Great article. Here at Expedia we are building something very similar for our AWS spend as we are migrating. Since our spend is multi-million per month (and we have barely started migrating), it's even more difficult. Hopefully, we will have a blog post in the coming months as well detailing it.
Dang, LR has been big in the underground communities forever. Bouncing money between international Paypal accounts and then through LR has always been the way I've heard of it being done. It will be interesting to see what follows it. Also curious if they will try to prosecute any of the LR users they are able to track down.
You could set up security questions for yourself. Like you have to input an answer to "Why do I want this MacBook", and, "Why is this MacBook more important than a latte this morning".
I think its a really good idea. It would be cool if you could have an on/off switch to make pausing more difficult. For instance, I know that for myself, as soon as I wanted to spend that money I was saving, I would just pause the service. But if I could make it harder to do that (I.E. make it so I have to do several prompts to pause it, answer some math problem or something that would take me more than 5 seconds to open an app and hit pause), I would certainly turn that on for myself.
I ultimately want to work in the security arena, it has been my favorite topic.
I also hold a TS/SCI security clearance so that is in my favor for such a job. But how do I get started with a job in that field? If a company was willing to take me on because I learn fast, that would be great, but how do I find something like that?