Sites like AFF require payment. Unless you have a credit card setup under a fake identity, you're going to have to provide real data to use the site.

Risk management is not simply about the probability of an event occurring; it must also take into account how damaging the event would be. For example, events that are very likely to occur but have little consequences might be safely ignored. Events that are very unlikely to occur but have catastrophic consequences merit some effort to prevent.

I've built a fair number of hypervisors, both VMware and Hyper-V. The hardware required to run 16 VM's concurrently is quite substantial. Good luck running 16 instances of Windows XP on a laptop!

The question I was responding to was "does having a single- or limited-purpose device make really make sense?".

The answer too your question is no.

A few years ago I bought a top-of-the-line Japanese rice cooker. It cooks any type of rice flawlessly, and easily allows me to specify in advance what time I want the rice to be ready. Yes, it takes up counter space, but it's an investment I appreciate every time I use it.

Actually, it's an oligarchy.

If you bothered to look at their download site, you'd see they support Mac in addition to Windows.

I wish I had mod points today, because you nailed this. Well said!

That's a pretty high horse you're on there.

This has nothing to do with closed source vs. FOSS. The examples I was referring to are small, non-critical applications where nobody needs to get fired because a cert warning appeared in someone's browser.

I usually figure out that a cert has expired when something breaks. For example, I like to use free certs from StartSSL on Exchange Servers. When they expire, people get warnings when accessing OWA, or smartphones stop connecting.

If it happens to be on an SBS Server it can really be a pain, however, since it will stop working as a Terminal Services Gateway, making it difficult to log back on and replace the cert.

Wow. You sound inordinately passionate about April 1st. If such articles are so much to your liking, perhaps it's you who needs to go elsewhere. May I suggest America's Finest News Source?

As for this site, the motto used to be "stuff that matters". When April Fools articles become so numerous, it's no longer amusing. It's like the same joke being told over and over again. April Fools is not a "huge holiday". It's a day literally intended for fools, and only a fool finds the same joke funny time after time.

This April Fools nonsense is tedious.

Your example misses the point:

out to be enough for anybody.

OK, this is clearly a bad thing, but I don't think it means that your private LAN is immediately accessible to people all over the world does it? Multiple routers using the same keys means you could be tricked into logging in to someone else's router without knowing, but that would still require some way of directing your traffic to the imposter's device to begin with, such as DNS hijacking.

Knowing someone's keys would also allow you to encrypt/decrypt traffic as that device, facilitating a man-in-the-middle attack, but still, you need a way to get in the middle between two devices. This is not something that's trivial to do from one arbitrary location to another.

I'm not suggesting this isn't a serious problem, but I don't think it's as bad as, say, remote administration being enabled with a known default password.