Umm... that movie where US troops secured the vital Enigma machine wasn't actually accurate. It was the Brits who stole the intact Enigma and the brightest of the Brits who cracked the code and, to a large extent, helped them win the war. (OK, having a whole lot of US planes and bombs and ships and tanks and stuff to DO something with the intercepted data was also quite significant, but the intelligence side of things was all down to the Poms.)

Yes, the individual nature of the devices is the whole point of the exercise.

No, that doesn't defeat the identification, it allows/enhances it. It means that, unless the copier can decrypt the data and encrypt with a new fingerprint, the fingerprint parameter on the copied device won't match the value generated by the reader using the physical characteristics.

In mag stripes, the magnetic remanence of the strip is different from card to card, in EEPROM, differences in the voltage levels and speed of reading of the cells are used.

The general principle is that it's no point having unbreakable crypto if the data can simply be copied to a new medium. Consider a card (of whatever type) that stores monetary value for public transport or photocopying or whatever: Put $100 on it and copy the data, not knowing which bits are what. Copy that data onto a heap of cards bought with $5 of credit on them and sell them in the grey market for $50 each and pocket the profit.

With this sort of technique, though, part of that encrypted data is a fingerprint based on the physical characteristics of the original card. The new cards will generate a fingerprint in the reader that doesn't match the original, making the copies invalid.

Sure, if you can crack the encryption, this method is useless, but that's not the point. Crypto can be pretty good and costs more than a cheap reader/writer to break to duplicate cards/RFIDs.

An author sells rights to publish his/her work to different publishers in different countries, and there's often either legal protection or trade agreements to prevent parallel distribution of editions from other regions.

So, a book might be published by Doubleday in the US but by Pan MacMillan in Australia, and the major book chains in Oz wouldn't carry the Doubleday version (some specialised genre bookshops might.)

This is almost certainly Fictionwise/ereader just catching up with the requirements placed on them by the publishers who provide their ebooks, possibly because the B&N purchase put them above the radar a bit more.

The screen's the same res and similar size to an iPhone and the built-in browser's adequate, or you can run Opera Mobile for a few more bells and whistles.

Oh, and it apparently can be used for other stuff like movies, MP3s, addresses, tasks, ebooks, etc., etc.!