I fly into Rome and then do Schengen flights within Europe. Cathay Pacific do flights from HKG to FCO, and while FCO is kind of a pokey little airport, at least they don't have poky security personnel :-)

(Trains out of Rome are a poor option, I've looked into them and it's about a twelve hour journey just to get out of Italy, since the Thalys doesn't run that far south).

History says things generally have to get pretty bad before people will sacrifice several other comforts and securities to regain one.

I'm avoiding the US, Germany and the UK, but I know the time will come in the next two years when I'll have to choose between out of control border security countries and my requirement to travel for work. I'm not sure what I'll do, but I don't know that I'd have the courage to tell my boss I won't fly because I don't want to be physically assaulted at an airport again.

(Yeah, it's happened to me, in Germany, and it is a hell of a lot more unpleasant than you'd think it would be before you've had it done to you; I really didn't think it would be as bad as it was).

Stock is part ownership in a company, and comes with voting rights and dividends. It has intrinsic value. If you stop trading, and merely hold onto your stock, you still retain the voting rights and still receive dividends.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, does have no intrinsic value, and is a fiat currency. Fiat currencies are based only on belief in the system issuing them. Consider the US dollar, and the effect of the economic condition of the US on the perceived value of the dollar; or the Euro and the situation in Greece coupled with the cooling attitude of Germany towards the currency. The Euro could collapse if Germany pulls out and other countries lose faith in it as a viable currency.

Bitcoins are based on faith in the system that operates the bitcoin economy.

The EFF has declared a lack of faith in that system, in particular, that the legal foundation for it has not been tested, and the potential risk of being a test case outweighs any other value bitcoins may have.

I do tend to argue that DNS is now for systems administrators, to allow for easier renumbering of services, and that Google is how regular folk find websites.

It is less vulnerable because Apple does actual reviews. They will not find everything but they will find SOME things.

Yes, true - they'll trivially find blatant stuff, and probably some slightly less blatant stuff, but not stuff that goes to pains to hide from the review process specifically; all of which is more stuff than is caught with no review at all!

I don't believe Apple's store is any less vulnerable to malware than the Android store.

The system architecture is a lot less permissive in iOS than Android, though, and that limits the damage that a misbehaved app can do - at the obvious cost of limiting the options for well behaved apps.

If I was a lawyer out to ruin someone's day, I'd argue that a computer renders text into an image for presentation to the user.

Perfect is the enemy of the good.

It's not impossible to line up a trojan on a mobile and a desktop, but it's not as trivial as getting a trojan on one device. Attacks have been done successfully by social engineering on the phone company to redirect the service, but as someone else said, if someone really wants your money there's always a lead pipe in an alley.

Should two-factor become widespread, and smartphones become as vulnerable as desktops to trojans (unlikely with both major OS vendors using a managed software repository, making social engineering of users harder), and the problem of coordinating devices be solved, then it will be time to find another security mechanism.

And no doubt, plenty of banks will be reluctant to adopt better security again, giving those of us with security conscious banks another decade or so of protection through presenting a significantly smaller attack surface than most others.

Text message challenge, web response.

In order to subvert a transaction, the attacker would need to own both communication channels - my browser displays which transaction I'm approving, the text message displays the same thing. If they don't agree, one or the other has been tampered with.

If they do agree, it's too late for the attacker to alter the transaction, and my response via web can only be blocked, not used for a different transaction.

It's two channel because an attacker needs to subvert both channels to subvert the transaction; only capturing one will cause an easily detectable change.

Transactions to unapproved accounts, where "approved" means either the bank knows the recipient and can hunt them down if they commit fraud, or I've explicitly said the recipient is OK by me (which requires external auth to do :-)