Sorry brennen, totally disagree with you. I thought at first it was a good thing, and yes it DOES show that the security measures are currently inadequate, but they have broken the law, and released customers information to fraudsters, claiming it's the companies fault for not protecting it. What a crock of ****.
That's like you saying the bank didn't put an adequate lock on there door, and your excuse for breaking in and stealing the money. Whilst in there you take peoples bank records and make them publicly available.. and you then claim it's also the banks fault. No, you broke the law.
I'm not trying to get on a moral high horse here, but they are breaking into (or have been and now announcing it), multiple places.. and now the US Senate Office has alledgely been hacked into, I think the may be rather stuffed. Might be a little hard to find people that obviously could hack wireless networks easily to stay mobile...
I'm sure the thrill of not-physically breaking into somewhere is good (because it 'feels' like it isn't illegal per se).. and the desire to show themselves off is awesome... but they are also picking and chosing who they exploit (i.e. they reckon they didn't steal anything from the NHS.. oh, how moral)... and then trying to go after the 'evil' corps. I don't like companies that treat their customers as 'punter's, (i.e. just cash cows.. get the money and don't worry about how they are treated), but doesn't mean that these guys have the right to try and **** them over.
I appreciate what you are saying about 'thinning out', and better in in the long term. You are quite possibly right. But it still isn't right. If you had your money stolen from your bank account, or even games taken from you, I doubt you'd be supporting them then. If the place I work at was 'hacked' into (and believe me, it's rather bloody secure), you'd be rather bloody ****** off if the thing I protect was taken from you.
Additionally, I don't believe the companies will stop gathering data about customers etc, it's the nature of business. All they will do is try to lock that data down more.