The answer depends on what you mean. As far as I'm concerned, a hardware router can probably be trusted to be a basic firewall/router. It's pretty unlikely that anyone will come up with a useful attack on a device that's just doing port blocking, NAT, and basic routing. At worst, somebody might DOS it or turn it into a well-connected zombie to aid in DDOSing somebody's server, but neither of those is compromising your data.

Now if you're passing unencrypted data across that router, you might have a problem, but then again, passing unencrypted data across any router outside your own intranet is a bad idea, so nothing new there. And if you're expecting the commercial router to provide a VPN, then the answer to whether it is trustworthy becomes "no", because its crypto implementation cannot readily be audited and verified to be trustworthy.

What the NSA may have done is made it so your encrypted communications have two keys: yours and the NSA's. There is no evidence that it weakens the algorithm in any way, provided of course that NSA doesn't publish their private key.

They're accused of sabotaging the random number generator that is used for generating keys. The net result is that what should be a random key is less random than it otherwise would be. That's not saying that it doesn't also somehow introduce some secondary key that can partially or completely decrypt the data, but whether it does or not, weakening key generation means all attackers (once they discover the flaw) benefit from the reduced entropy by being able to deduce things about the generated keys.

A minimum 3-story building with underground parking requirement for all new commercial construction would go a long way towards fixing all of the land shortage in the Silicon Valley area.

That said, the folks I know who live in SF live there because there's nothing for them to do in the SV area. Being young, they like being able to walk from their apartments to the hottest clubs or concerts or whatever. Most of those folks move back out to the suburbs by the time they have their first kid, but there's always a new batch of youngsters waiting in the wings to take those apartments when they leave.

I'm assuming for the moment that this evidence is, in fact, legitimate. Given how heinous the NSA's actions have been lately, it seems completely in character, which makes that likely a safe assumption. However, just to give them the benefit of the doubt, everyone involved should receive a fair trial. With that said, everyone involved should be tried for high crimes against the United States and its allies. These are accusations of very serious crimes.

Deliberately compromising the secure communications of hundreds of millions of computers all around the world just so a bunch of pencil-dicked asshats can play their little spy games goes so far beyond unconscionability that it borders on a crime against humanity. Such ends-justify-means thinking is fundamentally incompatible with any form of liberty or justice. Our data is fundamentally easier to crack not just by our own government, but also by organized crime syndicates, foreign governments, and even terrorist groups. In all likelihood, even military communications gear is less secure, which means our troops are at elevated risk during a time of war as a direct result of their actions. That's treason, even by the absolute strictest definition thereof. Further, such deliberate weakening of crypto endangers the lives of dissidents in countries with oppressive regimes, many of which are considered our enemies—an act that could also be considered treason.

Their actions, if true, clearly constitute providing material support to terrorists and treason by means of providing material aid to our enemies in a time of war. Therefore, according to U.S. law, everyone involved should be immediately treated as enemy combatants, deported to an appropriate holding facility outside our borders—preferably the one affectionately known as "Gitmo"—and tried before a military tribunal.

In addition to prosecution of individuals, there should be consequences for the groups involved. RSA should be immediately dissolved and all its assets destroyed. Further, at this point, it should be abundantly clear to anyone with even the slightest understanding of crypto that nothing short of the complete and total elimination of the NSA and a constitutional amendment clearly and plainly banning any similar organization from ever existing in the future can even begin to restore trust in cryptography and computers. That organization is fundamentally malevolent, and its very existence is inherently incompatible with the very concepts of security and privacy. No matter what successes they may have had, nothing can possibly even come close to justifying such a heinous breach of the public's trust.

15% payroll tax (half of this is usually hidden from the employee, but make no mistake, it is a tax they pay.)

No, it isn't. Taxes on businesses, including payroll taxes, are invariably passed on as part of the cost of doing business, and are thus paid by the people who buy goods and services from those companies. The poor, most of whom spend the majority of their income on goods and services, end up paying a disproportionate amount of those taxes (relative to their income). They also pay a disproportionately large percentage of their income as sales tax. Those regressive taxes more than balance out the reduction in income tax on the lower tax brackets, so on average, the poor pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the rich (in every state but Vermont, at last check).

That pretty much sums up how people feel about DRM. ... It must not cut into what they want to do. It must not disrupt their experience.

The real problem with most forms of DRM is that they don't "cut into what they [users] want to do" until they do. When the company goes out of business, when you're offline without launching the app for too many weeks, when the company decides that it isn't worth maintaining a DRM server for the hundred remaining users, etc., suddenly you find yourself unable to use something that you paid for.

The only form of DRM that doesn't suffer from this is what I would call "static DRM", as used by DVDs and Blu-Ray players, in which millions of devices are authorized to use the content, and in which the only thing preventing copying is the higher cost of devices that can burn media with data in certain parts of the disc (otherwise known as "trivially defeated DRM", or "only useful for region coding" DRM).

Sounds like you need a cat door that unlocks only when the cat isn't carrying anything.

Most if not all charities today also get some money from the government. If the real concern was people not being generous enough to charities why not mandate everyone give X percent of their money to charity instead of taking it at gunpoint and redistributing it. At least then people would have a choice about which charity THEIR money is going to support.

I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of money charities get from the government is in the form of tax breaks for nonprofits. Those dollars are spent by the government in proportion to the money given by individuals, so in effect, people do have a choice about which charities their money is going to support. Compared with that, all other government grants to charities (NEA and NSF grants, for example) are almost certainly lost in the noise.

Lets call it what it is. Liberals like you want to steal money from those who work and give it to those who don't and call it charity. Its not charity its theft, pure and simple. That's why they call you names because you are a thief.

Let's call it what it is. Neocons like you want to steal money from those who have to work just to get by and give it to people who could retire today and live comfortably drinking Mai Tais on the beach for the rest of their lives, and call it trickle-down. It's not trickle-down. It's theft, pure and simple. That's why they call you names—because you are a thief.

The reality is that the rich pay more in taxes because they gain the most from those social services. You might think that the poor benefit most, but that's just not true. The rich don't pay taxes to support the poor. The rich pay taxes to protect themselves from having to defend themselves from the poor. The rich are able to have their affluent lifestyles because we have a functioning society—because the poor are not marching in the streets with automatic weapons, calling for their heads. The only thing separating the rich from a horrible death is that civilization. Therefore, the rich benefit most from a stable society and from all the programs that keep that society stable, hence it is their duty to pay more.

Moreover, the Bible teaches that all should give according to their means. This means in a government based on Christian principles, the rich should give more than the poor. This is why I find it particularly hypocritical to see self-proclaimed "Christians" running on the Republican ticket, when that party's economic policies are precisely the opposite of what the Bible teaches. These folks might wrap themselves in the Bible to get votes, but most are no more Christian than any other sociopaths grasping at straws to bolster their power.

Finally, I would add that the entire reason for many of the social programs is that the rich have been massively underpaying their workers for decades. In a sane society, minimum wage would be enough for an individual to afford to keep a roof over his or her head, buy food, and pay for healthcare. If you can't live on your wages, your employer is screwing you. Right now, the U.S. minimum wage should be at least $20 per hour (and $25–30 in big cities). After taxes, that barely covers a basic apartment, food, and the cheapest health insurance you can buy. Instead, it is a comically useless $7.25 per hour. That's simply not a living wage unless you live with your parents, own your own home (from a previous job that paid better), or have some other source of income. Thus, in a very direct way, the rich benefit from welfare programs by being able to get away with paying workers wages that in a society lacking those programs would likely result in a worker revolt and aristocrats' heads stuck on pikes outside the factory to serve as an example to others.

So don't give me that bulls**t about liberal policies being theft. They aren't. Theft is expecting people to work for 40 hours per week without giving them enough money to buy groceries and clothing for their kids. Liberal policies are just forcing the rich to cough up a tiny fraction of their fair share.

If we could just make it mandatory for browser plug-in vendors (Adobe, Microsoft, I'm looking at you two), it would go a long way towards improving security.

In other news, the sky is blue.

Not sure if one, two, many is a myth, but one to many is a database relationship.

The answer, then, is somewhere in between my assumption and your response because I've definitely had to connect my blu-ray player to the Internet for a firmware update in order to play a movie I rented from red box. So it would appear that the answer is they don't need to be connected to the Internet to function, but they do need to be connected periodically in order to receive updates that allow newer movies to be played.

My players haven't seen any firmware updates in at least a couple of years, and I haven't had any problems playing movies. Firmware updates fix bugs (common), and firmware updates replace keys from players whose keys got compromised (rare), but in the normal case, players should not need to be periodically connected.

In that case the end result is nearly the same, if you have to allow the player to receive updates for continued functionality then one of those updates could just as easily remove functionality as well.

And do. I've had Blu-Ray players that got badly broken by firmware updates. Fortunately, every player I've used so far will allow you to revert to an older firmware by grabbing a copy of the older firmware file, copying or dding it to a USB stick, and inserting that stick into the device's USB port.

I think you missed the "I would not expect them to act on anything else" part. We don't live in that world.