A hardware router is distinguished from a software router by the fact that a software router is capable of executing general-purpose instructions.
We have different definitions, and thus will come to very different conclusions based on those definitions. To me, a software router means a router in which you install the software, and thus are in some sort of control over it, as opposed to a prepackaged all-in-one solution, where you (typically) aren't in control of anything other than its configuration. If you don't configure the software yourself, the router is essentially a black box, and whether it is using hardware-assisted routing or purely software routing doesn't significantly change the level of trust.
The reason the trust level doesn't change is that it is not really feasible to have a router that is incapable of running general-purpose instructions. Such a device cannot be configured usefully, except perhaps by swapping out a configuration ROM (which would be highly impractical in most real-world environments). I've seen lots of two-tier setups, where special-purpose hardware does the actual packet routing and a general-purpose CPU runs some sort of web or SNMP interface for configuring the device, but you still have a general-purpose CPU that can be attacked, and can then be told to reprogram those special-purpose devices to route or modify packets in a different way, up to and including diverting some portion of the traffic to a port on the general-purpose computer for deep packet inspection.
Therefore, black-box hardware-assisted routing is no more secure than black-box pure-software routing. From a security perspective, the only things that matter are the extent to which the software is under your control and the extent to which you trust the software vendor.
But your router is an integral part of your intranet. With a little more paranoia, I can imagine a router doing vulnerability scans, or proxying a device with more memory that can do the vulnerability scans, and giving some third-party access to your computing devices. Systems are often set up to share a lot on the local network, for convenience and because the intranet is considered to be "safe." If you don't want to be in a position to trust your router, then you really should consider your security boundary to be your computer, and distrust anything that leaves or enters your NIC.
Depending on your level of trust/paranoia, you should consider the security boundary to be your app and the libraries statically linked into it. By the time it gets anywhere close to the NIC, it is out of your control.
And yes, if your intranet is likely to contain actual secrets, you should encrypt everything as though it were a public network, and maybe also consider placing an additional firewall outside your router to do DPI looking for possible information leakage, unusual activity, etc.
With that said, your home intranet isn't likely to contain much (if any) data that isn't going to the public Internet, and assuming your switches are working properly, it should not be possible for your router to see non-broadcast traffic directed towards a different device anyway. Obviously, that reasoning fails if your switch is a managed device that can be potentially reprogrammed to change the switching behavior, but that's atypical for home networks, which I thought was the main point of discussion in this thread.
There is no such thing. A device that moves data from one location to another, using some policies to examine and transform it, is not just a "hardware" device.
That's completely immaterial. A hardware router is distinguished from a software router by whether it is or is not a general-purpose computer. Hardware routers range from that little D-Link all the way up to Cisco boxes. In the most extreme designs, the hardware provides a dedicated I/O processor that performs the actual routing functions, allowing it to route data considerably faster than a general-purpose computer can.
With just a little paranoia, I can imagine someone finding a way to get those routers to copy your traffic, or at least the headers, to some hostile entity. It doesn't take full knowledge of your traffic to destroy your privacy.
I think you missed my point, which was that yes, you could do exactly what you're suggesting, but it would be just as easy to do that at any router along your data's path to its destination. As soon as the data leaves your intranet, it's like sending a postcard. You should assume that it can and will be monitored by everyone and his mother. Therefore, there is no security concern because the data in question was never secure to begin with.
The answer depends on what you mean. As far as I'm concerned, a hardware router can probably be trusted to be a basic firewall/router. It's pretty unlikely that anyone will come up with a useful attack on a device that's just doing port blocking, NAT, and basic routing. At worst, somebody might DOS it or turn it into a well-connected zombie to aid in DDOSing somebody's server, but neither of those is compromising your data.
Now if you're passing unencrypted data across that router, you might have a problem, but then again, passing unencrypted data across any router outside your own intranet is a bad idea, so nothing new there. And if you're expecting the commercial router to provide a VPN, then the answer to whether it is trustworthy becomes "no", because its crypto implementation cannot readily be audited and verified to be trustworthy.
What the NSA may have done is made it so your encrypted communications have two keys: yours and the NSA's. There is no evidence that it weakens the algorithm in any way, provided of course that NSA doesn't publish their private key.
They're accused of sabotaging the random number generator that is used for generating keys. The net result is that what should be a random key is less random than it otherwise would be. That's not saying that it doesn't also somehow introduce some secondary key that can partially or completely decrypt the data, but whether it does or not, weakening key generation means all attackers (once they discover the flaw) benefit from the reduced entropy by being able to deduce things about the generated keys.
A minimum 3-story building with underground parking requirement for all new commercial construction would go a long way towards fixing all of the land shortage in the Silicon Valley area.
That said, the folks I know who live in SF live there because there's nothing for them to do in the SV area. Being young, they like being able to walk from their apartments to the hottest clubs or concerts or whatever. Most of those folks move back out to the suburbs by the time they have their first kid, but there's always a new batch of youngsters waiting in the wings to take those apartments when they leave.
I'm assuming for the moment that this evidence is, in fact, legitimate. Given how heinous the NSA's actions have been lately, it seems completely in character, which makes that likely a safe assumption. However, just to give them the benefit of the doubt, everyone involved should receive a fair trial. With that said, everyone involved should be tried for high crimes against the United States and its allies. These are accusations of very serious crimes.
Deliberately compromising the secure communications of hundreds of millions of computers all around the world just so a bunch of pencil-dicked asshats can play their little spy games goes so far beyond unconscionability that it borders on a crime against humanity. Such ends-justify-means thinking is fundamentally incompatible with any form of liberty or justice. Our data is fundamentally easier to crack not just by our own government, but also by organized crime syndicates, foreign governments, and even terrorist groups. In all likelihood, even military communications gear is less secure, which means our troops are at elevated risk during a time of war as a direct result of their actions. That's treason, even by the absolute strictest definition thereof. Further, such deliberate weakening of crypto endangers the lives of dissidents in countries with oppressive regimes, many of which are considered our enemies—an act that could also be considered treason.
Their actions, if true, clearly constitute providing material support to terrorists and treason by means of providing material aid to our enemies in a time of war. Therefore, according to U.S. law, everyone involved should be immediately treated as enemy combatants, deported to an appropriate holding facility outside our borders—preferably the one affectionately known as "Gitmo"—and tried before a military tribunal.
In addition to prosecution of individuals, there should be consequences for the groups involved. RSA should be immediately dissolved and all its assets destroyed. Further, at this point, it should be abundantly clear to anyone with even the slightest understanding of crypto that nothing short of the complete and total elimination of the NSA and a constitutional amendment clearly and plainly banning any similar organization from ever existing in the future can even begin to restore trust in cryptography and computers. That organization is fundamentally malevolent, and its very existence is inherently incompatible with the very concepts of security and privacy. No matter what successes they may have had, nothing can possibly even come close to justifying such a heinous breach of the public's trust.
15% payroll tax (half of this is usually hidden from the employee, but make no mistake, it is a tax they pay.)
No, it isn't. Taxes on businesses, including payroll taxes, are invariably passed on as part of the cost of doing business, and are thus paid by the people who buy goods and services from those companies. The poor, most of whom spend the majority of their income on goods and services, end up paying a disproportionate amount of those taxes (relative to their income). They also pay a disproportionately large percentage of their income as sales tax. Those regressive taxes more than balance out the reduction in income tax on the lower tax brackets, so on average, the poor pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the rich (in every state but Vermont, at last check).
That pretty much sums up how people feel about DRM.... It must not cut into what they want to do. It must not disrupt their experience.
The real problem with most forms of DRM is that they don't "cut into what they [users] want to do" until they do. When the company goes out of business, when you're offline without launching the app for too many weeks, when the company decides that it isn't worth maintaining a DRM server for the hundred remaining users, etc., suddenly you find yourself unable to use something that you paid for.
The only form of DRM that doesn't suffer from this is what I would call "static DRM", as used by DVDs and Blu-Ray players, in which millions of devices are authorized to use the content, and in which the only thing preventing copying is the higher cost of devices that can burn media with data in certain parts of the disc (otherwise known as "trivially defeated DRM", or "only useful for region coding" DRM).
Most if not all charities today also get some money from the government. If the real concern was people
not being generous enough to charities why not mandate everyone give X percent of their money to charity instead of taking it
at gunpoint and redistributing it. At least then people would have a choice about which charity THEIR money is going to support.
I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of money charities get from the government is in the form of tax breaks for nonprofits. Those dollars are spent by the government in proportion to the money given by individuals, so in effect, people do have a choice about which charities their money is going to support. Compared with that, all other government grants to charities (NEA and NSF grants, for example) are almost certainly lost in the noise.
Lets call it what it is. Liberals like you want to steal money from those who work and give it to those who don't and call it charity. Its not charity its theft, pure and simple. That's why they call you names because you are a thief.
Let's call it what it is. Neocons like you want to steal money from those who have to work just to get by and give it to people who could retire today and live comfortably drinking Mai Tais on the beach for the rest of their lives, and call it trickle-down. It's not trickle-down. It's theft, pure and simple. That's why they call you names—because you are a thief.
The reality is that the rich pay more in taxes because they gain the most from those social services. You might think that the poor benefit most, but that's just not true. The rich don't pay taxes to support the poor. The rich pay taxes to protect themselves from having to defend themselves from the poor. The rich are able to have their affluent lifestyles because we have a functioning society—because the poor are not marching in the streets with automatic weapons, calling for their heads. The only thing separating the rich from a horrible death is that civilization. Therefore, the rich benefit most from a stable society and from all the programs that keep that society stable, hence it is their duty to pay more.
Moreover, the Bible teaches that all should give according to their means. This means in a government based on Christian principles, the rich should give more than the poor. This is why I find it particularly hypocritical to see self-proclaimed "Christians" running on the Republican ticket, when that party's economic policies are precisely the opposite of what the Bible teaches. These folks might wrap themselves in the Bible to get votes, but most are no more Christian than any other sociopaths grasping at straws to bolster their power.
Finally, I would add that the entire reason for many of the social programs is that the rich have been massively underpaying their workers for decades. In a sane society, minimum wage would be enough for an individual to afford to keep a roof over his or her head, buy food, and pay for healthcare. If you can't live on your wages, your employer is screwing you. Right now, the U.S. minimum wage should be at least $20 per hour (and $25–30 in big cities). After taxes, that barely covers a basic apartment, food, and the cheapest health insurance you can buy. Instead, it is a comically useless $7.25 per hour. That's simply not a living wage unless you live with your parents, own your own home (from a previous job that paid better), or have some other source of income. Thus, in a very direct way, the rich benefit from welfare programs by being able to get away with paying workers wages that in a society lacking those programs would likely result in a worker revolt and aristocrats' heads stuck on pikes outside the factory to serve as an example to others.
So don't give me that bulls**t about liberal policies being theft. They aren't. Theft is expecting people to work for 40 hours per week without giving them enough money to buy groceries and clothing for their kids. Liberal policies are just forcing the rich to cough up a tiny fraction of their fair share.
If we could just make it mandatory for browser plug-in vendors (Adobe, Microsoft, I'm looking at you two), it would go a long way towards improving security.
The answer, then, is somewhere in between my assumption and your response because I've definitely had to connect my blu-ray player to the Internet for a firmware update in order to play a movie I rented from red box. So it would appear that the answer is they don't need to be connected to the Internet to function, but they do need to be connected periodically in order to receive updates that allow newer movies to be played.
My players haven't seen any firmware updates in at least a couple of years, and I haven't had any problems playing movies. Firmware updates fix bugs (common), and firmware updates replace keys from players whose keys got compromised (rare), but in the normal case, players should not need to be periodically connected.
In that case the end result is nearly the same, if you have to allow the player to receive updates for continued functionality then one of those updates could just as easily remove functionality as well.
And do. I've had Blu-Ray players that got badly broken by firmware updates. Fortunately, every player I've used so far will allow you to revert to an older firmware by grabbing a copy of the older firmware file, copying or dding it to a USB stick, and inserting that stick into the device's USB port.
The danger is that there's no way to know whether they picked those 60 or the other 60, and there's very little oversight to ensure that they always limit their surveillance to the 60 terrorists and not the 60 well-connected random citizens.
And your Blue Ray[sic] collection can burn in a house fire or get stolen.
And, subject to a deductible, my insurance will replace that collection if that happens. If an online-DRM-encumbered collection becomes unplayable because the DRM servers went away, that's just money wasted. There's no recourse, no way to get that collection back (legally), and you've spent money for a content license that just became worthless because you can't (legally) use it.
Talking about wills and inheritance. Just give them the account and password. We're talking aobut movies and tv shows, not family heirlooms.
What you're missing is that physical items are transferrable, and thus have actual cash value. Just like all the other random crap you have around your house, when you die and pass on those Blu-Ray discs to your kids or grandkids or coworkers or cats or whatever, chances are they won't want very many of them (if any), because they'll already own copies of any movies that they want, and they won't care about the rest. However, they can A. resell them on Amazon and make a few bucks, B. dump them in an estate sale and make a few bucks, or C. take them to Good Will and take a tax write-off. Either way, your heirs get something (usually $$) from your collection.
With digital downloads, your heirs have to transfer the passwords for the whole collection to one person, who will want maybe three or four movies out of several hundred. In effect, unless you happen to have a grandkid who wants your entire collection en masse, the rest of the movies in your collection become instantly worthless.
I'll rent DRM-encumbered movies. I'll pay a monthly fee to stream DRM-encumbered movies. I won't buy DRM-encumbered movies unless the DRM is irrevocable and not tied to any particular player hardware or software.
It's gotten to the point that I categorically will NOT buy and Blu Rays with the Ultraviolet crap -- I'm not signing up with 3 different places to have a piece of digital media which needs to call home every time I want to play to confirm they've not revoked my license. Because sometimes I want to watch the movie when I do not have network access (like on an airplane).
Personally, I like the Ultraviolet copies; they make great coasters, or passable flying discs (read "Frisbees"). Oh, you mean the data on them? Yeah, that's useless. As long as the price is the same and it doesn't take up any more space than a single BRD case, I don't care, though. I certainly won't go out of my way to avoid the extra piece of plastic. To me, it has neither a positive nor a negative value.
No. No, it does not. People use Blu-Ray players in their cars. An always-connected player would defeat the whole purpose of physical media. AFAIK, the only players that require Internet access when playing a Blu-Ray disc are ripper apps and other unofficial player apps that folks use because of lack of any proper players on any platform besides Windows. They, in turn, use Internet access to grab a copy of the pre-decrypted disc key, avoiding the need to actually break the copy protection at all.
I suppose pedantically, if a player's key is compromised, they can make future discs for which that player's key is blacklisted, at which point the player will require a firmware update to get a new key that will play titles made after that date, but short of a firmware bug, there's no mechanism for making existing media unplayable, and in particular, there's no mechanism for revoking a particular disc's keys after it has been pressed.
That's arguably too weak. If they come across a conspiracy to commit any capital crime or other act of violence or physical abuse, I would expect them to act on it, whether we're talking about terrorism, murder, rape, child molestation, etc. I would not expect them to act on anything else.
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We have different definitions, and thus will come to very different conclusions based on those definitions. To me, a software router means a router in which you install the software, and thus are in some sort of control over it, as opposed to a prepackaged all-in-one solution, where you (typically) aren't in control of anything other than its configuration. If you don't configure the software yourself, the router is essentially a black box, and whether it is using hardware-assisted routing or purely software routing doesn't significantly change the level of trust.
The reason the trust level doesn't change is that it is not really feasible to have a router that is incapable of running general-purpose instructions. Such a device cannot be configured usefully, except perhaps by swapping out a configuration ROM (which would be highly impractical in most real-world environments). I've seen lots of two-tier setups, where special-purpose hardware does the actual packet routing and a general-purpose CPU runs some sort of web or SNMP interface for configuring the device, but you still have a general-purpose CPU that can be attacked, and can then be told to reprogram those special-purpose devices to route or modify packets in a different way, up to and including diverting some portion of the traffic to a port on the general-purpose computer for deep packet inspection.
Therefore, black-box hardware-assisted routing is no more secure than black-box pure-software routing. From a security perspective, the only things that matter are the extent to which the software is under your control and the extent to which you trust the software vendor.
Depending on your level of trust/paranoia, you should consider the security boundary to be your app and the libraries statically linked into it. By the time it gets anywhere close to the NIC, it is out of your control.
And yes, if your intranet is likely to contain actual secrets, you should encrypt everything as though it were a public network, and maybe also consider placing an additional firewall outside your router to do DPI looking for possible information leakage, unusual activity, etc.
With that said, your home intranet isn't likely to contain much (if any) data that isn't going to the public Internet, and assuming your switches are working properly, it should not be possible for your router to see non-broadcast traffic directed towards a different device anyway. Obviously, that reasoning fails if your switch is a managed device that can be potentially reprogrammed to change the switching behavior, but that's atypical for home networks, which I thought was the main point of discussion in this thread.
What's worse: the malice of a few or the apathy of an entire nation?
Well, then, I have some good news for you: No company has manufactured a router in the U.S. since the Clinton administration! :-D
That's completely immaterial. A hardware router is distinguished from a software router by whether it is or is not a general-purpose computer. Hardware routers range from that little D-Link all the way up to Cisco boxes. In the most extreme designs, the hardware provides a dedicated I/O processor that performs the actual routing functions, allowing it to route data considerably faster than a general-purpose computer can.
I think you missed my point, which was that yes, you could do exactly what you're suggesting, but it would be just as easy to do that at any router along your data's path to its destination. As soon as the data leaves your intranet, it's like sending a postcard. You should assume that it can and will be monitored by everyone and his mother. Therefore, there is no security concern because the data in question was never secure to begin with.
The answer depends on what you mean. As far as I'm concerned, a hardware router can probably be trusted to be a basic firewall/router. It's pretty unlikely that anyone will come up with a useful attack on a device that's just doing port blocking, NAT, and basic routing. At worst, somebody might DOS it or turn it into a well-connected zombie to aid in DDOSing somebody's server, but neither of those is compromising your data.
Now if you're passing unencrypted data across that router, you might have a problem, but then again, passing unencrypted data across any router outside your own intranet is a bad idea, so nothing new there. And if you're expecting the commercial router to provide a VPN, then the answer to whether it is trustworthy becomes "no", because its crypto implementation cannot readily be audited and verified to be trustworthy.
They're accused of sabotaging the random number generator that is used for generating keys. The net result is that what should be a random key is less random than it otherwise would be. That's not saying that it doesn't also somehow introduce some secondary key that can partially or completely decrypt the data, but whether it does or not, weakening key generation means all attackers (once they discover the flaw) benefit from the reduced entropy by being able to deduce things about the generated keys.
A minimum 3-story building with underground parking requirement for all new commercial construction would go a long way towards fixing all of the land shortage in the Silicon Valley area.
That said, the folks I know who live in SF live there because there's nothing for them to do in the SV area. Being young, they like being able to walk from their apartments to the hottest clubs or concerts or whatever. Most of those folks move back out to the suburbs by the time they have their first kid, but there's always a new batch of youngsters waiting in the wings to take those apartments when they leave.
I'm assuming for the moment that this evidence is, in fact, legitimate. Given how heinous the NSA's actions have been lately, it seems completely in character, which makes that likely a safe assumption. However, just to give them the benefit of the doubt, everyone involved should receive a fair trial. With that said, everyone involved should be tried for high crimes against the United States and its allies. These are accusations of very serious crimes.
Deliberately compromising the secure communications of hundreds of millions of computers all around the world just so a bunch of pencil-dicked asshats can play their little spy games goes so far beyond unconscionability that it borders on a crime against humanity. Such ends-justify-means thinking is fundamentally incompatible with any form of liberty or justice. Our data is fundamentally easier to crack not just by our own government, but also by organized crime syndicates, foreign governments, and even terrorist groups. In all likelihood, even military communications gear is less secure, which means our troops are at elevated risk during a time of war as a direct result of their actions. That's treason, even by the absolute strictest definition thereof. Further, such deliberate weakening of crypto endangers the lives of dissidents in countries with oppressive regimes, many of which are considered our enemies—an act that could also be considered treason.
Their actions, if true, clearly constitute providing material support to terrorists and treason by means of providing material aid to our enemies in a time of war. Therefore, according to U.S. law, everyone involved should be immediately treated as enemy combatants, deported to an appropriate holding facility outside our borders—preferably the one affectionately known as "Gitmo"—and tried before a military tribunal.
In addition to prosecution of individuals, there should be consequences for the groups involved. RSA should be immediately dissolved and all its assets destroyed. Further, at this point, it should be abundantly clear to anyone with even the slightest understanding of crypto that nothing short of the complete and total elimination of the NSA and a constitutional amendment clearly and plainly banning any similar organization from ever existing in the future can even begin to restore trust in cryptography and computers. That organization is fundamentally malevolent, and its very existence is inherently incompatible with the very concepts of security and privacy. No matter what successes they may have had, nothing can possibly even come close to justifying such a heinous breach of the public's trust.
No, it isn't. Taxes on businesses, including payroll taxes, are invariably passed on as part of the cost of doing business, and are thus paid by the people who buy goods and services from those companies. The poor, most of whom spend the majority of their income on goods and services, end up paying a disproportionate amount of those taxes (relative to their income). They also pay a disproportionately large percentage of their income as sales tax. Those regressive taxes more than balance out the reduction in income tax on the lower tax brackets, so on average, the poor pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than the rich (in every state but Vermont, at last check).
Must be Monster.
The real problem with most forms of DRM is that they don't "cut into what they [users] want to do" until they do. When the company goes out of business, when you're offline without launching the app for too many weeks, when the company decides that it isn't worth maintaining a DRM server for the hundred remaining users, etc., suddenly you find yourself unable to use something that you paid for.
The only form of DRM that doesn't suffer from this is what I would call "static DRM", as used by DVDs and Blu-Ray players, in which millions of devices are authorized to use the content, and in which the only thing preventing copying is the higher cost of devices that can burn media with data in certain parts of the disc (otherwise known as "trivially defeated DRM", or "only useful for region coding" DRM).
Sounds like you need a cat door that unlocks only when the cat isn't carrying anything.
I'm fairly certain that the vast majority of money charities get from the government is in the form of tax breaks for nonprofits. Those dollars are spent by the government in proportion to the money given by individuals, so in effect, people do have a choice about which charities their money is going to support. Compared with that, all other government grants to charities (NEA and NSF grants, for example) are almost certainly lost in the noise.
Let's call it what it is. Neocons like you want to steal money from those who have to work just to get by and give it to people who could retire today and live comfortably drinking Mai Tais on the beach for the rest of their lives, and call it trickle-down. It's not trickle-down. It's theft, pure and simple. That's why they call you names—because you are a thief.
The reality is that the rich pay more in taxes because they gain the most from those social services. You might think that the poor benefit most, but that's just not true. The rich don't pay taxes to support the poor. The rich pay taxes to protect themselves from having to defend themselves from the poor. The rich are able to have their affluent lifestyles because we have a functioning society—because the poor are not marching in the streets with automatic weapons, calling for their heads. The only thing separating the rich from a horrible death is that civilization. Therefore, the rich benefit most from a stable society and from all the programs that keep that society stable, hence it is their duty to pay more.
Moreover, the Bible teaches that all should give according to their means. This means in a government based on Christian principles, the rich should give more than the poor. This is why I find it particularly hypocritical to see self-proclaimed "Christians" running on the Republican ticket, when that party's economic policies are precisely the opposite of what the Bible teaches. These folks might wrap themselves in the Bible to get votes, but most are no more Christian than any other sociopaths grasping at straws to bolster their power.
Finally, I would add that the entire reason for many of the social programs is that the rich have been massively underpaying their workers for decades. In a sane society, minimum wage would be enough for an individual to afford to keep a roof over his or her head, buy food, and pay for healthcare. If you can't live on your wages, your employer is screwing you. Right now, the U.S. minimum wage should be at least $20 per hour (and $25–30 in big cities). After taxes, that barely covers a basic apartment, food, and the cheapest health insurance you can buy. Instead, it is a comically useless $7.25 per hour. That's simply not a living wage unless you live with your parents, own your own home (from a previous job that paid better), or have some other source of income. Thus, in a very direct way, the rich benefit from welfare programs by being able to get away with paying workers wages that in a society lacking those programs would likely result in a worker revolt and aristocrats' heads stuck on pikes outside the factory to serve as an example to others.
So don't give me that bulls**t about liberal policies being theft. They aren't. Theft is expecting people to work for 40 hours per week without giving them enough money to buy groceries and clothing for their kids. Liberal policies are just forcing the rich to cough up a tiny fraction of their fair share.
If we could just make it mandatory for browser plug-in vendors (Adobe, Microsoft, I'm looking at you two), it would go a long way towards improving security.
In other news, the sky is blue.
Not sure if one, two, many is a myth, but one to many is a database relationship.
My players haven't seen any firmware updates in at least a couple of years, and I haven't had any problems playing movies. Firmware updates fix bugs (common), and firmware updates replace keys from players whose keys got compromised (rare), but in the normal case, players should not need to be periodically connected.
And do. I've had Blu-Ray players that got badly broken by firmware updates. Fortunately, every player I've used so far will allow you to revert to an older firmware by grabbing a copy of the older firmware file, copying or dding it to a USB stick, and inserting that stick into the device's USB port.
I think you missed the "I would not expect them to act on anything else" part. We don't live in that world.
The danger is that there's no way to know whether they picked those 60 or the other 60, and there's very little oversight to ensure that they always limit their surveillance to the 60 terrorists and not the 60 well-connected random citizens.
And, subject to a deductible, my insurance will replace that collection if that happens. If an online-DRM-encumbered collection becomes unplayable because the DRM servers went away, that's just money wasted. There's no recourse, no way to get that collection back (legally), and you've spent money for a content license that just became worthless because you can't (legally) use it.
What you're missing is that physical items are transferrable, and thus have actual cash value. Just like all the other random crap you have around your house, when you die and pass on those Blu-Ray discs to your kids or grandkids or coworkers or cats or whatever, chances are they won't want very many of them (if any), because they'll already own copies of any movies that they want, and they won't care about the rest. However, they can A. resell them on Amazon and make a few bucks, B. dump them in an estate sale and make a few bucks, or C. take them to Good Will and take a tax write-off. Either way, your heirs get something (usually $$) from your collection.
With digital downloads, your heirs have to transfer the passwords for the whole collection to one person, who will want maybe three or four movies out of several hundred. In effect, unless you happen to have a grandkid who wants your entire collection en masse, the rest of the movies in your collection become instantly worthless.
I'll rent DRM-encumbered movies. I'll pay a monthly fee to stream DRM-encumbered movies. I won't buy DRM-encumbered movies unless the DRM is irrevocable and not tied to any particular player hardware or software.
Personally, I like the Ultraviolet copies; they make great coasters, or passable flying discs (read "Frisbees"). Oh, you mean the data on them? Yeah, that's useless. As long as the price is the same and it doesn't take up any more space than a single BRD case, I don't care, though. I certainly won't go out of my way to avoid the extra piece of plastic. To me, it has neither a positive nor a negative value.
No. No, it does not. People use Blu-Ray players in their cars. An always-connected player would defeat the whole purpose of physical media. AFAIK, the only players that require Internet access when playing a Blu-Ray disc are ripper apps and other unofficial player apps that folks use because of lack of any proper players on any platform besides Windows. They, in turn, use Internet access to grab a copy of the pre-decrypted disc key, avoiding the need to actually break the copy protection at all.
I suppose pedantically, if a player's key is compromised, they can make future discs for which that player's key is blacklisted, at which point the player will require a firmware update to get a new key that will play titles made after that date, but short of a firmware bug, there's no mechanism for making existing media unplayable, and in particular, there's no mechanism for revoking a particular disc's keys after it has been pressed.
That's arguably too weak. If they come across a conspiracy to commit any capital crime or other act of violence or physical abuse, I would expect them to act on it, whether we're talking about terrorism, murder, rape, child molestation, etc. I would not expect them to act on anything else.