This would trivially fail as even if the top 1000 sites were to agree to leave Google, each one would *individually* have interest in betraying the plot and staying. I.e. the bribe price shall not be the *average* but the rational price of betrayal, which is much higher, and actually increases with the number of participants.

Technical impossibility is a non-argument. Strip out perhaps only the most visible things (like the executable). Make it a free, largely advertised download. Just as Opera/Firefox/Chrome. It *does* matter a lot because OEM/developpers/whoever will *not* assume that IE exists by default. However easy it is for it to be installed back. The whole point is that the *user* has to *explicitely choose* MSIE over the competition. That makes a whole lot of difference. Obviously you should not let OEM choose - MS has too much leverage there, as the WMP fiasco has proven.

Plausibly deniable encryption tools are common place these days. E.g. Truecrypt, dm-crypt, etc.

WIth any kind of "Private Mode" you still need to go there manually: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager04.html

Creating a "Private Mode" guest account with $HOME in /tmpfs is the only possibly safe way. A few scripts can even make it icon-clickable for regular users (ssh -X, etc. ).

But that won't prevent your ISP/Corporate admin to see traffic. Unless you use a Tor plugin - and even then you need to trust Tor exit node.

Point being: it's easier to just not need a "Private Mode" to begin with. Sex is better in real life, anyway.

Much more importantly: in an unregulated, illiquid market most financial entities used "mark-to-model". ie. Use your own, in-house valuation technique to decide whether you made or lost money.

The funny thing is that now both sides of the very same trade can miraculously claim to have gained money comes year-end and bonus computation time. Pay bonus first, ask questions (and pay back) later.

Sure enough, the current crisis was mainly caused by overly lax monetary policy, dogmatic reluctane to regulate and exuberant account deficit causing a flood of sino/petro dollars looking for anything to be invested in, no question asked.

In this grand scheme CDS were just a catalytic corollary. But a particularly immoral (though legal) one. That market urgently needs to be regulated. Some prominent players have been asking for that even since that market took off - witness Ken Griffin, for example. He was spot on.