The ability for websites to activate plug-ins has been a security issue for a long time.

... blame everyone else for problems caused by Microsoft.

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Microsoft needs to remember that this is 2013, not the second half of the 1990's when the PC OEMs existed purely to support Microsoft and Intel.

The computing world has moved on (e.g., into mobile computing) and guess what, Microsoft missed yet another paradigm shift (the first being that Microsoft famously missed the onslaught of the Internet in the late 1990's).

So Microsoft is whining that they are being left behind by their PC partners; the very same PC partners, by the way, from who Microsoft has schemed and managed to suck nearly every last dollar of profit via the quasi-legal leveraging of the Windows monopoly.

Now there is a new means in town for the PC hardware OEMs to make money, and it does not require continuous bowing towards Redmond.

While the OEMs are trying to assure that they will not be subjects of Microsoft ever again. Microsoft is yelling at them, "follow us, we are the leader." But it is falling on deaf ears.

I can see why Microsoft is whining. Microsoft is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

... so a new market needs to be created to allow people to buy additional shiny toys.

Sounds like the earlier thread about a guy who wanted to get his wife hooked on (a.k.a., addicted to) video games just as he was....

And the RIAA apparently knows that online P2P is not the major source of privacy.

The answer to your question is in your question.

Does your spouse have the same opinion about gaming as you? maybe she views gaming as little more than a time wasting experience.

Maybe your spouse sees that, and she prefers not to become addicted to gaming as you appear to be.

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Perhaps the question that is really being asked here is, "my wife is giving me grief for sitting in front of the game console all day, and I want her to stop bothering me and let me play."

The manner in which you pose your questions is that of a selfish person. Instead of trying to impose your likes upon her, you should be talking with her about new things both of you can enjoy, perhaps even taking advantage of living in a different country.

With so much to discover and learn just outside your door, why waste your time sitting in front of a game console?

I did not miss that aspect at all.

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However, anytime there is a single choke point for what I do on the web, it makes it easier for google to track me. While the device may or may not use google's servers, however, it more than likely has a single ID for me across multiple sites. That single ID makes it easier to track me.

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Do you know that the ID will never be given to google in return for some manner of analytics exchange with google?

Do you know that the single ID will never be tied to google analytics via the vendors' websites?

Think a little, will ya....

It's great that google continues to put these security improvements into Chrome. But what I also would like to see would be the ability to set a proxy that is not the system proxy, something that IE, Opera and Firefox have been able to to from day 1. Why is Chrome so far behind in this aspect?

"flamebait" - looks like I hit a nerve.

That certainly makes it much, much easier for google to track you as you go around the web.

If they are big enough to have a customer card, then they have the smarts/connections to sell customer data. Indeed, the customer card service is probably run for them by a data collection company.

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Zuck said that Facebook spends 3 percent of their CPU power on privacy. With such a low CPU budget dedicated to something as important as users' privacy, it's no wonder they do such a poor job of it.

Additionally, if the companies you seem to be defending have such a rigorous process for putting software out into general usage, how do such critical security bugs apparently seem to be able to side-step that very rigorous process and get Out Into The Wild?

Instead of trying to rationalize and trivialize the incompetence of the companies that provide a lot of the software infrastructure that the IT industry uses, maybe your online efforts might be better served to try to effect a change in the companies providing that software infrastructure to be able to produce a timely solution that protects the users from vulns.

A vuln that apparently was first reported in August 2012 is finally fixed (maybe) in January 2013.

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Why can't the larger companies, e.g. Microsoft and Oracle, respond to and fix the sucrity issues more quickly than on a timeline expressed in months?