yes, anything that is exposed to the internet and calls "system(), popen() or exec() with a imported environment under the control of a potential attacker.

well, he did say "the USB host controller chip on the motherboard."

android device manager? Cerberus? and anything that "find my phone" would yield in the play store would do more or less the same thing.

size of IS NOT a function. it is a unary OPERATOR that get's replaced at compile time not at runtime by the size in bytes of what ever you passed to it (generate assembly of simple code using size of and you'll see that it sizeof(int) gets replaced by the constant 4 but as of C99 if the operand is a variable length array things get complicated as it will compute the size at runtime, so the assembly code is way more complicated )

? "tainted" is just a flag, nothing more. It's there in case womeone sends them a bug report (a crach for instance), if the kernel is "tainted" their answer will probabaly be : try again without the "tainting" module and see what happens : if the problem goes a way they'll send you crying to the one responsible for THAT module, periode.
There's absolutely NO denying anything to any module.

isn't the minimal price to break even is the marginal cost for +1 unit produced? (in the first chapter of any economic book)

isn't copyright a restriction? so by definition any market involving it is not free?

I didn't know the fashion industry existed in an alternate universe ???? (except from trademarks they have nothing)

I almost forgot this: what you want it the ability to track the phone, for that you need a functioning phone not a bricked one.
having control over the trust chain in the boot process with prevent the thief from installing anything on the phone hence preserving any tracking software present!

it does existe, it's called google device manager or cerberus or .... etc for Android. Or iCloud or something like that for iphones/ipads
On android, for instance to brick the phone destoy the EFS partition and "voila" ( dd if=/dev/random of =PATH_TO_EFS) the phone is useless for the thief! (if you recover it and have a back up you can restore it).

yes, it does, and yes I could just use iptables also, no need for AFWall or anything else.
But, saying it would be PITA would be a euphemism.
What the available "firewall" applications out there do is simplify that task a bit. I would be even better if we had something like this : http://iphonemonsta.com/firewa... or this http://www.neowin.net/forum/to... . baked in the system, so that no rooting is needed.
I'm not asking, I'm just saying. (and in the mean time, I'm thinking about implementing my own solution, using libnetfilter_queue or something similar).

too cheap! At least 4 rolls of loonies .. way better!

Even AFwall is not enough.
What's needed is : app/cell/wifi/ip/port. There was (Still?) a nice firewall app in cydia that did exactely that.
For android there was something from whisper systems that was never released (it was part of the whole system -2.3-).

how about that thing called exception handling?

More over, statistics tell beatiful stories about a sample/a groupe, but nothing really about an indvidual of said group.
Except a probability that this or that will happen, which far from a certainty (somthing that, it seems to me, most often than not is forgoten)