You need to adjust your tin foil hat. I took my droid, my tablet, and my laptop, and there really isn't that much to worry about if you follow basic security practices, like not sending any plaintext passwords, closing any ports or services you don't need, and not doing financial transactions or other very confidential things there. And I'm sure the assorted 3-letter agencies already know all about anyone they are interested in.

You forgot IR and UV.

Off topic, but I'm also still waiting for one with integrated GPS position AND orientation, somewhere in the general neighborhood of the consumer price range.

They just don't advertise those passes...and you have to be a major corporation or senator to get them.

Why would people do such a thing? I wipe pirated windows installs so I can put linux on.

The common adage of a chain being only as strong as the weakest link is very true in security. It may seem like the potential for misuse is minimal, but security-/hacker-minded individuals work mostly by finding ways that seemingly unimportant problems affect other things they are connected to. Some of the other comments talk about a DoS-type of attack that can be performed by flooding this vulnerable communication channel; what if it is discovered that this type of DoS attack could, for example, specifically target the braking system?

So... Amazon will know everywhere I crossed a word out and replaced it with "goat" in my copy of the kama sutra? Wonder what this will do for that area of their page that recommends products to me based on things I've previously done on their site...

Actually, patent applications are public documents. How else would someone be able to check whether or not an invention was already patented? Though it would not surprise me if the DMCA somehow allowed that kind of take-down request, as it appears to have been written by some variation of the infinite monkey theorem... I think I will call it the "Finite Legislator Theorem": if a legislator types random words for long enough, it will eventually produce a document that can pass as a law.

Actually, it's the method or process they are trying to patent that has to be non-obvious. If they have developed innovative and non-obvious methods of patent trolling, they can patent those methods. Although, the more specific your claims get, the less useful they are as less of the people you would go after will actually fall under the more specific claim.

TKIP is not a cipher; it is a keying protocol. When you use TKIP, the actual cipher you are using is called RC4, which is older and has more known vulnerabilities than AES. It is also the cipher typically used by WEP, though the keying protocol WEP uses contains additional vulnerabilities. TKIP basically takes RC4, which was designed to encrypt a single stream of data, and creates a protocol around it for sending arbitrary packets, which may not be reliably delivered. WPA2 provides a more secure way to similarly wrap the AES cipher, but retains support for TKIP/RC4 for legacy devices.

There's actually an interesting proof floating around out there about exactly how much time and CPU power would be required to perform a brute force attack on 256-bit AES, and the conclusion is something like the amount of power required to do so with anything resembling current technology exceeds the output of the sun for the the next 100 years or so. Due mostly to apathy (and not remembering the password for my WAP), I still use WEP at home, but I live in an apartment complex with several unsecured networks readily available, so if anyone really wanted to get on the intarwebs, they would just use those. There will always be an arms race between the people developing security and the people breaking it, but as long as you aren't the easiest target, it is unlikely that the "bad guys" will go after you. BTW, last I checked, you can sniff packets quite effectively on a cable network, and probably on DSL too, so if you want to tap a residential internet user, you don't really need to crack WiFi.