Which regulations were lax or missing? From what I saw it was a pretty heavily regulated market even on the banking side.

No I wouldn't. Who said they would be? This is a straw man argument. And possibly a false dichotomy.

I don't think the parent suggested that torts and other forms of liability should be abolished.

And so on. There are multiple ways that problems like these can and have been resolved, and centralized federal regulation isn't the only choice.

In other words, go back to the way ads used to work in the paper era. Publishers vetted the ads and printed them themselves. If the sites did this the ad blockers probably wouldn't even work. I wonder why they don't pursue that option instead of trying to use the government to force people to do something they do not want?

That is interesting. I wonder how the 'you are using ad blocker' detection works? Our proxy doesn't block ads (i.e. does not return a 403 status) but it replaces the content with a blank HTML document. We did this to avoid any ugly block messages and such. But I have never gotten the 'you are using an ad blocker' message. Maybe there is something in the detection that triggers on the 403 status returns from your proxy and not the 200 status returns from mine. (Assuming your proxy returns 403 which could be wrong).

I wonder if the ad blockers could be set up to provide the scripts in the ads with convincing feedback without exposing the end user to the risk or the content. After all, this is just another form of self-reporting.

Here's hoping one of these jets doesn't hit Rosetta and send it spinning off into deep space like Buck Rogers.

There is nothing in here about "loads of information" leaked to Chinese press (only one mention of a set of IP addresses), nor is there anything to establish he still had viable copies of these documents when he went to Russia. A few vague mentions of something he might do in the future doesn't prove anything except he thought about it.

I believe those tests were of cryogenic suspension, which takes a living animal and slows the metabolism down. I did not find any mention of tests involving animals fully frozen into a completely inert state that were ever revived.

That strikes me as pretty fast for an organization that size.

I don't see the reasoning for this conclusion, it seems to me this program is a colossal waste of money. I did a little searching and these benefits don't seem that great except in the cases of engineering classes. I am sure there are some students who will have their interest piqued, but there's a false assumption in that argument that the students would not have gone on to be engineers without that early exposure to some toy in the classroom.

Chimps eat tons of fruit. Fruit isn't simple sugars?

A CA isn't required at all to encrypt, just accept any self-signed certificate. If we want to introduce CAs or other method of identity verification, that may be fine but it is a different problem from encryption. We are seeing bits of this with the various opportunistic encryption extensions to SMTP and HTTP.

And who else can walk up and simply kick the door in? Is the risk of a break-in significantly changed by using the phone app? Why wouldn't anyone who wanted in simply kick in the door or just break a window? Some guy in a different country has no interest in unlocking my front door. My point is, does an app like that REALLY change your risk at all given how easy it already is to get in? Now if you are running a gold repository or something the equation is different, but for the typical wooden house owner I don't see it is any different.

But I generally agree with you, I don't want Internet connected appliances of any sort. Even my 'smart' TV is disconnected.

A better way to say this might be: the effort the manufacturer puts into security will be equal to the perceived risk. Since my garage door is already easy to open with a crowbar, the manufacturer might perceive that the risk of some wireless vulnerability is no worse than the risk I am already accepting by having a garage door in the first place. The same with vulnerabilities in my thermostat. What is the risk of someone hacking it and goofing with my temperature settings? They might feel this is not a real threat since there is no money involved for the theoretical attacker. And of course, as you point out, the risk to the manufacturer of lawsuits, etc. enters into the picture. As it stands now, they might plan to go into court and argue that since it was already easy to open the standard garage door there is no reason to make the wireless opener any more secure than that.

What good is stopping one missile if the next ten get through and bounce the rubble?

Israeli prime ministers have been making this claim for decades. The year keeps passing and still it hasn't happened. US intelligence agencies keep reaffirming their conclusion that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, please provide us a clarification of how you know better than them.