Forgive my ignorance but I fail to see the difference between a separate password manager app, and password management in a browser that has the necessary crypto to secure the passwords on the disk, and reveal them only with proper credentials (aka master password).

Only advantage I see for a password manager is that it could be used across different applications.

The problem with the browsers is that they make it all too easy with the ubiquitous "save password?" every time one is entered. I know I can turn off the function, but most people don't and they do blindly save them.

I never knew that Chrome didn't have anything between the user and the plaintext password....how many people take their computers in for service not realizing that the techs behind the counter now have access to their bank, health and other info?

The scary bit is whether the navigator even knows how to read charts any more. Or do dead reckoning or celestial navigation.

The transportation industry is relying more and more on technology and less on human knowlege to get from point A to point B. GPS, Airline Autopilots and Instrument Landing Systems, train automation are all making significant in-roads to the point that the humans on board are just blindly trusting it.

I foresee the auto industry going in the same direction. I tease my kids that their kids will not know how to drive a car. Indeed my kids have never looked at a paper map.

Just today I renewed a subscription for 365 days of delivery to my front door. $228.00 gets me not only the news, but something to line the cat's litterbox, package filler, and tabletop protection for those messy kitchen table projects.

And the ad's don't jiggle, make noise, change color or otherwise become overtly obnoxious that I want to download Ad-Block. I don't mind a little advertising...sometimes I want to see what is out there.

Finally, I don't mind if my greasy fingers get on the paper.

Try killing a spider with a kindle...

Why destroy all ads and marketing? We still need a mechanism that allows us to know what is available, and at what price.

What I want to destroy is the means for marketers to set prices of goods and services based on "targeted" information that seemingly have no relation to the product or service being purchased. I hate when people in Florida have are offered a product via a WWW site that costs more than the same exact product offered to someone in Massachusetts. It is even worse when you take a look at the picture on a global basis. I hate it when I pay $100 more for an airline seat than the guy sitting next to me. We both got the same exact service, but at wildly divergent prices.

Make a good product...sell it at a price point determined by supply and demand (which I am guessing won't fluctuate each minute) where a reasonable profit can be had, and be happy with it. Probably a little naive...

I have been using the GNOME shell in Fedora 15 -> 17. Once they added the "extensions" interface it made it palatable as I have a number of extensions that give me back some of the old features. I do like the http://extensions.gnome.org/ interface though...makes it easy to find and add the needed extensions. But I can't honestly say that the changes GNOME3 introduced were worth the trouble. The workflow isn't greatly enhanced and the learning curve was bad enough to make me curse more than once.

I haven't seen a single interface enhancement that I can say was worth the headache: Windows XP -> Windows 7 ( I finally turned off Aero). I won't try Windows 8 unless I have to. Firefox upcoming v25 changes have me scared. MS-office ribbons suck.

In most cases I see these as a solution looking for a problem...

It is only "screaming" now, because almost nobody uses it.

I have always been surprised at the fact that no company I have ever worked with demands encryption for Emails. Even attachments are rarely encrypted even though ZIP provides an easy "shared password" type of encryption. Every Email transmitted in cleartext can be read by just about every sysadmin, and unless they are using encrypted SMTP can be read by anybody sniffing the internet.

Once Email encryption becomes ubiquitous (if ever...) it won't be screaming any more.

Looking at the filing date and the Assignee's on the patent you will see that this patent was originally filed by AT&T in 1992. This was in the glory days between the original 1984 divestiture of the Bell operating companies and the 1994 split of AT&T Long Lines and AT&T Networks (aka Western Electric). AT&T Networks became Lucent Technologies, which then merged in 2007 with Alcatel to become Alcatel-Lucent.

Probably won't happen. Most retailers are sensitive about advertising...the price advertised will always be the cash price if they are adding the surcharge, while a second retailer who doesn't add the surcharge either matches the price and eats the surcharge, or advertises a higher price. Either way the second retailer is going to end up matching the business practices of the guy down the street.

I have no idea how the retailers are going to react. But I fully expect to see healthcare providers who take credit cards tack on the extra surcharge. The interesting thing is how the insurance companies react...I am guessing no reimbursement for the optional fee.

I am guessing restaurants are also going to tack on the surcharge.

Same way any Windows box gets compromised...two most common:

-- A security flaw is found in the distro and the patches are not up-to-date.
-- Someone installs some other program as root which contains the trojan.

Linux is just as vulnerable as Windows to these attacks....

While it may increase the liquidity of the market, it doesn't necessarily promote good ideas.

Society benefits when good ideas are promoted through shareholder investments. The stock market did just great for 100 years without algorithmic trading, and the intro to algorithmic trading has caused several large instabilities in just the past two years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_capital

This amazing graphic illustrates the effect of this type of trading on the volumes, and ...I believe that instabilities will only get worse with this type of activity.

http://www.nanex.net/aqck/2804.HTML

As the underlying article states the growth of "Quote SPAM" is really the problem. Most of this is "testing the waters" where a quote is tossed out to see the response and immediately cancelled with no resulting trade.

Fundamentally, it is simply gambling.

Actually this is a pretty good way to do two factor authentication. In theory, you need possession of the login credentials as well as possession of the phone to do the transaction.

RSA SecureID with the "number that changes once a minute" is another two factor authentication system that is in wide use, and if I understand the attack vector would be just as easy to compromise with a trojan in the PC. Just have the Banks WWW site ask for the securID token for some innocuous thing (sync the securID for example), and trojan takes care of the rest.

The fact that they were able to infect two devices for a single user testifies to the ingenuity of this attack. If I am honest with myself, I can't say I would be immune to it either...even though I am probably more sensitive than the average computer user. I still find myself being the lemming when accessing some site and wanting to get the transaction done. Click here, put in code there, who knows whether it is legit or not. Especially since this trojan did some sort of greasemonkey type injection directly into the banks real WWW page.

It is more complicated than that. This is all about what today's society expects and how people conform to those expectations.

I believe a better analogy would be "I draw a picture, make a large number of copies, and leave them in a public building. Do I expect that people walking by won't pick one up?".

The answer depends on how hard it is to make the copy, where in the public building the copies were left, what notices were posted at the door of the public building, what the passer-by intends to do with the copy, and whether the original producer is deprived of anything.

If each copy was an oil painting on canvas I suppose you might reasonably expect a passer-by to leave them lie. Especially if that passer-by intends to pick up the entire stack and sell them on a street corner. After all each copy cost the original artist something in materials and time, and I would be depriving the original artist of those costs.

If each copy was a photocopy, I can't see anyone assuming that they can't pick up a copy. Material/time costs to the original artist are minimal, so as a passer-by I won't feel that I have deprived anybody of anything by picking up a copy to take home and hang on my wall. In today's society a stack of photocopies in a public place implies they are to be taken.

Of course, if I take that photocopy and publish it in my newspaper in order to sell more newspapers, The original artist might have cause to object, as that act isn't generally supported in today's society.

In GitHub, if I put some sourcecode there, and make no attempt to protect it with password or license, I don't feel today's society would not allow me to object to people downloading it for personal use. But if I include it in a project for sale, I should take care to read the licenses and get the necessary permissions.

Ever try getting an appointment for a specialist for a non-urgent procedure in the USA? While I am sure it isn't every case, I have been told a couple of times that the "first available slot" is 6-8 weeks out, and only after the first visit can the procedure be scheduled which may be delayed yet another couple of weeks.

I live in Florida, have decent corporate Health Insurance (~ $5000 per year premium from my paycheck, plus $25 copays for every visit up to $2000, plus 10% of all charges for any procedure). Most all procedures are now done off premises in Surgical centers where you get 2 bills: the doctors, and the facility which tend to total to more than $1000 per procedure to my insurance company ($100 or more out of pocket). Add to the "wait" and the "cost" that I must find an "in-network" provider.

Sounds like "standing in line" to me.....I have lived 11 years in Europe and Asia, and have always found the health care better overseas than in the USA. I think most of that is because the lawyers aren't as involved in healthcare overseas. Go see any USA provider and count the number of forms you need to read and sign.

I can't wait to see what kind of malware this type of scheme would produce. I have no proof, but if feels like running a compiled bytecode would be easier to exploit than text based javascript.

I will agree with this....having dealt with AT&T as a vendor, I would say their customer service people probably have no idea who in the company might be able to answer the question, so it easier to just punt and give the "proprietary" answer.

Furthermore, I would guess they know which market the caller is coming from, and whether they are the only provider in the area. If they know you can't vote with your feet, they are much less inclined to make you happy.