Interesting note at the end about offline playists having to be re-downloaded. That, and the phrase 'internal company data' has me curious if the breach was some kind theft of media, as opposed to user credentials and info.
This is actually about as good as it gets for password hashes, so kudos to eBay.
Since these are salted and require 12000 iterations, cracking individual passwords will be quite time consuming. The preferred method in this case, though, is to go after low hanging fruit.
The way one would do this is to try something like the 500 most common passwords against all entries in the table. This won't take very long (compared to trying to brute force a bunch of individual passwords), and will probably yield a ton of passwords.
I disagree. We are talking about instances where both you and the government have all the information necessary to compute your tax exactly. It doesn't matter who does the calculation, the rate is fixed in advance. Even if you let them calculate the number for you there is no reason you can't double check it.
For more complicated tax situations where you are trying to minimize your tax based on information not available to the government this type of a system wouldn't be applicable.
While I think this sort of analysis is really cool and potentially interesting, there really isn't anything non-obvious in this article, assuming one is familiar with basic music theory. Hopefully this is part one and the more interesting material is being saved for later.