Actually it has everything to do with SonicWall.

The issue wasn't the device's ability to block ports (inbound, or outbound), but the device's ability to ensure that only the licensed number of nodes were allowed outbound access through the device.

SonicWall makes money selling licenses, SonicWall is the party responsible for ensuring their devices only support the number of clients their licensed for. Their device was following through with this policy, but it was only limiting devices' outbound port 80 connections. There is no user setting to change the license policy, that's SonicWall's business model

The only SonicWall device I've ever had to work with had a limit of 10 nodes that could "connect to the internet". The limit was really 10 nodes that could NAT to port 80. Every other port was open. I always figured that if sonic wall didn't care about protecting their licenses why would they care about protecting their networks?

I don't see this being hardly possible at all, thirty years ago we got along fine without having our critical infrastructure's information systems not plugged into a global network. I'm speaking more of nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams, shipping locks, railway switches etc.

On the subject of stock exchanges, I seriously doubt much good has come from plugging stock exchanges into the global information network. Even as recently as fifteen years ago people were physically trading stocks on the floor of some of the world's major exchanges. Nowadays computers perform thousands upon thousands of trades in a fraction of the time their former human counter parts could. Is this really a good thing though? There's an absurd arms race going on between investment firms to install increasingly faster computers as close to exchanges as possible to get the 'jump' on trades. There's even a new trans-Atlantic trunk line going in, that shaves off a few milliseconds of latency, all in the name of automatically trading stocks, and 'making' millions of dollars. What purpose are these systems really serving though? Why is it a good idea to put such an insane amount of speculation into our financial markets? The day to day price of stock had little enough relationship to the actual value of a company prior to computers dominating the trading scene, now this representation is becoming more diluted.

As for sending people to prison for making bad IT security decisions, it's a lovely idea, but how do you determine who's to blame? The second something goes wrong, everyone starts pointing the finger at everyone else. Is the CFO to blame for not budgeting enough IT dollars? Is the head of IT to blame because she was following orders without questioning them? Should all the employees just be locked up to be safe? What about the programmer who didn't terminate a string properly, who works for an entirely different company that sold the software to the firm that was breached??

Then there's the people problem. Even if we could somehow make the billions of lines of code that drive computers perfect, we'd still have people opening up alleged 'job interviews', which are really just malicious excel files, or what have you. In this case at least there's a forensic trail and a 'smoking' gun to link the ignoramuses to their negligence.

I think there are a lot of cases where it would be a lot cheaper to hire security cleared specialists to manually handle the transfer of data between secure isolated networks, and the global internet. Sure it would seem more expensive, but these breaches can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Specialists can be bought for less than a hundred thousand a year each, and they can be held directly accountable.

Simply analyzing the probabilities involved in computer intrusion should be enough to convince anyone that can understand high-school mathematics that we NEED to unplug critical infrastructure from global networks. Unfortunately the powers that be seem woefully ignorant of how technology works. The anti-piracy campaigns that involve breaking DNS highlight this ignorance.

The 1800s are the 19th century, how did this not get edited?

Have you ever heard of Apple's App Store? It's this crazy store which is the only place you can get applications for your phone or tablet, and Apple controls every piece of software published on it. Apple also imposes arbitrary bans on applications whenever Apple sees fit. Apple is also trying to push this model to their laptops and personal computers. Furthermore if you want to make your own applications run on your iDevice you have to pay apple $100, or violate the TOS to unlock your phone. That's right, imagine that, you outright own a device, but you don't have the right to administer it.

strange that manifestos and data dumps from pastebin have become normal news http://pastebin.com/r21cExeP