he works for, I wonder whether anything would have been done by Apple, Amazon, et al?

I now change passwords and PINs regularly. I store them in a password and PIN-protected environment on a machine unconnected with the internet and not wi-fi enabled. I also store them in hardcopy on a sheet of A4 amongst a sheaf of old documents in a ring-binder kept amongst old files, necessary to allow my wife and family to access them in the event of anything happening to me.

Having read that back, it all makes me sound pathetically dependant on gadgets. I'm looking around my desk and see five high-tech items that, whilst not essential to my life, have made it a bloody sight easier and more interesting than it might otherwise be. I can find my way to anywhere in the UK or Ireland with a device that could record all my engagements for the next decade if I expected to live that long, has all my contact details together with the ability to connect me to any one of them, has a myriad of devices that will measure the location, distance to and height of anything I come into contact with, and will keep me both amused and informed with hours of recorded music and text. In fact, name it and it'll do it within reason - and often, seemingly, beyond reason.

Can we really, nowadays, do our banking without the internet without travelling miles to do it?

I'm in twice-weekly face-to-face contact with my brother in Canada and my nephew in Arkansas, and I can speak directly with my sister in a nursing home in Arkansas by his simply putting the phone up to the mic on his laptop.

If I was so inclined to make this old pile (the house, not me) an energy-efficient place and one that also pumped electricity into the grid, I could post a question about a problem of detail for which I couldn't see an obvious solution on here and get informed opinion from any place between Cornwall and Skye, or even Canada and Hungary and numerous points about the UK's offshore island of Europe.

But I still don't think the continued existence of miserable little scrotes of hackers are a price worth paying!

I don't really see that story as an Apple/Windows thing, more a personal computing/cloud computing thing. Apart from the remote wiping bit (it's just nuts to allow some remote company to be able to wipe your computer without some sort of additional password or whatever) that sort of thing could have happened to the user of any operating system (yes, even Linux ). The problem here was crappy authentication in the cloud, not operating system bugs.

Posted By: Joiner
I wonder how much of Honan's problems were caused by the Apple Mac-induced feeling of security that such a reputedly unhacked OS engenders?

OS X is far from "unhacked", it routinely gets taken down in the Pwn2Own competition. There are numerous live threats circulating. No OS is immune, especially since a lot of attacks rely on things like social engineering, the machine can't protect you from your own stupidity.

There have been quite a few cases of Mac users getting tripped up lately. A truckload of them ended up in a botnet a little while ago after installing dodgy copies of iWork from public torrents. Numpties. I don't know why anybody installs pirated software, that's just rolling out a welcome mat that says "pwn me!"

At the time I had three anti-virus programs supposedly working on my behalf - Norton, MacAfee and Avast. I got rid of Norton and MacAfee soon after and kept Avast because it costs nothing and yet seems to do the job just as well as the other two and does it for nothing.

It's generally not a good idea to run more than one AV suite, they tend to kick up a lot of false positives caused by them regarding each others' behaviour as suspicious. Norton and McAfee were traditionally crap and ludicrously bloated. I've heard rumours that may have changed, but I haven't used either in a long time so can't confirm. Avast and Microsoft Security Essentials are both good for freebies. MSE is very lightweight, but Avast is more fun because you can set the default language to "Pirate Speak", and it does boot time scans which is handy.

The only defence seems to be a physical separation. A virtual distance is just that - virtual.

Indeed, however there are digital walls you can build that are extremely effective. Encryption can be impractical to actually crack, the only realistic way to defeat it is to get the target to hand over the key.

Tom, Your 'universal field' is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

I always liked this guy's "Theory of space, time and gravitation" http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Fock.html

Seret, gravity acts simultaneously everywhere? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity

Posted By: fostertomI never knew that c is supposed to be the highest poss speed of anything

To the best of our knowledge it is, things can be slower than the speed of light though, even light, that is why a prism splits light into different colours.

Posted By: fostertomSo the recent faster-than-light thing was reckoned to be a mistake?

Yes it was, very old news that one now.

Posted By: fostertomand I thought someone had detected phenomenally fast quantum entanglement reactions?

Ah the spin of a photon, no one really knows what is going on, so treat it as gravity for now. I have a book about it and it defeats me what they are on about.

Posted By: fostertomI never knew that c is supposed to be the highest poss speed of anything - and I find that hard to accept. Why shouldn't different fields have different speeds of propagation? Is that Wiki in fact the accepted conventional wisdom?

But Tom, the idea is to unify all the fields into one ultimate field - this would explain why they all have the same speed of propagation. As for the "speed" of light - it's just a constant that falls out of the geometry of spacetime. One could imagine that, from a photon's point of view, time doesn't pass at all. This could also explain why quantum entanglement appears to be simultaneous - from the point of view of the two spin-correlated photons, no time has passed at all since they were separated. Einstein's equations have never been proved incorrect (so far) in their predictive abilities - and they rely on c really being the ultimate "speed" - but, as I said, it's more a geometrical parameter than what we would conventionally think of as "speed".

Paul in Montreal.

Posted By: fostertomThere are messages passing between 2 independent entities, but just by the power and purity of their innocence in not recognising time, the messages miraculously take no time at all i.e considerably faster than c; or

No, there's no message passing. The state of the photos is "set" once they are "launched" - all you know is the state of both of them - I don't think you can change the state of the local one. So there's no information passing at faster than c.

Posted By: fostertomAll is one i.e. there are no independent entities anywhere.

Doesn't this support your "interconnectness of everything" hypothesis?

But don't forget one of the key tenets of relativity is the "relative" aspect - that one's frame of reference is key to what is observed. My frame of reference is quite different to that of a photon.

Paul in Montreal.

Here's a nice discussion about whether quantum entanglement allows faster than light /communication/ http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=231008

The gist seems to be no, it doesn't.

ted has some good talks on this subject, tap quantum computing into the search box
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/aaron_o_connell_making_sense_of_a_visible_quantum_object.html

i like the holographic universe theory myself