I suspect they're not producing these kinds of phones simply because, despite the author's assertion, very few people actually do want such phones.

A writer and a submitter does not constitute some vast ignored market.

How much does a middle aged Slashdot ID go for nowadays? I might be in the market to sell mine to an astroturfer.

I'm not clear as to how, for instance, using buggy versions of SSL libraries fits into your whole theory. One possibility is that what you wrote is gibberish.

You could have saved some typing by not opening the article. But then you would not have been able to write this long pointless OT rant.

After a bit of skimming, I couldn't really determine if this is a standalone device or something that depends on some creepy third party who will abandon it at some point? The processing demands seem a little high for a standalone, embedded processor.

"Either your name is on the volume licensing agreement... or your brains."

As we speak, Microsoft is instructing its European "business partners" to give a certain French city a shitload of really cheap Office licenses.

I have to confess, I'm pretty mystified. For our own internal servers, I have my own CA, and can see no reason why I would want to have someone else sign internal certs.

Sounds like yet another way in which the commercial CAs scam stupid CIOs out of cash.

Double kudos for writing it on touch screen devices. I do some Play-by-email roleplaying and at times I do posts on my Nexus 7, and man oh man it's difficult. I wouldn't even dream of doing long prose writing on a tablet.

Quite frankly, and this sounds stupid, but I'm emotionally attached to my glasses. I'm 42 now, and I've been wearing glasses since I was six. Frankly I don't even remember what it was like without them. I freely admit it's an irrational and emotional response, but I like my glasses.

Viri, the plural of vir (man), means 'men'.

And you're basing that on what, exactly? Marketing claims. And in reply to a post about how marketing claims ended up not being true in iDrive's case.

If you use their web interface, they will store your password on their servers. Be aware of that.

Also, your account password is the the key used to encrypt your data (easy to verify: accessing your data on a new device only requires your account password). They use PDKDF2, which expands the password into a larger key, but (obviously) doesn't add any entropy to that already present in the password. Choose your password wisely.

That password is also used to access the billing, etc web interface, so they do keep at least a hashed copy of your password on their servers.

As with any closed source and opaque solution, you shouldn't depend in any way on unverifiable claims. They could now, or at any time in the future, store your passwords. You're better off handling your own security than trusting magic black boxes.

Hell, if I put a Raspberry Pi inside the scooped out guts of ENIAC, it would be just like ENIAC was streaming a movie... right?

I'm thinking of pulling the beads off an abacus and throwing a Raspberry Pi to show how an abacus can stream movies... and then maybe hollowing out a stone and showing how cool streaming could have been in the Neolithic...

Sarcasm mode off

This is just another spammer and net criminal enabler. The EFF has long fought against efforts to end spam. Encouraging wide-open net access with no accountability is just another step down that road.

The EFF: enabling spammers since the 1990s.