I use a LaCie Cloudbox http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10563 .

It does the backup itself, so you don't need to keep your PC running. Also, it has built-in encryption.

This could be the product that matches your described use-case the most closely.

> Is my five letter password more secure if the salt is 15 characters long?

No. The salt helps against dictionary attacks. Normally, it is different for every user, but not secret. It does not help against brute-force attacks.

What does help, is adding more rounds to your key-derivation function (e.g. PBKDF2). Or choosing a longer password.

Also, supervision of the Internet becomes easier because those trying to circumvent the Great Firewall are now the interesting cases and not mere porn downloads.

Imagine you are the Chinese secret service and trying to hunt down 'criminals' that try to circumvent the Great Firewall in pursuit of their 'criminal' activity. Sooner or later, you'll get frustrated because 99% of the leads you follow end up being porn downloads. By allowing porn, maintaining the Great Firewall becomes manageable again because the ones that you now detect circumventing it are now the ones you really care about.

I'm happy you didn't receive any mod points. Otherwise you would have voted up a completely ignorant post. Google collected much more than the SSID, it also collected transmitted data (see also the comment titled 'RTFA').

Actually, I just logged in in the hope of getting mod points to be able to downvote the ignorant comment and upvote 'RTFA'. But I didn't get any either.

I signed up for it. I'd love to see this succeed. A flat rate to pay for things that can be copied without cost makes economical sense.

I went to an ACTA public information meeting that was organized by the Swiss delegation ten days ago. They couldn't openly talk about the positions of the different countries, but from what they said, I concluded that we don't have to fear as much as the internet rumors suggest. For example, they wouldn't sign the treaty if it contained a three-strikes-provision as this would be against Swiss law. They also publish quite some information on their website, including a transparency paper that roughly describes the content of ACTA:
https://www.ige.ch/en/legal-info/legal-areas/counterfeiting-piracy/acta.html

Overall, they made a good and competent impression and it also seems to me that they are open to input from the public. I'm quite proud that the Swiss government seems to handle this much more democratically and transparently than others.

I went to an ACTA public information meeting this week that was organized by the Swiss delegation. They couldn't openly talk about the positions of the different countries, but from what they said, I concluded that we don't have to fear as much as the internet rumors suggest. For example, they wouldn't sign the treaty if it contained a three-strikes-provision as this would be against Swiss law. They also publish quite some information on their website, including a transparency paper that roughly describes the content of ACTA:
https://www.ige.ch/en/legal-info/legal-areas/counterfeiting-piracy/acta.html

Overall, they made a good and competent impression and it also seems to me that they are open to input from the public. I'm quite proud that the Swiss government seems to handle this much more democratically and transparently than others.

Great news! I really hope the 18-30 year olds can still make a difference in an ageing society like Europe. I'm concerned that some decades ago, when the median age was much lower, western democracies were more agile and creative (look for example at the hippies, I'm not sure if that still wouldn't be possible).

The grammar nazi in me wants to tell you: it's "per se", not "per say".