I'm suprised they are not worth more since they represent a great point of entry for social attacks. Think Personalized spam (i.e. "Hey John, I think Laura wanted you to buy this for the concert you are attending next week"), targeted dictionaries, localized phising (i.e. location data deploys phising to compromised machines near you). Once you break a single friend in the "network" you gain additional information to everyone in that scope, so the return on entry is very promosing. An attacker can begin profiling ideal targets in the guise of friends. Ah, so many possibilties. Such a gold mine.

I had the same idea as OnLive a couple of years ago. My theory was based on the (reverse) evaluation of game code and how most games resided in small execution loops during gameplay. The biggest barrier to implementing my idea at the time was bandwidth and upgrade costs. The monthly subscription cost would have been too prohibitive and bandwidth requirements were unreasonable. I have no idea how these OnLive guys are going to handle frequent hardware updates since high-end games continue to push hardware. Maybe they are using NVidia's new server platform?

Also, I wouldn't call this an unbreakable DRM -- it's the same as renting a game. Issues with DRM come into play when you own the game, especially as it pertains to multiple machines.

Damn, now I have to use CD's as coasters. I find their reflective properties highly annoying.

If they mean no harm and are intelligent, they will know to keep a safe distance and attempt to make communications. If they show up randomly in a big ass ship -- its safe to say we are fucked. Even, if they mean no harm--our reaction, disease, and additional resource burdens are likley to be problems.

It probably went down like this...
911: Please state your emergency
Passerby: I'VE JUST BEEN HIT IN THE FACE WITH A FOAM BALL.
911: Sir, calm down. We are sending our entire police force now.

Damn. With that kind of lack of oversight its difficult to view those officers as anything other than a danger.

Everyone thought Thomas Jefferson was a cook when he opposed Judicial Review. Who appoints supreme court Justices? The Executive branch. Sure, congress may give a candidate the final blessing, but let's be honest, senators get DoSed (lobbied) into picking a particular justice. Here's some more insight on why our Supreme Court system sucks

This very same situation happened to me. I was walking down the sidewalk listening to my iPod when a cop pulled up next to me and asked for identification. I asked the cop if he suspected me of a crime, or if I was being detained. He didn't answer, so I ignored him. He got out his car and demanded ID, I repeated if I was being detained or suspected of a crime, he told me my constitutional rights were bullshit and starting cussing at me. I just walked away. I guess the officer knew he was in the wrong becuase he didn't try to make an arrest.

I was about to post this same suggestion. Instead I will highlight why their reaction was unreasonable:

1. The banned members may have been a profitable source of ad-revenue.
2. The website has very limited control over how their content is recieved.
3. The information may have already been recieved prior to moderation.
4. The information is easily accessible from other sources.
5. The blowback creates negative PR and may have the opposite effect (increased awareness of ad block).

Passwords get dirty and using the same password over a long period of time may leave you vulnerable to new exploits. The goal of aging passwords is to allow updates in password policy to propagate amongst a user base. If your user base is accessing non-secure sources with that password, it is also important to expire that password in order to limit the opportunity of exploit. For example, if you connect to your gmail account (before it defaulted to ssl) with your password over a public network and somebody MTM's your password, but does not act on it before your password expires, they are out of luck. Without aging the password, that opportunity exists as long as the same password is in place. Considering you may access multiple non-secure sources over a longer period of time the situation begins to look worse. Also, passwords are often shared to improve productivity (like instant access to a resource). They are convenient because they are easy to share and since they are shared so often, they should be changed often to re-establish and update trusted resources. Think of credit card expiration dates. If they were shorter, how would that effect their value when stolen, sold, and exploited? Cards about to expire are really not ideal targets for exploit. It's similar to that. I think the real issue with aging passwords is that the policies are often too aggressive for their limited scope of use. Aging passwords by time is a bad method since that time period may be arbitrary. Passwords should age based on activity and usage, not time.

Learn a memorization format if you are inconvenienced. For example, static salt + variable + static salt2. A password in this format may look like &*!,Mz_-hunter2))JZ5781 . In this case you memorize &*!,Mz_- as Salt 1 and ))JZ5781 as Salt 2. hunter2 is the variable. When your password expires, you just change the variable so a new password may look like &*!,Mz_-Variable2))JZ5781. I find explaining this to users relieves the discomfort of password changing. Some people even get creative by changing the order of salt and variables. Try it out.

Yes, I agree. Most testing I've seen on browser benchmarks make no effort in providing consistent configurations. I know its hard to control the configurations, but at least *try*. The most configurable browsers (opera and firefox) are modest in their stock deployments, catering more towards security and control rather than speed and optimizations. Chrome barley provides any options, so I presume its optimized by default.

I think if these tests were redone with optimized settings in Opera, it would show Opera slightly ahead of Chrome. For example, on page load, Opera is set to draw in one second intervals during load, by default. Obviously for simple sites that load under a second, Opera will preform poorly. Another example is memory usage. They called Opera memory hungry but that is ridiculous. Opera allows you to set the maximum memory limit and is capable of caching to memory. Any unused memory is allocated to cache. You can greatly adjust Opera's memory usage by disabling page caching (set to 1000 by default), lowering maximum memory usage, removing history (set to 5000 pages by default), removing tab thumbnails; however, while Opera's caching may hurt memory usage, it is amazing in the long run. The equvilent to having a local proxy in your browser. Anyways, the bottom line is Opera's default settings are NOT optimal and modifying securtiy, history, memory, caching, DNS prefetching, and the UI can improve its overall preformance. I cannot say the same for chrome where the only optimizations that can be made is DNS prefetching and some security stuff.

A bit off topic, but in the event that internet legislation leads to revolution...
I've been thinking of new democratic and legislative structures for a post-revolution America. An exercise in thought, nothing more. Anyways, I was thinking that one of the biggest issues with our current government is the Iron Triangle. Essentially, we have a centralized government that is actively being DoS'ed by lobbyists and anyone else who can buy a lobbyist. The interest of those individual groups often come at the expense of the majority.

What if we structured our government like the Internet by providing functionality at the end point and only using congress to pass data?

Essentially, people would be responsible for writing laws in some sort of wiki type collaboration. These laws would have "release cycles" that go to an elected body of "experts" (congress) only after the legislation passed a public review process. Congress would ONLY have the ability to veto proposed legislation. The president would serve more as a mediator in the event the public wanted to force legislation after congress has already vetoed it. If the majority has a mandate and Congress has a minority veto, then the president can be used to override the Congressional veto, but only in those circumstances.

Lobbyists would essentially be spammers. They cannot effectively bribe anymore due to decentralization of legislation. Anyways, I'm still developing the idea, feedback would be much appreciated, sorry I'm offtopic!

Crunchyroll.com has a 6 episode anime called "Time of Eve" detailing a student's struggle to regain his confidence playing the piano after he lost a music competition to a robot. I highly recommend it especially if you are an Asimov fan.