Excellent :)

My post wasn't intended for serious consumption. Is your humor detector broken today? :)

This is also known as Whoosh Syndrome

Debian GNU/Linux on ARM

Man, you've gotta stop thinking in terms of price. You've gotta think in terms of value and interoperability. Given the fact that Google can drop a datacenter-in-a-storage-container off anywhere, you could build your own personal Intarweb anywhere you want, complete with users! I hear there are even plans to have the containers directly linkable, using something industry pundits are referring to as "Lego" architecture. What exciting times these are.

Selling vulnerabilities == little money
Selling fully functional botnet time == probably a lot more

It's unfortunate, but I don't see it changing in the near future.

And in turn, I agree with much of your comment :). My position with respect to natural selection wasn't meant to be interpreted in the animalistic sense; it's meant more in the "there are winners and losers" sense (with the understanding that it's all shades of gray).

As intelligent beings that make up a society, we do operate according to "higher principles," but those principles are just as much a part of nature as anything else. I think it's fair to say that humans have a tendency to draw entirely too stark a line between "us" and "the rest of the stuff crawling around."

I'm sure as heck no Microsoft fan, but they've been exporting strong cryptographic components for a long time now, and not in an open source format. Please reference the following materials for further guidance on this topic:

Export of cryptography in the United States
International Traffic in Arms Regulations 2009

Sure, you can't export this stuff to Iran, North Korea, etc, but there are very few real obstacles aside from that. This is pure and simple failure on Microsoft's part, on the most basic level imaginable concerning data protection.

Heh. I'm from Atlanta (lived there for the better part of 20 years), spent time in the Navy (plenty of flying there), and now live in Absecon, NJ (54 miles from Philadelphia). PA layovers may not happen quite as often as the Atlanta variety, but they're not exactly rare, either.

I do not care about people "misconfiguring" their home networks. I'm going to make an awful car analogy: if I do not perform properly educate myself on the operation of a motor vehicle and perform the minimum routine maintenance on it, I can't bitch when something goes wrong. By the way, people deserve the rights they can defend; that's a founding principle and a basic manifestation of natural selection.

Let's try a different analogy: if you build your house out of glass, you can't blame folks for looking in. The fact that someone might not find this "obvious" just because it involves a home router bought at BestBuy does not absolve that person of responsibility for the equipment's prudent use. We do not live in a nanny state (at least not quite yet, not to the degree that some folks in Congress would like [at least for those USAians reading this post]), and I strongly object to most attempts to push things in that direction.

The bottom line is simple. For years and years and years mainstream consumer network equipment has offered point and click wizards for enabling even the most basic of security measures. If people cannot be bothered to at least try to learn about a device they have bought and installed at their home, or consult someone with a 6th grade education to do it for them, I honestly don't have a lot of sympathy for their plight.

I'll settle for that correction :).

Unfortunately, a ton of folks are probably going to reply to your analogy with the usual "you can't walk in my front door just because I left it unlocked" crap. To all who are even thinking about going there, if your front door is flying through the air and I happen to photograph it on the way past, too freakin' bad. Hope you didn't have anything important painted all over it, and welcome to the World of Encrypt Everything.

Anonymity is extremely important. On more occasions than I can count, I've espoused the virtues of (pseudo)anonymous communications techniques, coupled with strong encryption. Note that this shouldn't be construed to say I believe people should be absolved of being held accountable for their actions if they do something wrong. I do, however, acknowledge that under certain circumstances (repressive regimes for example) local law may not be in line with what the rest of the planet finds remotely reasonable. Like everything else that involves people, these things require careful consideration and deliberation amongst the citizens affected by them.

As they're dealing with people whose full-time job is to do such things, I'd say the likelihood is high that any service these folks can be linked with might receive some paperwork.