Add to this: password is (if they do it properly) one-time only, and must be changed online after entering it.

Were an attacker to comprimise your account, you'd simply reset your password again and they'd lose access.

What you forgot to add is:

With so many (most?) people using webmail services (gmail, hotmail, etc) for personal e-mail, the e-mail even if sent encrypted will be decrypted on a third-party system just so the recipient can read it.

Gonna be fun in all those countries where hiding your face in public is not allowed by law (laws typically designed against Muslim-style burka gowns, but of course written broader and in a non-discriminatory sense).

It's on the moon, silly. That should be a "moon shattering kaboom". And it seems on-one has ever heard one of those, so we don't know how they sound like.

What stroke me more is at the end of the video they suggest to stay indoors during meteor showers.

I'd say the risk of your bulding being struck is higher than that of a space-walking astroaut, due to the larger area. And such a 5-ton-TNT hit is a pretty devastating blow to pretty much anything we can build. That is, unless they'd go deep underground (for more reasons than meteorites a good idea).

Because the cdn is probably (hosted at) a different company; not hosted on your own server (that has the database and provides all dynamic content and user logins and whatnot - keeping all that important information in house), but that seriously bandwidth-eating stuff comes from say Amazon or some cloud server.

Now why such foocdn would need cookies, that'd be the real question. That's supposed to be static content, downloaded via direct links in the main html.

The easy way out of that is to include a default white list. Which of course should be open and configurable (add/remove sites from whitelist; disable whitelist completely).

I have been blocking third-party cookies since I found out Mozilla (yes, back then) allowed me to do so. And when switching to Firefox when it became useful I did the same. Never had any problems with it.

Why reboot? Exiting Windows, back to DOS, then restarting it (win.exe) should do the trick. Unless for fiddling with config.sys and autoexec.bat I don't recall much rebooting. I do recall a lot of starting and quitting Windows though.

And suddenly I'm feeling old.

This shouldn't be too hard: request a video stream, get the advertising video streamed first followed by the content you intended to see. That would overcome ad blockers as well (come to think of it, with ABP there indeed is no advertising on YouTube).

Apparently it is not as much a case of MS blocking advertising, it is more like they simply don't include advertising - they basically didn't implement the advertising delivery part.

You mean they actually still add those region locks to DVD players? Well over a decade since I've encountered one of them.

Whether or not there is financial gain should not matter for the question whether it is allowed or not. So whether it's a free open-source app, or an app MS supplies (and that app is free, too) to enhance their platform is irrelevant for the question whether they broke some license/TOS/AUP/whatever or not.

The financial gain matter is only a factor in determining punishment, if someone is found to be wrong.

This greasemonkey script adds a download button on the YouTube page. Choose flv or mp4.

Did they actually go ahead and sue any of them? Or were this all empty threats?

Maybe they're just presenting the web site in a different way than intended by the maker. In how far is one obliged to follow the HTML standard when displaying a page? To run all the javascript? Get all third-party bits and pieces (e.g. advertisements)? Many Firefox add-ons change how a page looks like, by adding things, or blocking things. AdBlockPlus is a thorn in the eye of many advertisers, yet it seems they can't do much against it.

Call my argumentation ridiculous - I know it is. But it is that kind of interpretation is what opens up mazes in the law, and if you have your argumentation right, you may very well be within your legal rights.