A local business prof says this is a "desperate" move.

In my area, there is $50 a month for 30Mbps download, 5Mbps upload, unlimited cap.

See this plan

I had similar issues, though on a machine hosted outside my home network.

The solution was to implement SPF, pointing to the PTR of machine (i.e. what a reverse IP lookup will resolve to), and DKIM.

In your case, doing a PTR will be hard, since dynamic DHCP may change what the PTR is, but the rest does apply.

I wrote the following detailing what I did: Setting up SPF and DKIM on Postfix.

I had lots of mails bounce after Yahoo implemented DMARC.

However, with a bit of patience, I was able to implement DKIM and SPF for my domain, and now all the mails get delivered to Yahoo addresses.

I wrote about how ot configure SPF and DKIM in this article: Setting up SPF and DKIM for Postfix.

Perhaps you could have a two tier level of trust where repositories that are from signed approved vendors are automatically permitted, but unlisted ones require specific admin permission to install from. Of course, power users could mark an unlisted certificate as trustworthy to prevent the auth request, but it would prevent installs from silently coming in from hijacked repositories in the scenario described above.

Things were easy until the mid to late 19th century. Anything could be produced in a carpenter, blacksmith or watchmaker's workshop. Lenses were ground, metals were machined, ...etc.

Then in the early 20th century things started to get far more specialized. By the mid 20th century, we had the transistor then the integrated circuit.

Now, everthing from ubiquitous phones to home appliances to street lights have complicated integrated circuits, CPUs, RAM, ...etc. that can only be designed by specialized teams, and fabricated in very high tech fabs.

I wrote about it here : Information readability and longevity in the digital age.

Is that really what they are doing? I have a counterfeit Prolific device that "broke" after a driver update. I simply uninstalled the new drivers and installed an old version to make it work.

Admittedly, that's a different OEM, so they may be doing something different.

None of these analogies are correct.

They are not changing the device at all, they are simply making their drivers not work with the fake ones.

There is no reasonable analogy that can be made involving a Gucci product.

This is exactly correct. I've experienced this with a radio programming cable with a counterfeit chip supposedly from Prolific. The drivers that Windows automatically downloaded for it caused the device to not function. Rather than stuffing around with the supplier, I simply downloaded an old working driver, uninstalled the new driver, installed the old driver, and done.

Certainly not a job my mother could do, but also not the same as the OEM bricking devices, which would legally be dangerous for them as it could be argued that they were willingly causing property damage.

From a commercial point if view I think it is an appropriate measure, albeit perhaps not the most reasonable from consumers' perspectives.

SurfaceRT was a failure. The only way only explanation that I can think of for you asserting that the Surface Pro line has been a failure is if your head is located in a place that makes it difficult to see what's going on in the world around you.

The main difference is that FreeBSD users know what Google is and how to use it.

They will take a CNN and a Fox newscaster and lock em in a cage until only one is left reporting.

I'll avoid that. I don't think I could stomach such brutality.

Contrary to all the speculative guesses in the comments, the researchers do have a hypothesis for this.

From the linked PLOS article:

Unique among the senses, the olfactory system depends on stem cell turnover, and thus may serve as an indicator of deterioration in age-related regenerative capacity more broadly or as a marker of physiologic repair function

I’ve got news for you. The sexual liberation movement has already been and gone, and most of society no longer has a puritanical view of sex and sexuality. You’ll have to find some other reason to explain the difficulty you’re having getting laid.

/bin/sh is linked to /bin/bash and vulnerable

Not on Debian/Ubuntu. On those, /bin/sh is symlinked to dash, which is not vulnerable to Shellshock.

To test this, I created a small PHP script, as follows:

$ cat > x.php
<?php
system('echo hello there');

I run the php script, and do an strace following children:

$ strace -f -o output php x.php

In the output I find this:

28302 execve("/bin/sh", ["sh", "-c", "echo hello there"], [/* 24 vars */]) = 0

And here is what /bin/sh links to ...

$ ls -l /bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Mar 29 2012 /bin/sh -> dash