I think the point is that this is a necessity for Japanese text input, whereas we were able to manage without it for English text, for a while (but don't make me go back, please!)
Japanese text entry in Windows is similar, at least from a qwerty keyboard. You type the roman letters corresponding to the sound you want, then you hit space to cycle through kana and kanji that match the sound.
The latin alphabet is no more "normal" than, say, the Korean alphabet. That's syllabary, not an alphabet.
Actually, Korean script is really cool. Each fixed-width one-syllable symbol contains alphabetic elements that tell you how it sounds. I really recommend reading up on it.
Wave that dictionary page in front of the judge and "I Rest My Case". But the accusation is not that the word "cult" is inaccurate, but that it is "insulting".
The word "cult" is certainly pejorative. I'm not sure it should be promoted to "insulting".
The thing is, arcade games were not designed with home gaming in mind. If you love arcade games, then you can see past this (I do -- I have a JAMMA cabinet in my house).
This is why home ports of arcade games usually have extra elements bolted on. For example, something like Soul Calibur in the arcade has one game mode -- play until you die, see your score.
After all, its job is to take some money from you, give you a quick fix, then get rid of you. You might play a few more times. Most arcade games don't try and lure you in for a whole afternoon (arcade-dwelling otaku notwithstanding).
The console port has unlockable characters, story mode, challenge mode, time attack, etc. etc., to give it longevity and replayability.
My partner and I have probably spent more time cooperating on single player games, than competing on two player games.
Classic point'n'click adventures like Monkey Island, Sam and Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle, for example. We also played a lot of text adventures (Google "Interactive Fiction" and "Curses" for a fantastic one).
More recently we played the new Telltale Games episodes of Sam & Max on the PC, rigged up to a TV almost as you described. I got some joypad-to-mouse software, and we sat on the sofa playing together -- taking it in turns to take control. They're not quite as good as the classic original, but they're entertaining enough.
We played a lot of two player puzzle games on the original Playstation -- Bust a Move for a while, then when we discovered it, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The former is widely available, including on the PC and in MAME as Puzzle Bobble. The latter came out recently on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN. I think there's a Steam release in the works.
The publishing industry (think newspapers and wide format coffee-table books) applies the principle of "wide = hard to read" by using columns.
As a user you can work around it by narrowing your browser window. Incidentally, my first GUI web browser, NCSA Mosaic on SunOS, defaulted to a portrait shaped window taking about 25% of the screen area.
As a web developer, you can apply it by narrowing the text area (many Wordpress templates do this, for example).
It would be pretty sweet to have a browser that could reflow a page into columns regardless of the original format (and I don't mean just by replacing the stylesheet).
Write shorter methods. That is all. I don't know to what extent you were joking, but I agree with this. If your blocks are significantly more than 50 lines long, there's something wrong.
The Linux coding style guide contains wisdom on this:
"Functions should be short and sweet, and do just one thing. They should fit on one or two screenfuls of text (the ISO/ANSI screen size is 80x24, as we all know), and do one thing and do that well." And something similar goes for width:
"Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program." I must admit to often failing to live up to those ideals, but that doesn't mean they're good aims to have in mind.
If encryption is used, you can't do it. I don't know about the really nasty stuff - but mainstream filesharing (e.g. Bittorrenting the latest episode of Lost) would be hurt if everyone was driven to encryption.
To get a good number of peers, access to these BT clouds are anonymous. If it's anonymous, then you can encrypt point-to-point, but trackers still have to publish the IP addresses of peers, and you don't know whether a given anonymous peer is bad guy (or a good guy, depending who's side you're on).
Or to put it another way: would you join a torrent if the only way to find out its filename, was non-anonymous?
My guess is that the rape-and-kiddie stuff mentioned in the original article is shared by very secretive, closed groups. There are many techniques to covertly share data within such a closed group. Assuming they're being careful enough, and don't get careless, it's going to take traditional policing techniques to catch them.
I'm curious. What do you use your optical drive for? I rip CDs when I buy them. I install from CD on the very few occasions software comes on CD (increasingly rare). I backup to DVD-R from time to time.
But these are all infrequent jobs that can be done on a home machine, or with an external drive. No sense taking the drive everywhere just for these jobs.
I normally travel with my work's laptop, and keep a diary (alright, a blog). When I traveled to a less 'secure' part of the world, I took a Palm Pilot instead. Since text input was so laborious, I ended up with much terser diary entries, which I now regret.
Yes, you can buy a keyboard for a Palm. Having a portable device with the keyboard included is more attractive to me.
I once did a teaching course, as I was teaching basic IT skills in an evening class. One of my fellow students was teaching astrology (I was rather glad to hear that it wasn't subsidised in the same way as the IT classes were). So I got to learn a little bit about it.
He was completely dismissive of magazine horoscopes, and said that a proper horoscope involved far more detailed plotting based on the exact date, and a dialogue between the astrologer and the client. It soon became apparent to me that the star stuff was pretty much just a starting off point for some self-examination, coached by the consultant. You can make the same argument for tarot -- the cards you get are arbitrary, and their meanings are deliberately ambiguous, meaning you can use them to kick off some rather productive brainstorming.
Making a Slashdot-like rating system would help quite a bit. Users could then mod stuff up and down and flag certain types of content. Users with high karma would get an auto flag to the top. Fiddly though. Are people moderating an article, or an update? It needs to be absolutely clear to them which.
If it's an article you're moderating, what happens to points when an article is updated? I might give negative mod points to an article today, only for someone to update it to an incredible standard tomorrow. The safest thing to do is to discard all prior moderations, every time there's an update. Yet that's throwing away information capital.
I guess a "moderation" could be attached to a given revision of an article, with the points divided among updates, pro-rata per word visible in that revision. Fiddly.
A while ago a friend of mine said to me "one thing I don't get about this Free Software thing is, how do the programmers make a living?"
Although there are plenty of answers you can give that demonstrate how people can produce Free software as part of a paid job, my answer to him was that the GNU people don't consider the question in scope. RMS codes for pleasure, and as someone to whom coding comes easily, he doesn't consider software development to be such a super-duper skill that people should command vast salaries for it.
The answer to Pajitnov would be similar. The viability of your business model is not something Free software is interested in.
As a programmer myself, the benefits of using Free software far outweigh the benefits of producing non-free software. Among the most frustrating parts of my job, are those that involve getting licensed non-free software. If it were up to me, I'd never use the stuff.
I mean, the politician who gets to do this, should lose 6 million votes instantly (and be out of the office, impeached or something). Too bad those 6 million suckers will still vote for those corrupt bags. Since we have (almost) a two party system, who would we vote for instead. Let's see what the opposition have to say on this issue:
Ed Vaizey, the Shadow Arts Minister, said: "David Cameron called on the internet providers to address this issue last summer. The credibility of the Government's latest threat is undermined by the fact that ministers have spent so many years dithering on whether to legislate." (For non-British readers -- a shadow minister is an opposition minister corresponding to the government minister).
So what do we have here? As with much of British politics -- and American politics, as far as I can see -- if you don't like it, vote for the other lot, except they'd do the same thing, faster.
A graphic designer knows all about fonts and colour and layout, and could design you a beautiful logo, or ad, or book layout. But they won't know about usability, accessibility, browser independence, standards compliance, performance. This is how people end up with sites where every page is an image (or worse, a chopped up image, reassembled in a table).
A typical IT geek knows about code and protocols, probably knows a well designed web site when he sees one, but often doesn't have the inclination to design something new and visually beautiful. I used to be pretty good at art and design at school, but now I class myself in this group -- if I pick two colours for a page, they'll either look hideous together, or conventional and dull.
WHEREAS - a Web design geek doesn't necessarily understand the subtleties of protocols, nor necessarily have the best programming skills. But they'll know HTML and CSS inside out, and they'll have a passion for all those important webby things the graphic designer would neglect. They'll be full of attractive layout ideas, but will stay within the bounds of what CSS can do efficiently.
You can still be involved. If there's dynamic content, you pick the CMS, you code up any new logic that's needed (learned RoR yet? Now's an opportunity!). Work with your Web design geek to agree on div classes they can write their CSS around.
Last night I showed my wife the beauty of Apple TV - she thought the Movie trailers were a really cool feature.
Then she asked "why can't we download these movies right now"?
The movie and music industries need to realize that restricting content only shrinks the market for your products. With every instance of artificial restrictions, I can easily name many situations where the distributor of that content lost a potential sale:
Movies released to theaters - OLD model good for teens, not good for parents with young kids, a home theater and high speed internet. I would love to see new releases, but we can't really get to the theater (and we hate going there anyway). Why not let me "rent" the movie at my house? (I have digital cable with on-demand movies, but the list of movies is not current with new releases.) The practice of staging release times (in general, theatre, then aeroplanes, then rental, then buy-to-own media) is pretty well established, and I'm pretty sure the justification is that it maximises profits. At each stage in the chain, the later release would take away sales from the earlier one, if they'd come out at the same time, and not vice versa. e.g. People watch a movie in the theatre (because they're keen to see it and there's no other way), then later buy the DVD. With a simultaneous release, they'd just buy the DVD and stop there. I'm sure the studios are bright enough to stop this as soon as it becomes profitable to do so.
So the answer to your wife is -- 'because they think they can make more money by making us wait'.
DVD region coding is a slightly different thing, in that it's about distributors setting prices based on specific markets, and being able to stagger publicity campaigns (to spread spending over time, and to utilise resources that can't be duplicated, like actors for personal appearances and interviews). For a while it looked as if DVD region encoding was dead in the water, since it felt as if everyone (in Europe at least) had a hacked player -- but now that DVD is mainstream, the vast majority of consumers play the game -- while those who care and can be bothered (I like importing Japanese DVDs), can work around it and not get hurt. Actually it's worked out quite well.
I would have to say that that is just what they wanted the EU to think. It's probably a good 9 years since I've had cause to look at hex dumps of Office files, but at that time it was fairly obvious that the file format was 'copy the chunk of main memory containing the document to disk', combined with whatever hacks were necessary to make that work.
Who knows, a judge may find that you were criminally negligent by providing an open AP that was used in some crime. There's no good reason to take that risk. Setting aside the legal responsibilities for a moment, why would you even want to take the chance of being caught up in an investigation involving your unsecured AP? That's just asking for trouble. You wouldn't leave a loaded gun lying around for anyone to use or a running car unattended for anyone to drive off with, so why would you leave an access point unprotected? An open AP is not a gun though, is it? I'm not sure it's facetious to say that I leave my rubbish bin outside on the street unsecured all the time. If someone stole it and hurled it through a shop window, I wouldn't be found criminally negligent for providing an unsecured missile.
I would be more concerned with someone connecting to my network and downloading/hosting child porn, which could get me (1) in serious trouble with the law and (2) an (unjustified) label as a child porn kingpin. It's just irresponsible and foolish to leave an AP open. But you've not countered the argument (and I continue too play devil's advocate here) that an open AP gives you plausible deniability -- except for criminal negligence suggestion, for which I'm not aware of any precedence. Is it criminally negligent to give a stranger a pen, which he then uses to send blackmail letters?
Also, I don't know why in the world you are using WEP when WPA is so common and easy to use. And yes, "securing" (not really) your AP with WEP is just not smart and truly is the worst of both worlds. WPA would still keep your bandwidth available while using a short passphrase. In fact, it's easier than WEP. Why aren't you using it? I have old hardware, I'm too stingy to replace it, and sometimes I want to take my Nintendo DS online.
Just repeating the argument. FWIW my own access point is secured with 64 bit WEP, which I suppose is worst of both worlds. But it keeps my bandwidth available for myself, and uses a short passphrase I can remember.
Why aren't you using WPA-PSK or WPA2-PSK instead of WEP? Using either WPA method is far more secure than WEP (which can be cracked by using a paperclip, the foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum, two buttons from your shirt and a 20-oz bottle of Mountain Dew). I'm not sure my AP supports it -- I'm still on 802.11b and too tight to upgrade.
xbox live works fine without any port forwarding at all. I Googled, and you're right. However XBL uses UPnP if it's there, and I suspect that for most games, at least one Xbox needs to be able to accept() connections from the rest -- whether that's using port forwarding, a direct connection to the net, or whatever. So yeah, a given Xbox can run without any port forwarding, but if everyone did it, it would break (like in the old days when MSN Messenger file transfer worked if one side was NATed, but not if both were).
Any half decent bittorrent client works of a single port and can be setup in minutes.
What is this 'chore' you're on about. I known virtual newbies do it without prompting. 'Minutes' is more than zero effort, and I suspect your 'virtual newbies' are a lot smarter than you're letting on. If UPnP is available, you can be up and running with Azureus without even knowing what an IP address is. Without UPnP, you need to understand the concept of an IP address, NAT, ports and port forwarding. Then you need to find out what particular port your application needs, then you have to work out your particular router's admin interface. My mum can't even work iTunes; you expect her to do this?
On the whole, people love not having to think. UPnP lets them do that. Turning off UPnP makes them have to think twice -- once about the security risks they're avoiding, once again about how to manually achieve the stuff UPnP was doing for them automatically.
Security vulnerabilities aside, open access points are a legal nightmare waiting to happen (child pornography, phishers, DDoS attacks, intrusion, etc.) You've either missed the recent debate, or missed its point. The argument goes:
- If someone uses your open access point for nefarious means, you have a defence -- "But anyone could have done that". - If someone uses your 'secured' access point for nefarious means, your defence requires a jury to understand the ease with which (say) WEP can be cracked.
And the likelihood of spammers, DDoSers, phishers etc. using your WiFi connection rather than their massive botnet is negligible.
Just repeating the argument. FWIW my own access point is secured with 64 bit WEP, which I suppose is worst of both worlds. But it keeps my bandwidth available for myself, and uses a short passphrase I can remember.
The portforwarding rule attack was given as an example as this is probably one of the things that cannot be used right away by script kiddies and it is sufficient enough to prove a point.
The fact that ports can be forwarded to a given host is not the real point of this article. More serious would be someone resetting the admin password, allowing the attacker to do things like set the DHCP-assigned primary DNS server to a malicious one, just as an example. Given how often phishing attacks succeed, this seems like a legitimate threat. Notice that in this case the clients could be as hardened as can be, and they would still (unless a static DNS was manually entered) use the DNS server provided by the compromised router. Hmm, but UPnP is special, in that it does quite serious things at the behest of unauthenticated requests, by design. Let's repeat that -- this isn't a 'bug' on the routers. UPnP is/designed/ to forward ports when it gets a request from inside the network, no questions asked.
Whereas, you do need at least a password (or a more esoteric vulnerability than UPnP; one that won't be as homogenous across various brands of router) to actually compromise the router in ways such as you describe.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that this is a necessity for Japanese text input, whereas we were able to manage without it for English text, for a while (but don't make me go back, please!)
Japanese text entry in Windows is similar, at least from a qwerty keyboard. You type the roman letters corresponding to the sound you want, then you hit space to cycle through kana and kanji that match the sound.
Actually, Korean script is really cool. Each fixed-width one-syllable symbol contains alphabetic elements that tell you how it sounds. I really recommend reading up on it.
The word "cult" is certainly pejorative. I'm not sure it should be promoted to "insulting".
You're surprised when something is cheaper in Thailand than it is in Britain?
The thing is, arcade games were not designed with home gaming in mind. If you love arcade games, then you can see past this (I do -- I have a JAMMA cabinet in my house).
This is why home ports of arcade games usually have extra elements bolted on. For example, something like Soul Calibur in the arcade has one game mode -- play until you die, see your score.
After all, its job is to take some money from you, give you a quick fix, then get rid of you. You might play a few more times. Most arcade games don't try and lure you in for a whole afternoon (arcade-dwelling otaku notwithstanding).
The console port has unlockable characters, story mode, challenge mode, time attack, etc. etc., to give it longevity and replayability.
My partner and I have probably spent more time cooperating on single player games, than competing on two player games.
Classic point'n'click adventures like Monkey Island, Sam and Max Hit The Road and Day of the Tentacle, for example. We also played a lot of text adventures (Google "Interactive Fiction" and "Curses" for a fantastic one).
More recently we played the new Telltale Games episodes of Sam & Max on the PC, rigged up to a TV almost as you described. I got some joypad-to-mouse software, and we sat on the sofa playing together -- taking it in turns to take control. They're not quite as good as the classic original, but they're entertaining enough.
We played a lot of two player puzzle games on the original Playstation -- Bust a Move for a while, then when we discovered it, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. The former is widely available, including on the PC and in MAME as Puzzle Bobble. The latter came out recently on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN. I think there's a Steam release in the works.
You can get Lego Star Wars for PC.
The publishing industry (think newspapers and wide format coffee-table books) applies the principle of "wide = hard to read" by using columns.
As a user you can work around it by narrowing your browser window. Incidentally, my first GUI web browser, NCSA Mosaic on SunOS, defaulted to a portrait shaped window taking about 25% of the screen area.
As a web developer, you can apply it by narrowing the text area (many Wordpress templates do this, for example).
It would be pretty sweet to have a browser that could reflow a page into columns regardless of the original format (and I don't mean just by replacing the stylesheet).
The Linux coding style guide contains wisdom on this: "Functions should be short and sweet, and do just one thing. They should fit on one or two screenfuls of text (the ISO/ANSI screen size is 80x24, as we all know), and do one thing and do that well." And something similar goes for width: "Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program." I must admit to often failing to live up to those ideals, but that doesn't mean they're good aims to have in mind.
To get a good number of peers, access to these BT clouds are anonymous. If it's anonymous, then you can encrypt point-to-point, but trackers still have to publish the IP addresses of peers, and you don't know whether a given anonymous peer is bad guy (or a good guy, depending who's side you're on).
Or to put it another way: would you join a torrent if the only way to find out its filename, was non-anonymous?
My guess is that the rape-and-kiddie stuff mentioned in the original article is shared by very secretive, closed groups. There are many techniques to covertly share data within such a closed group. Assuming they're being careful enough, and don't get careless, it's going to take traditional policing techniques to catch them.
I'm curious. What do you use your optical drive for? I rip CDs when I buy them. I install from CD on the very few occasions software comes on CD (increasingly rare). I backup to DVD-R from time to time.
But these are all infrequent jobs that can be done on a home machine, or with an external drive. No sense taking the drive everywhere just for these jobs.
Exactly.
I normally travel with my work's laptop, and keep a diary (alright, a blog). When I traveled to a less 'secure' part of the world, I took a Palm Pilot instead. Since text input was so laborious, I ended up with much terser diary entries, which I now regret.
Yes, you can buy a keyboard for a Palm. Having a portable device with the keyboard included is more attractive to me.
No, stay with me. I don't believe in hocus pocus.
I once did a teaching course, as I was teaching basic IT skills in an evening class. One of my fellow students was teaching astrology (I was rather glad to hear that it wasn't subsidised in the same way as the IT classes were). So I got to learn a little bit about it.
He was completely dismissive of magazine horoscopes, and said that a proper horoscope involved far more detailed plotting based on the exact date, and a dialogue between the astrologer and the client. It soon became apparent to me that the star stuff was pretty much just a starting off point for some self-examination, coached by the consultant. You can make the same argument for tarot -- the cards you get are arbitrary, and their meanings are deliberately ambiguous, meaning you can use them to kick off some rather productive brainstorming.
If it's an article you're moderating, what happens to points when an article is updated? I might give negative mod points to an article today, only for someone to update it to an incredible standard tomorrow. The safest thing to do is to discard all prior moderations, every time there's an update. Yet that's throwing away information capital.
I guess a "moderation" could be attached to a given revision of an article, with the points divided among updates, pro-rata per word visible in that revision. Fiddly.
A while ago a friend of mine said to me "one thing I don't get about this Free Software thing is, how do the programmers make a living?"
Although there are plenty of answers you can give that demonstrate how people can produce Free software as part of a paid job, my answer to him was that the GNU people don't consider the question in scope. RMS codes for pleasure, and as someone to whom coding comes easily, he doesn't consider software development to be such a super-duper skill that people should command vast salaries for it.
The answer to Pajitnov would be similar. The viability of your business model is not something Free software is interested in.
As a programmer myself, the benefits of using Free software far outweigh the benefits of producing non-free software. Among the most frustrating parts of my job, are those that involve getting licensed non-free software. If it were up to me, I'd never use the stuff.
So what do we have here? As with much of British politics -- and American politics, as far as I can see -- if you don't like it, vote for the other lot, except they'd do the same thing, faster.
... you need a web design geek.
A graphic designer knows all about fonts and colour and layout, and could design you a beautiful logo, or ad, or book layout. But they won't know about usability, accessibility, browser independence, standards compliance, performance. This is how people end up with sites where every page is an image (or worse, a chopped up image, reassembled in a table).
A typical IT geek knows about code and protocols, probably knows a well designed web site when he sees one, but often doesn't have the inclination to design something new and visually beautiful. I used to be pretty good at art and design at school, but now I class myself in this group -- if I pick two colours for a page, they'll either look hideous together, or conventional and dull.
WHEREAS - a Web design geek doesn't necessarily understand the subtleties of protocols, nor necessarily have the best programming skills. But they'll know HTML and CSS inside out, and they'll have a passion for all those important webby things the graphic designer would neglect. They'll be full of attractive layout ideas, but will stay within the bounds of what CSS can do efficiently.
You can still be involved. If there's dynamic content, you pick the CMS, you code up any new logic that's needed (learned RoR yet? Now's an opportunity!). Work with your Web design geek to agree on div classes they can write their CSS around.
Then she asked "why can't we download these movies right now"?
The movie and music industries need to realize that restricting content only shrinks the market for your products. With every instance of artificial restrictions, I can easily name many situations where the distributor of that content lost a potential sale:
Movies released to theaters - OLD model good for teens, not good for parents with young kids, a home theater and high speed internet. I would love to see new releases, but we can't really get to the theater (and we hate going there anyway). Why not let me "rent" the movie at my house? (I have digital cable with on-demand movies, but the list of movies is not current with new releases.) The practice of staging release times (in general, theatre, then aeroplanes, then rental, then buy-to-own media) is pretty well established, and I'm pretty sure the justification is that it maximises profits. At each stage in the chain, the later release would take away sales from the earlier one, if they'd come out at the same time, and not vice versa. e.g. People watch a movie in the theatre (because they're keen to see it and there's no other way), then later buy the DVD. With a simultaneous release, they'd just buy the DVD and stop there. I'm sure the studios are bright enough to stop this as soon as it becomes profitable to do so.
So the answer to your wife is -- 'because they think they can make more money by making us wait'.
DVD region coding is a slightly different thing, in that it's about distributors setting prices based on specific markets, and being able to stagger publicity campaigns (to spread spending over time, and to utilise resources that can't be duplicated, like actors for personal appearances and interviews). For a while it looked as if DVD region encoding was dead in the water, since it felt as if everyone (in Europe at least) had a hacked player -- but now that DVD is mainstream, the vast majority of consumers play the game -- while those who care and can be bothered (I like importing Japanese DVDs), can work around it and not get hurt. Actually it's worked out quite well.
Do you think any of those shows are really enhanced by the difference between SD and HD? Let alone 33 megapixels...
Why aren't you using WPA-PSK or WPA2-PSK instead of WEP? Using either WPA method is far more secure than WEP (which can be cracked by using a paperclip, the foil wrapper from a stick of chewing gum, two buttons from your shirt and a 20-oz bottle of Mountain Dew). I'm not sure my AP supports it -- I'm still on 802.11b and too tight to upgrade.
What is this 'chore' you're on about. I known virtual newbies do it without prompting. 'Minutes' is more than zero effort, and I suspect your 'virtual newbies' are a lot smarter than you're letting on. If UPnP is available, you can be up and running with Azureus without even knowing what an IP address is. Without UPnP, you need to understand the concept of an IP address, NAT, ports and port forwarding. Then you need to find out what particular port your application needs, then you have to work out your particular router's admin interface. My mum can't even work iTunes; you expect her to do this?
On the whole, people love not having to think. UPnP lets them do that. Turning off UPnP makes them have to think twice -- once about the security risks they're avoiding, once again about how to manually achieve the stuff UPnP was doing for them automatically.
- If someone uses your open access point for nefarious means, you have a defence -- "But anyone could have done that".
- If someone uses your 'secured' access point for nefarious means, your defence requires a jury to understand the ease with which (say) WEP can be cracked.
And the likelihood of spammers, DDoSers, phishers etc. using your WiFi connection rather than their massive botnet is negligible.
Just repeating the argument. FWIW my own access point is secured with 64 bit WEP, which I suppose is worst of both worlds. But it keeps my bandwidth available for myself, and uses a short passphrase I can remember.
Whereas, you do need at least a password (or a more esoteric vulnerability than UPnP; one that won't be as homogenous across various brands of router) to actually compromise the router in ways such as you describe.