On fees: fees are generally charged, but they are tiny. However, all those involved in Bitcoin (including miners and software developers I spoke with) know that fees will rise and mechanisms are being created to make that simpler. The production of Bitcoins will halve in 2016, and miners are, over time, expected to derive the rewards that drive investment and operation of the system's functions (operating nodes, mining, "burying" transactions in the block chain, all interrelated) from fees rather than coins.

If you read Andreessen's piece and my essay, you'll see that he properly discusses essentially counterfeit payment from one party to another, but doesn't address fraudulent payment and the infrastructure to ensure that the party paying owns the funds used to pay. That is, if Bitcoins are stolen and used to pay for goods, a merchant faces the same trouble as if cash were stolen and used to pay. Except cash can be untraceable, and Bitcoin transactions can be tracked, even if the party isn't directly known who engaged in the transaction. Law enforcement could prove funds are stolen even if they can't recover the goods or services purchased with the funds, and clawback the funds from the seller/merchant.

None of that is addressed in Andreessen's essay, in which he proposes that Bitcoin by having very low or no fees on Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin transactions removes the necessity for any per-transaction fees as are charged to deal with fraud and overhead in a credit-card system.

Most merchants are going to be more likely to deal with an intermediary Bitcoin operator who will handle transactions on their behalf and charge a fee for chargebacks and theft recovery.

Now, c'mon, grizzled veteran (like myself?).

The point of this article, which I wrote, is both to inform people of the practical aspects of 802.11ac, and also to deal with the disappointment. Average users, to whom these products are marketed in sound bites, may be upgrading because they think "faster is better!" This is to provide a realistic case for what 802.11ac will offer in Apple's version (and everyone's).

Outdated opinion on 5 GHz. The channels 149 and higher can broadcast at 20 times the signal strength of channels 36 to 48, and Apple and others have been boosting power progressively over the years. I can see it around me in my home and the last office I had: you can see a lot of 5 GHz now because of newer devices, where before, I only saw 2.4 GHz. That's anecdote, but fire up iStumbler or a Windows equivalent (aircrack-ng?) and see what I mean.

I'm never sure if Slashdot commenters read the original article or the blurb.

In the article, which I wrote, I explain the precise degree of risk, who is at risk, and how to mitigate.

* Recommending software: I did not write the article about 1Password Pro; Joe Kissell did.

* I do not receive a share of advertising revenue, nor is any my writing for any of many publications based on advertising revenue. I receive a fixed fee arranged in advance. Only the publication knows whether or not advertising was justified.

* Attacked on his income: Neither the publication TidBITS or me personally have any income issues associated with the sale of any security software.

This article was for normal folks, not security experts, and tried to explain in clear terms how to disable (for instance) any PIN-based access or switch away from a numbers-only passwords.

The criticism here seems both misplaced, conspiracy oriented, and not based on a reading of the article.

1. If you're having trouble with WPA2, it's an implementation issue. There's no reason that WPA2 shouldn't work as well or better than WPA. In some silicon, AES-CCMP encryption can work faster than TKIP. Check for firmware upgrades on adapters and APs.

2. TKIP keys cannot be extracted by any known methods. Short TKIP and AES-CCMP passphrased-based keys are vulnerable to brute-force dictionary attacks, typically based on precomputed common SSIDs. A key of 10 or more characters is probably fine; 20 random characters is beyond computation in this universe. 63 is just silly.

3. The TKIP exploits are particular to AES-CCMP and don't recover the key, nor does any particular key length prevent the exploit. The exploits rely on a set of givens (such as 802.11e/WMM being available and enabled on a router), but this latest exploit that I link to uses the integrity checksum to extract a packet delivered to a client in the right circumstances.

4. This attack could be weaponized, but it's a proximity attack, so the yield is very very low in such attacks.