It's not always cost that limits bus widths. See PCI for example. They tried widening it (64 bit) and clocking it up (66, 133, and very rarely even beyond), but what won out is a much higher clocked serial interface (PCI Express).

Skew in a parallel interface is a bitch, plus the number of traces required on the board to support a wide bus. There's only so many connections you can practically run in to any given chip package without getting unmanageable.

ECC does not mitigate it, but it will detect the problem where non-ECC memory will happily keep on operating with the corrupted data.

For the standard car analogy, consider tire pressure monitoring systems. They won't stop you from getting a flat, but they'll let you know you have a slow leak where you might otherwise keep driving until it's bad enough that you notice otherwise. By that time the damage is done and you probably need a new tire.

Seriously, I'm pretty sure the first touch screen I ever used back in the early '90s used basically the same method. You didn't have to actually touch the screen, since it was a CRT and was usually curved where the sensor plane was flat.

SS7 dates to the '70s. Pretty much no communications protocols intended for general use were designed with even the thought of security at the time. The number of players in the game was small enough that any bad behavior could be rooted out fairly easily.

Look at email for the same basic problem, it was designed with the assumption that the parties involved could be trusted because on the networks it was designed for that was generally the case. Over time the trustworthiness of the network was degraded for reasons both good and bad, but the common protocols had already been established by then and it's a long road to change.

I won't argue that there probably has been some "influence" on decisions about adopting more secure replacements, but it's a bit tinfoil hattish to claim that the protocols themselves were intentionally made insecure when it's well documented that most protocols from that era just weren't designed to try to be secure in the first place.

Individual is the key word there. The BSA (and thus I agree by extension Microsoft) has a well documented track record of suing companies using pirated software. If you take them at their word that there were a large number of different devices activating those products from that IP address it seems reasonable that the same is exactly what's happening here. Individual pirates would be like the RIAA and MPAA going after actual people and families.

Or that IP is an exit point for Tor or a VPN or whatever and whoever's actually doing it is somewhere else, who can say.