I think it is kind of like the other crap in the legal system these days. As the little guy you might be 100% in the right but since you have comparatively very limited resources they bank on people being too afraid to having to spend tons of money proving their innocence. So they get to make it more or less illegal without the actual political blow back of making it illegal.

That is a really good article. If they are using very out of date Linux kernels there are probably a lot of other out of date software on their systems. That combined with the fact that they don't have any internal password strength policy and are using cryptographically broken encryption shows they don't seem to have any competent server admins and web developers.

There is a lesson to learn here and it is a simple one: Don't be stupid.

Given their demonstrated lack of competence in handling this whole situation I don't have a ton of faith that they can competently check their systems for other damage and any modifications made by Gnosis.

As have I, a good way to test this is to try and reset your password on said site. If they show you or email you your existing password and not a random new one, you know their security is crap and shouldn't be trusted.

And why do you think the market would have gone that way? I highly doubt things would have turned out as rosy as you describe.

If IBM hadn't made a PC that was popular and easy to clone, things would be very different these days. Probably more like the game console market where there is only 3 big companies producing hardware. And the prices on computers might not have fallen as quick without such fierce competition. In the grand scheme of things I would say IBM is much more responsible for the current state of computing than Microsoft. IBM is the reason the majority of personal computers today are all compatible with each other.

If Microsoft wasn't around, there would have been some other company. You can blame Gary Kildall for Microsoft's dominance, if he hadn't turned IBM away when they came calling for an OS for their PC, Microsoft never would have become so huge. However we don't know what would have happened if IBM had gone with CP/M, maybe Digital Research would have been that other company. Things might be better today or they might be worse, hard to say.

Which is a legitimate worry, these community owned and ran ISPs that actually have good customer service and reasonable prices threaten their monopolies. The big companies have made it easy to compete against them, since they have terrible prices and worse customer service. If the city I lived in had a city owned ISP, even if it was slightly more expensive, if it had better customer service I would use that over any of the big ISPs.

I really hope we see more cities doing this. And with wireless technologies like WiMax the barriers to entry can be a lot easier.