I trust the government more than competing private corporations... And worse case scenario, the government has the law, and the power to physically enforce it, and could even call attacks on the system acts of terrorism. (again, worst case...)

Exactly. Except secure.

Instead of farming the job out to private corporations, a government agency should be in charge of it. One with a large web presence. They maintain you public key and force you to update keys regularly. (Opt-in of course, if you want the benefits of the secure online identity). There would also be physical locations, maybe just extend the DMV's job (I know, shoot me) or some other agency that is already in the business of authenticating people that would serve as the human fallback that the masses need to fix any security issues.

Private corporations could try to step into the personal key managing business. We just can't trust private industry to keep the people's interest's at heart. That is what the government is (supposed to be) for. And regulation of the private industry that would handle this would just be a slow and wasteful alternative.

That's what I did... :-/

Apple controls the available software for (among other reasons) their image. If they let people develop security software, people would start to not trust Apple as much, hurting their image and thus sales. They also intentionally keep everything "simple" for their average/target user. Apple's products and philosophy appeal to people that don't understand computers as well as the /. crowd. That being said, if you know how, you can still customize it, but it usually takes getting your hands dirty. I might not have bought an iPhone if I couldn't jailbreak it.

Unless we don't know it's mass. Then we could know how fast it's going. :-D

d) bring a towel

You obviously know sarcasm when you see it... :-P

I do this.

The biggest annoyance with entering bad data is actually Firefox . It makes me click through the phishing warnings before posting my bogus info.

I also usually leave them a message in the bogus data.

PS. How did you guys guess my password!? "lafaroleratropezoooooooooooooo" was picked because I couldn't even remember it!

This is why I always think outside the dodecahedron. :-p

Now that you have seen the trick, you can use it everywhere too!

By definition, each digit reduces the possibilities by exactly 90%.

Yeah, if I wanted it I'd pay for it but since I only need it, I'll steal it.

No, that's how they get people hooked so they demand to use it in a business environment where the costs can be very high.

MS makes most of their money from things like support that you pay through the nose for. Businesses want to pay people to take care of such things because they have been conditioned to believe that it isn't cost effective to do it in house.

MS has literally conditioned people (like my boss) to be scared of Linux and open source.

Until you pass Prop 8.

The vast majority of the problems came from replacing files that LxLabs's software would access with elevated privileges with symlinks to target files like /etc/shadow. One combination of these tricks even led to full root shell access. Who needs an SQL injection attack... except to access an account so you don't even need to be a paid user.

I love that on the scale it reaches 420