It shouldn't even be an option to misconfigure your product in that fashion. Botnets are nothing new. Assume your customer will go with the defaults, and make those defaults a secure default. Give them an option for doing a factory reset, because yes, many folks will forget the password even though you reminded them to record it. Don't let them make the password "password" or "password123." Because they will.

It's always good to see Michael "No probable cause" Hayden posting. No, the 4th Amendment is not simply governed by the phrase "reasonable." Because it's nearly guaranteed that the government executing the search ALWAYS sees its actions as unquestionably reasonable. Michael Hayden himself argued with a journalist that the phrase "probable cause" did not appear in the 4th Amendment. He kept digging even after being taken to task, arguing, "If there's any amendment we know at the NSA, it's the Fourth!"

My main problem with Office, of any version, is the same problem I have with Windows. Every new version is simply a game of Hide the Hamster with all of the features I've known how to use for years. No, nothing has been "lost" in the sense that it's all still there. It's just reshuffled endlessly. Supporting different versions of Office just means doing a lot of Googling for stuff like "This or that feature, Office 2007" and "This or that feature, Office 365." It makes acquiring any sort of fluency in the technology almost pointless. Why bother? It's just going to be somewhere else in the next version of the software, which should roll around in another two years or so.

Oh, thank you. I needed a nice, rich deep belly laugh on a Monday morning.

I think back over the years of high-level executives who exempted themselves from ever having to change their passwords or using password complexity, or who refused to use VPN because it was too complicated, or whose computers constantly had to be hosed down and reimaged by techs wearing hazmat suits because of highly inappropriate internet browsing on company computers, and malware-infected USB sticks handed to them at conferences ("It was free!")

"As a matter of course," you say.

If only!

This talk reads like the tech equivalent of airplane contrails. It's a bunch of loose conjectures strung together from headlines and some casual Google searches. As a tech, I would have liked to have seen more technical meat pointing to more than maybe, possibly, could be. It sounds like he submitted a pretty crappy talk, and is going to try and milk his rejection to pimp his book. I think there are valid questions to be asked. Mandiant, for example, has profited mightily from the business thrown at it from the U.S. government. But it's a long reach from "black market baby milk powder" to "It's the fault of the banks!"