The Epic Fail, exposing Sony's private key, had nothing to do with the IBM Cell processor. In fact the flaw was not in any of the PS3 software. It was a mistake in the program used to sign software approved to run on the PS3. That program presumably runs only on some highly guarded server in the bowels of Sony. It could have been fixed by adding one line of code, a call to random number generator to generate a new random value for each signature. Even a crappy random number generator would probably have resisted attack. All that was needed was keeping attackers from finding two different signatures that used the same "random" number. You have to go back to the Venona NSA exploit in the Cold War to find an example of a large organization screwing up what should have been an unbreakable cipher system.

Uhh no. We have some trade issues with China, but they hardly rise to the level of Cold War.

One thing in the NYT article that did not make sense was the claim the large amounts of capital are needed to make this happen. If local people can afford the solar units and they pay for themselves in a few months, what's holding the wide scale deployment up?

By law, the US government publishes a report each year on all lawful wiretaps, Federal and state. Here is an excerpt from the latest report: "Public Law 106-197 amended 18 U.S.C. 2519(2)(b) to require that reporting should refect the number of wiretap applications granted for which encryption was encountered and whether such encryption prevented law enforcement officials from obtaining the plain text of communications intercepted pursuant to the court orders. In 2009, one instance was reported of encryption encountered during a state wiretap; however, this did not prevent officials from obtaining the plain text of the communications." In other words, there was just one lawful wiretap last year where communications were encrypted and even that did not stymie law enforcement. The proposed law is not about aiding law enforcement, it's about perfecting the surveillance society, where all communications are filtered for suspicious content.

Very informative, but for the record, cars and trucks don't use GPS in a safety-critical role and railroads don't use it at all.