Here are a few more differences and corrections:
* Mitrokhin turned the data over to British officials only after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He did not endanger his country's ongoing intelligence operations. He may have embarrassed several former Soviet officials, but the revelations were not a crime against his country, as that country no longer existed at the time of their release. While the act of copying the classified data would certainly have been a crime against the Soviet Union, again, that country was gone. (Snowden released the data of his own still-active country, including information about active operations.)
* The data he turned over was archival material spanning decades and ending in the 1980s; he gave it up in the early 1990s. Some of it was less than ten years old at the time it was delivered. (Snowden's data was indeed more current and relevant.)
* After the publication of his notes in two books, the SVR actually provided academic access to the old KGB archives for a time. I think that was ended after the wrong person was embarrassed by his historical record, perhaps a former lieutenant colonel in the KGB. (The NSA has not yet opened their doors to the public in response to Snowden's release.)
* He was not a "whistleblower" in that he did not release this data in an attempt to change any ongoing practices. He was a historian who respected the truth, and did not want the facts distorted or destroyed by a regime with a long history of rewriting history. (Snowden is an activist, who is trying to effect change.)
* Mitrokhin's position was a Senior Archivist. He had access to essentially all KGB historical records, not simply operations of which he was a part. (Snowden was an administrator of systems, and had access to the records they contained; he also used other people's credentials to gain additional access to other records.)

Well, considering Mitrokhin had Christopher Andrew publish selected information in two English language volumes already, "The Sword and the Shield", and "The World was Going Our Way", I think your pleas for ignorance are not going to have much effect. This is simply a release of the rest of the materiel he exfiltrated.

C'mon, guys, when they aren't even on the same continent, you ought to realize they have their own laws. I know you think American law applies everywhere, but maybe you should try to find some more relevant perspective.

Blizzard is dying. Minecraft confirms it.

While I don't want to provide a detailed how-to, it goes something like this:

1. Go to store.
2. Fill cart with TVs and other expensive goods.
3. Wait for cashier to ask "would you like to save money by opening a credit card?"
4. ???
5. Profit.

I was watching a TV show about Alaska, where some small town had their generator go out and they needed to fly in an engineer. In those tiny villages, the kind where an engineering degree means you can get a job somewhere else that can afford to pay you, remote monitoring and diagnosis is the only option they have. They had one guy in the town who had the keys to the building, knew to keep the fuel tanks filled, and could do some minor mechanical repairs to the system, but that was pretty much the limit of his capabilities.

Nobody in that town would be qualified enough to even understand those notices. Nobody there would likely know what software was being used, let alone visit the home pages of the company providing it. A town like that won't have the money to pay for monitoring services - they're going to be on a repair-only basis. And they're going to be the ideal consumers of a remote solution like the kind these firms are selling.

While this town may be a worst case scenario, it exemplifies the kinds of bad luck circumstances that would lead someone right into this risk, and CERT notices probably won't ever help them much.

I realize you're trying to make a joke in that all things are "things", but there's value in having a phrase that narrows the topic a bit. It's basically a catch-all term, like referring to the Internet's plumbing as "the cloud." The "things" in the Internet of Things are devices that aren't primarily information devices by design. A refrigerator may have a microcontroller to maintain temperature, but it wouldn't be called a computer. Adding internet connectivity to it still doesn't make it an information device, so it falls into the category of "Internet of Things".

Mobile phones, iPads, laptops, computers, these are primarily information devices that are generally not considered part of the IoT, although they may serve the user to interact with the things. And the line is very squishy. An IP-enabled TV set seems to straddle the border, and depending on context may or may not be part of the IoT discussion.

The "things" do offer benefits to people, just not giant big payoffs. A washing machine can alert you that the load needs to go in the dryer, or it can phone home for diagnostic and service information, potentially saving on repair bills. And certainly when the Smart Grid arrives, they will help people save money by managing usage. As many non-connected devices already have microcontrollers, adding a wifi chip and protocol stack may cost only a few extra dollars.

They don't have to be big benefits. As long as they deliver at least small incremental improvements, people will buy them.

I'm not saying that 50% of Americans will run out and replace every device in their house with IoT capable things. But as IoT devices hit the market, more and more people will start to acquire them as they replace their worn out goods. They will not arrive with a big bang, but in about 20 years or so, you won't be able to swing a cat in the homes of affluent Americans without hitting at least one or two IP devices. And what's the IoT going to look like then? Microsoft wants to be a part of shaping that now, because it is going to pay off big later.

Sadly, as for the people who can't afford to fix their cars let alone replace a broken washing machine, the gap is going to widen, and they are going to be left further behind. It's already apparent that they are stuck with bad choices, such as cheap-but-used energy-inefficient appliances. They can't afford to get to a managed, efficient refrigerator that could save them extra money over the long term, because they haven't the capital to spend today. That's part of the nature of an inequitable system. The only hope they'll have is that in 10 or 20 years that today's hand-me-downs can still get online and are energy efficient.

It seems like you really have no grasp on the concept of the Internet of Things. You're inventing ridiculous strawmen to slaughter to make your point. Nobody but you is talking about adding IP to showerheads.

The IoT is recognizing the idea that there are millions of IP enabled devices out there today, and the number is growing rapidly. The most visible examples include replacements like Nest or Honeywell thermostats, but other devices are entering homes, too, such as garage door openers, smoke alarms, light bulbs, and even washing machines. The most popular devices include entertainment systems that now can connect to Netflix or Hulu. Some of these will be successful, others won't. But the numbers are ever increasing, and people are buying them.

The market for them is also poised to go up rapidly. Today, they're primarily owned by early adopters, who are always willing to pay a premium. But there is something unusual about the IoT in that, by reporting back to a cloud, they provide valuable data to the manufacturers. More data gives them more value, so they have incentive to increase market penetration, and that means aggressive pricing and increased competition. This will result in more rapid adoption.

So with these diverse things entering the home, the demand to integrate them will increase. Microsoft has a large portion of the home PC market, and is perfectly positioned to provide that integration, even if it doesn't happen on Windows Phones. That is, as long as they do it well, and handle all the random error conditions that a diverse set of computers can generate. If it's not seamless and perfect, they'll fail again.

So how many of these people are actually needed in the federal government? It's not like having an extra cyber security guy in the FBI helps make Joe's Dry Cleaning a safer business. Security isn't transitive.

Regarding your iOS v. Android observation, that's possibly related to demographics. On average, university students tend to come from families with better educated parents, and better education correlates with a higher average income. I'm not saying every student on your campus was given an iPhone by a rich mommy and daddy, but I bet the average is higher than in the general population.

I already have a Z-wave hub for interfacing with home control devices, an AssureLink hub to interface with a Craftsman device, and a Harmony hub to blink IR at the entertainment devices. The Z-wave hub sits on my network, and I can access it directly. The AssureLink hub provides an interface only via their cloud, and can be accessed either from a browser or their smartphone app. The Harmony hub supposedly is Z-wave compatible, but in reality has no external connectivity at all, and pairs only with their remote. My Honeywell thermostat talks only to their cloud, and my Samsung appliances will provide a local interface only to their smartphone app. OpenHAB would be like magic if it could pull all these diverse boxes together.

However, the added complexity means troubleshooting will be an even bigger nightmare. Let's say the Z-wave controlled garage light isn't coming on when the garage door opens. Is the problem in the door opening controller, the AssureLink hub, the local network, the internet connection, Craftsman's cloud, the OpenHAB system, the Z-wave hub, the Z-wave's mesh network routing, the Z-wave light controller, or the bulb itself? The complexity is already outlandish, and the reliability of the mesh network is very poor - adding more complexity will not help it get better. At this point it's not worth even trying to integrate these devices, even though I'd like to.

And I understand what's going on - imagine someone who just pays an installer to plop an integrated box in front of them. They're going to get used to lots of disappointment.

Look at it this way: one of those Saturday courses on just about any money-making topic would have cost you over $100.00. So really, you learned the lesson for a pretty reasonable price.

That said, I wish you luck in getting a working product.

From your link: "RFID works by rectifying a strong local signal (not ambient RF) " [emphasis mine.] The scam in TFA is that they're ignoring the same laws of physics you apparently didn't bother to read.

Pro tip: If you're going to cite a source for your argument, you probably want to make sure it's not refuting the argument you're trying to make.

You've packed a lot of wrong into such a short post. If a system is insecure a "good" architecture is irrelevant - you're still screwed. And either way, neither architecture nor cryptocurrencies have anything to do with this problem, which is unpatched OpenSSL.