Your numbers are likely off by several orders of magnitude. 100W/m2 is 1/10th the energy density of direct sunlight. i.e. you can do ten times better than that with a flat mirror, no concentration.

Who says it has to a be a centimeter wavelength? How about the 95GHz pain beam? (I haven't checked to see what the atmosphere does at that wavelength, I would suspect clouds block it at the very least, but given that light is shorter wavelength and it penetrates well, I'm fairly certain there will be something between cm and nm that also works well.)

Of course in normal operation your 1000 units would beam to 1000 different reception sites at a safe level, it is only when you want to destroy someone that you divert them all to your enemy.

I can only use my nuclear power plants against my own people. The solar death ray can be targeted anywhere on the planet.

Whenever you read "spaced based solar power", just replace that with "municipal scale death ray". Now decide who should be in control of it.

Reading the article, this doesn't seem to be about real HTTP authentication passwords, but rather about the interaction of form autofilling and fields that an application might consider to be a password. (Like slashdot uses.)

Granted, somewhere the HTTP standards committee failed the community making ad hoc form based passwords more common than real authentication. I suspect the lack of a "logout" concept has a lot to do with that, though designers' desire to spread their "look and feel" over all elements also contributes.

If you use HTTP authentication this does not apply. If you use <input type=password ...> then, yeah, autofillers may autofill.

fail2ban will watch your log files and when it sees probing will firewall ban the offender. It has virtually eliminated probing attacks on my networks of machines. Sure, a distributed botnet can still probe you, but I haven't seen that happening.

Do be careful though...

• Have two different IPs you can come from. You will eventually ban yourself by being stupid. It took me a year, but I finally banned myself while working on some backup scripts.
• It is written in python and uses 3M of RAM plus maybe 20M more virtual memory. Sure, you high end gamers have 100 times that in your video card alone, but if you are running on a 64M VPS or a 32M router it is something to think about.
• You can have it watch much more than ssh if you wish.
• If you forward the syslogs of all your machines to your firewall and run fail2ban out there you can protect all of your machines at the first transgression and only have to manage one copy of fail2ban.
• If you are running virtual servers, consider running their syslogs out to the host box and running fail2ban there. Works well.
• There should be a memory efficient alternative, maybe I'll have to write that.

Cyber Monday is just marketing hype. The peak shopping days come later. The goal is to have a recognizable name that people will google up and read their customers' ads. I suppose they owe a big thank you to Soulskill for getting their message out.

Maybe we can have a slashdot article for Sears' next "White Sale".

The DoD takes everything personally, and for good reason, but I have a steady stream of chinese hackers attempting to break into the router in my tool shed that reports battery voltage and temperature at a cabin that is inaccessible for 6 months of the year.

I really should put a webcam in there so they can see what they have achieved if they ever do manage to get in.

(22.1F, batteries 25.3V, 600 watt hours of energy stored today.)

I have no personal evidence that he is currently free, thus he falls into the same category for me as Firefox does for him.

More disturbing (from TFA)...

I received an EeePC as a gift, but I could not run it because my conscience will not let me agree to the EULA. Finally, I asked someone to install a free GNU/Linux distro so the machine could be used.

I wonder which of these is true:

• It's ok to get some other sap to commit unconscionable behavior on your behalf?
• He is not able to install Linux? (Possibly because he keeps looking in the library under 'G'.)
• Installing Linux is not worth his time, but he has a sap with less worthy time to do these things?

That is all.