Sure, someone who wants to claim ownership of a picture would never be able to insert desired metadata in the file.

You forgot terrorists. They also use printers.

Yes, there are legitimate uses for all these traitorware features in software/hardware. The point is that these features should be opt in and disabled by default, so that people who truly want them can enable them.

Yes, I forgot to mention that this scheme will only work when ISPs are unable to set such unreasonable pricing (either through free (perfect) market, or through heavy regulation / government control). Of course, this raises a question whether Internet access is a luxury or a basic need that needs to be provided to all citizens.

You are correct. In fact, charging per sent/received byte of data could fix a number of economical and technical problems in the network.

First, there is this problem of flat rates. For some reason, people seem to like them (is it because they are predictable?), but I don't see any logic behind this. Everyone hates prepaying parking some extra minutes to be safe, leaving earlier, and regretting wasted money. I don't see why this should be different with Internet plans. People who use the Internet to check emails and surf text web would not have to pay for the minimum plan (at least $40/mo). Of course, that would mean less profit for ISPs, which is why per-byte pricing is not popular.

Second, this will solve technical problem of flow fairness. The whole reason why "download accelerators" and (partially) p2p programs exist is because TCP fairness is inherently broken, as you can increase your speed on a congested link simply by opening more connections. Charging per byte would tie all flows to an economic entity, ensuring perfect fairness (you pay more -> you get bigger share of a congested link).

Third, pricing can be dynamic ("congestion pricing"). We can borrow ideas from power companies that charge (typically industrial/commercial) users less per KWh in off-peak hours when the network is underutilized, and similarly charge more during peak hours. While this works the best between end user and their ISP, it could be extended to relationships between ISPs.

Fourth, end users could have more control over prioritizing their traffic with respect to their own and other users' traffic. Suppose the network is congested, and I am willing to pay more to get my VoIP traffic delivered on time, but I don't care as much for p2p traffic (it can be delayed/rescheduled so I can save money).

In fact, this is something I'm working on as a mini-research project, so it would be interesting if it worked in reality.

There is nothing wrong with an application that doesn't conform to standard practices as long as system administrator is fully aware of what the application does, and knowingly chooses to install it. I may have my own reasons why I want to run a rootkit on my machine (honeypots, etc), and Google is not the one who should deprive me of this opportunity. Now, it would be unethical for me to install this app to spy on somebody, but this should be left to my conscience without Google being a moral police.

I thought the general consensus here on /. was that since I own the hardware, I should be able to use it as I please, so why is my opinion so unpopular?

I'm not the OP, but I used the same workaround. The answer is simple - I didn't know about XDG, the command needed to update directory, its parameters, where the config file is located, or whether the app in question is "good behaving". Doing rm & ln is simple, gets the job done, and doesn't require additional googling. The same thing really happened when I installed sun java and didn't know about the alternatives mechanism - manually overriding symlinks, or even prepending java's bin directory to your $PATH is easier than trying to figure out how to do it properly. Of course now that I know about these tools I will use them, but you shouldn't really blame the OP for using something he knows to quickly fix the problem instead of spending additional time learning about new tools.