If the ad blockers would actually follow the links and give the people the clicks they desire, without displaying the advertisement, would that help?"

Are you asking if illegal click fraud would help Arstechnica? I think the answer is an unequivocal "no;"

...the demographic studies these revenue sources depending upon the click analysis would fail. How nice.

Why is that nice? Because then you'll see the ads that should have gone to 90-year-old widows instead of the video game ad you would normally see? How nice because Ars would go out of business? What exactly is your point here... because if it's what it seems to be on the surface then it's really dumb.

Simply sending a reboot command, or a single command that causes the machine to hang, isn't a DOS

This is a common view of a DoS because flood-style attacks are the types you hear about on the news and on Slashdot, however what you said is simply not true. Crashing a webserver remotely is, without a doubt, a denial of service attack, as you are denying service to the end user. It makes absolutely no difference what means you use to accomplish this goal. If you don't believe me, just take a look at this week's CERT security bulletin: http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/bulletins/SB10-040.html.
For Wireshark:

Multiple buffer overflows in the LWRES dissector in Wireshark 0.9.15 through 1.0.10 and 1.2.0 through 1.2.5 allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (crash) via a malformed packet, as demonstrated using a stack-based buffer overflow to the dissect_getaddrsbyname_request function.

For Asterisk:

Asterisk Open Source 1.6.0.x before 1.6.0.22, 1.6.1.x before 1.6.1.14, and 1.6.2.x before 1.6.2.2, and Business Edition C.3 before C.3.3.2, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) via an SIP T.38 negotiation with an SDP FaxMaxDatagram field that is (1) missing, (2) modified to contain a negative number, or (3) modified to contain a large number.

Postgresql:

The bitsubstr function in backend/utils/adt/varbit.c in PostgreSQL 8.0.23, 8.1.11, and 8.3.8 allows remote authenticated users to cause a denial of service (daemon crash) or have unspecified other impact via vectors involving a negative integer in the third argument, as demonstrated by a SELECT statement that contains a call to the substring function for a bit string, related to an "overflow."

So we have malformed packet, bad handshake, and a poorly handled statement, all of which cause what the CERT is classifying as "denial of service," and none of which even remotely match what you describe as a DoS attack.

Hahah, hell yeah I tried, gives you one of those goofy coversational "error: that's a really long string of characters!" errors.

1e100=1

Scientific notation does not work like that.
1e1 = 1*10^1 = 10
1e10 = 1*10^10 = 10000000000
1e100 = 1*10^100 = Slashdot doesn't let you write 100 zeros in a row. You get the idea.

Whoever designed these devices should be sent back to computer school. An authentication device that can be bypassed is a contradiction in terms.

First of all, this is not an authentication device, it's a cell network extender, which obviously requires some kind of authentication for any measure of security. What "Authentication device" (I think they mean "authentication mechanism") has never had a vulnerability exposed? Are all devices with a privilege escalation vulnerability designed by people who "should be sent back to computer school?" ("computer school?" ...seriously?). How many privilege escalation vulnerabilities were found in the Linux kernel last year? I empathize with the fact that an escalation exploit this serious in a device that is designed to be used by the public is not a trivial matter, but the poster is being sensationalist here, and, honestly, comes across as undereducated in the subject matter. I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but this person doesn't seem to have a clear understanding of the issue. It's a security vulnerability in a device that runs Linux because the designers were lazy when picking a password.

The real issue here is the fact that security is sometimes not taken as seriously with hardware and firmware design in commodity devices as it is with software.

Usually pressing the Windows key or alt-tabbing works just fine in that kind of setup.

Yep, that did happen, but in South Africa, not Germany.

I think we, as a community, can learn a lot from the ancient and wise game:

• Catch the Mountain Wampus for mod points
• Press all player buttons to post first
• Develop a cutthroat economy where a single asshole player can collapse the entire system

OK so maybe some aspects of the game are more plausible than others.

-Purple Mechtron

...a lot of dummies have bought into it.

The only reason I use Xohm is because I refuse to give any of my money to Comcast or Verizon; I think that's a pretty reasonable decision and does not make me a dummy. That being said, I do get minimum 120ms latencies to anywhere, and that does suck sometimes.

I couldn't agree more; BackupPC is really great. Not only does it support Tar over SSH and SMB, but it also supports rsync over SSH, rsyncd and now in the new beta, FTP. I backup everything to a NAS and then rsync that every weekend to another DR disk (you have to be careful about hardlinks when copying the pool, since it uses them in the de-duplication process). There are several variants of scripts available on the wiki and other sites for initiating shadow copies on Windows boxes, and with a little tinkering you can even get that working on Server 2008, though of course it really shines with *nix boxes. Highly recommended - the only drawbacks are that, as the parent mentioned, the learning curve can be intimidating at first, and the project has been pretty quiet the past few years since the original developer stopped working on it. Amanda (the MySQL backup company) seems to have picked it back up and they are the ones who released the most recent beta. Did I mention it has a really convenient web interface, emails about problems, auto-retries failed backups (while it's not in a blackout period), and somebody wrote a great Nagios plugin for it? I'm pretty sure I did, oh yes definitely.