having an over priced repairman come out and replace your AC starter capacitor because its illegal to sell them locally to someone without an electrical license...
We would love it too if people could not set up equipment and get "trained" to get the internet without consulting us at high prices. But it's no longer the nineties, and we can only dream:)
Ignoring the technology incompatibilities between v6 and v4 for a second, and just taking connectivity at heart, let's examine the effect of "isolation": your community runs out of telephone numbers for its area code. Your state creates a new area code. NEW numbers are given out to new owners; all old phone line owners remain unaffected and able to reach old phone lines and continue with business as usual with their other giant companies also using the old phone lines
With IPv6, all new owners can talk to the old owners. The old ones already have websites that they can reach. Top sites like youtube, google, facebook and maybe even windows update with reserved IPv4 address isn't just going to magically lose it. They'll shuffle less important services to IPv6 the day they are forced to exceed their IPv4 allocation.
Nobody is forced to "switch" to IPv6 entirely. They create DNS subdomains like the little known ipv6.google.com (if it works for you, then you have ipv6, by the way.) In the US, the government forced digital / HDTV adoption last year, but old and new channels coexist in your digital-ready cable boxes through the simple use of different channel numbers. I have no idea how many years it will take for them to force the non-HDTV channel numbers off, but I suspect that this will take as many decades as it took to implement HDTV and force it on us.
The only people having reachability problems like you mentioned will be those in NEW address blocks from poorly developed countries. Large companies needing more IP's may have issues, but nothing their IT teams can't fix with more 10.x.x.x addresses (2^24 addresses for internal company addressing "oughta be enough for [er, OK, most companies]") Consider the address space sizes. Though IPv4 is only 16 bits smaller than the MAC address space, which is small compared to the IPv6 total of 128 bits, nobody I have every heard is saying that billions of computers out there are going to run out of MAC addresses to give out soon. Funny because wireless devices and network devices tend to have multiple macs a piece.
Thanks! I worded my original post around little "hardware support" meaning hardware shops creating touchpad peripherals for us to buy.
The plus side is that the thread is a wealth of info on touchscreens, kernels and my intended topics of touchpad hardware shopping:) Thanks also to everyone who contributed
But the truth of the matter is that Linux on the Desktop will never become popular [...]
Just like "Unix on the desktop" didn't become mainstream? See MacOS X
and it's beyond their abilities to switch to a new one
See MacOS X's switch campaign some years back.
The main difference is that Apple had several more decades of hardware, software and market EXP than Canonical, and a ton more cash.
I'm not betting the house on something coming in the next five years, nor Ubuntu being that miracle. I'm just keeping the mind open ready a Linux distro so notable that it will be sold at your local Walmart store near the shelf with those bargain Antivirus bundles we've all seen:)
Other than specialty devices, hardware support is not even on the map. I believe W7 already supports multitouch, joining the mac bandwagon. So, how long until non-laptops, non-cellphones start shipping with that, so that we can see an explosion in programmer response and API's?
Oh, and while we wait, it'd be good to find where I can buy a USB pad currently to add multi-touch support for a Windows desktop. Thanks
I respecfully disagree: Nobody is going to complain because 1) Parked domains are useless to anyone other than a potential buyer, who has no rights to the site at all 2) Addons are annoying to apply AND keep updated if you have more than one username on your PC, one operating system, and one browser.
The "neutrality" stance has already been proven weak: Google already warns us about a few malware sites, and they're the number one internet site according to Netcraft for the US.
Sad that this malware problem is still not going to be enough to outlaw or reduce parked domains. Heck, network solutions doesn't even get a slap in the wrist for failing to check their modules.
Also, governments hate spending money on laws to regulate the internet... how about we let the current de-facto rulers of the internet do it: Search engines and browsers should do even more to stop malware domains from ever appearing in results or being reachable?
That would have been a hit to the business, but would have earned the respect from companies AND governments around the world that want that level of trust.
The equation is unevenly weighted: a) "Respect" is nothing tangible to shareholders, and can be easily lost by failings later on b) "Business" loss in one whole country means big revenue loss, and can't be easily gained. Losing it by earning temporary "respect" is a losing proposition.
This will be pretty interesting in shaping the expansion of future multinational companies: how long until every country decides that your "private" T1 connecting New York to Tokyo needs to pass through traffic sniffing tools so that both countries are sure nobody is using private corporations for terrorist activities? Far fetched? AlQaida is a private corporation on its own way. You just need some sleeper cells properly situated at both ends of the wire inside a fortune 500 company, especially an outsource friendly one. Then, even if Intel has no idea of the crimes being aided by their "private" network, these "super-private" interests can be allowed to harm both countries.
That said, I do not agree with government spying, but see that even as cellphone communications are important to control, eventually government "greed" will stop at nothing for the sake of national security.
"How about writing better software. Stuff that doesn't require 24 cores and 64GB of RAM?"
I for one wish we would reach hard limits like the Planck barrier TODAY. Think of the benefits of other things lacking useful increase these days: like cheap modems stuck at 56K speeds, floppy drives for flashing those old corporate motherboards, ball mouse resolutions, sound card voice count, and CD/DVD recording units.
Prices fall like bricks: $20 instead of a hundred per unit, which is elusive on the CPU market today. Advantages of technology limited by physics? People learn to cope or get other optimizations, or develop alternatives like DSL, USB sticks able to store more than 8GB DVD disks, high precision/dust-proof laser mice, and finally our multi-threaded programming and our multi-core environments [curiously already made at nearly fixed speeds of 3.0 GHZ since 2006, mind you.]
CPU-wise, programmers can't handle parallel computing as a majority. Limits and company forces would stabilize them to a level playing field where "can't" makes you lose, and the best ideas are the ones that add value per each fixed clock cycle.
Website owners, forum administrator, people you meet on the internet.. Those who know your email but don't really know your real identity.
Yet another reason to hide your email on forums' public profiles.
If FB fails to change anything, then more power to me for avoiding it. I can't believe this past two years: google improved forum indexing to the point that too much crap obscures legit searches... spammers have also gotten real good at stealing, curating my personal data and cloning it in a way to contribute to the above "crapflood." Phone books cannot even dream of the power of the spammers for aggregating data to piece together exactly who I am and who I work for and with, even if I have no linkedIn account --think cogmap and pipl.com and so on.
I've slowly been obfuscating inactive web accounts before even MORE data miners get them free. At least ten years ago you had to pay to find out as much.
...and the award for longest Slashdot post EVAR goes to you.
"POST"? I think that... THING has evolved since your observation! It's like I walked into a whole community: It's talking to itself now. Maybe GP has created SKYNET here and it just got lonely.
I'm going to just close my browser tab now... maybe shut down this PC and have my last walk before the terminators are loosed.
However a really good one is busy improving their systems to make them run faster/better and more efficient as well implementing new features to help the company grow, and not wasting their time fixing problems that really don't need to happen.
Working as an admin myself, I can tell this is just a manager's dream. The way IT runs, we are plumbers... nobody expects you mucking around in their production sinks unless something is leaking. Matter of fact, we are staffed in ratios such that you never have much time to improve efficiency. If you have any time at all, management will either promote you to train others AND do admin stuff, or they will stick more of their own projects under your belt.
When you give your all as a great admin, you're shunned for unduly raising standards for lazy admins. Managers and coworkers remind you to "keep problems buried to stay employed re-fixing them," and even clients say that "IT at this company is useless and already too slow, so why do you need to waste 3 hours countering the next meltdown when you said one lesser fix can have our system patched up to run in 1?"
So we all, or most, want to do good and clean things up, like any "great" doctor would. But there are doctors that love it when they can avoid operating and instead enslave you under certain medicines you for life, as approved by them while their bills get paid.
What they should have done was have an OS module which returns the adds, so the app didn't need internet access.
Yes, they should have... but "Hindsight is 20/20" applies here: Android is 2 years old, so it couldn't be held accountable, until Apple came out with the idea as a major OS / phone paradigm and loosed it to the public a couple months ago.
Though I can't answer your question, there's something FF lovers can enjoy out of switching, besides the fact that Opera wasn't cheese-holed enough to be "newsworthy" for their piece.
The Opera Private mode does NOT kill your current tab session like Firefox does. A single tab opens and any newly-linked tabs appear to be protected as well. You can, say, take your lunch and easily copy credit card details from gmail's "public" browsing session into a private tab containing amazon.com's credit card verification.
Aren't we tired of hearing of simple-sounding solutions that appear unattainable?
See recent/. stories stating our computer-level "private browsing" of the web is everything except "private." One problem I already see with any data wipe is that it takes a lot of time, like the article mentioned for Eraser.
The article had too few specifics, so let's sit on the what-if armchair for a bit: short of a strong explosion, the FBI could just not power the drive before removing the circuit board and replacing with one lacking wipe logic.
I thought the reason paparazzi's can intercept celebrities so well right before plane flights was because all plane boarding lists are public or at least thinly veiled to anyone but The Press (TM.) "Civil [aka public] servants" such as Ted Stevens likely do not bother to use aliases for an otherwise routine flight. Especially since congress or the US senate has so many holidays in which plane trips can be booked [quick research didn't yield a citation but bills pass slowly in part thanks to lots of days when they do not meet.]
That the press is much more experienced at digging up clues and yet is having a hard time seems doubtful. Maybe private flights or small planes don't need to publicize passenger lists to the FCC. (?)
We either get Big Corporate or Big Government deciding on what, when, how, and how fast
Hmmm... At least individual "Big Corporate" members have a real chance of
being remade for the better if they went bankrupt
dying out if the public no longer agrees with them
Starting with our failed friend "nothing to see here, move along..." MS Antitrust breakup, I've seen that the US's Big Government takes a 3rd option: being acquired/bought by high bidding companies interested in their services.
Firefox updates require the most current full installer to be run, and most corporate users have no access rights for that. I am surprised that nobody on the dev forum mentioned this issue; they all assume a home machine with full admin right accounts is the only environment for Mozilla Firefox deployment. In Windows, updates only work when the binary protected by System Folder rights negotiates an independent daemon that triggers elevated-privilege installs in the background, like you mention. Firefox does not use this option. Firefox also does not set up the main browser engine under the User-writable profile; Chrome doing this means more seamlessness than Mozilla's current design choice.
I'm mentioning all that because geeks and on the FF forum seem oblivious to this simple and pervasive problem: Non-admin rights usually fail to permit installs and updates.. Firefox's shameful reality is that since Version 2.0 or earlier, the default is for the software to update everything automatically. Any failures seen by all of us are caused by rights problems.
I have built windows environments for kids and mom/pop users. Just like corporations, I give them a "Limited User" account to keep their machine secured. They cannot install system-wide software without my Admin password. The result is that firefox just pops up notifications stating that an update is available but cannot be installed. That's all fine on single user computers, and FF being the grassroots software, geeks tend to install on HOME machines or machines where users have special rights. The result is that we have a reality distortion field on what it means to have updates be automatic.
Remember how people have been clamoring for Mozilla to add Group policy and Windows-server distribution / control to Firefox. That's because nobody wants manually log in as admin on hundreds of machines and initiate a manual install.
There's probably an excellent Firefox plugin to render this page's color scheme more bearable.
Halfway through this sentence I realized someone will now implement a nice little extension such that I never again have to answer these recaptchas. Pretty sure they would break this extension shortly with cunning, though. Anyway, at 30% accuracy now, it's easier to <F5> or click refresh 3 or 4 times than to get my hands off the mouse to type 2 word captchas that sometimes are eye-straining.
You don't have to reply here if you don't want to lose karma with such guilty-pleasure extension, brave spammers^Wcoders!:) I'll be googling the currently "virgin" string "captcha this fox" to find your work posted wherever.
Setting their browser to block ads by default would not hurt their cash cows (MS Office and MS Windows) but would certainly hurt their ad revenue... and other people's ad revenue as well... others like Google.
As a contrast, Safari/Apple Inc. is less involved with Ad-revenue, so they allow blocking of tracking components that MS AD department is too big to "ignore." Because there was no antitrust breakup of Microsoft after all the 1990's fuss, we see how now we all suffer from one more of these broken, corporation-centric design decisions.
The breakup would have caused "Microsoft/OS Inc" to be the logical buyer to all non-software assets, and "Microsoft/Software Dev Inc" to be [supposedly more] immune to the other's whims.
The only redeeming point on Verizon's side will be if besides slapping these lazy users on their wrists AFTER years have passed, they PRE-SET default passwords in the same serial-number conscious ways and update all their new-client literature to reflect that.
Is this even the same slashdot that advised against writing "viruses" that self-destroy after removing real viruses and closing critical vulnerabilities on similarly "lazy" John Does? Our reasoning back then was that nobody can intrude with computers and users without permission. It's not like the OP was a complete non-technical idiot that everyone here makes him out to be. He made the choice to ignore advise and knew full well the consecuences, just like all those businesses out there choose unpatched pirated Operating Systems over the more expensive alternatives.
The world spins madly, indeed. I see a swarm of furious comments yelling at the OP. Verizon does not even own the router anymore, and even though this is benefitial to all, Verizon has no right to come in and do it. The OP is allowed to sue for circumvention/new millenium digial intrusion grounds if he feels like it. A note and disconnection meassures should have been in place instead of forceful hand-holding.
Slashdot Mirror
having an over priced repairman come out and replace your AC starter capacitor because its illegal to sell them locally to someone without an electrical license ...
We would love it too if people could not set up equipment and get "trained" to get the internet without consulting us at high prices. But it's no longer the nineties, and we can only dream :)
Ignoring the technology incompatibilities between v6 and v4 for a second, and just taking connectivity at heart, let's examine the effect of "isolation": your community runs out of telephone numbers for its area code. Your state creates a new area code. NEW numbers are given out to new owners; all old phone line owners remain unaffected and able to reach old phone lines and continue with business as usual with their other giant companies also using the old phone lines
With IPv6, all new owners can talk to the old owners. The old ones already have websites that they can reach. Top sites like youtube, google, facebook and maybe even windows update with reserved IPv4 address isn't just going to magically lose it. They'll shuffle less important services to IPv6 the day they are forced to exceed their IPv4 allocation.
Nobody is forced to "switch" to IPv6 entirely. They create DNS subdomains like the little known ipv6.google.com (if it works for you, then you have ipv6, by the way.) In the US, the government forced digital / HDTV adoption last year, but old and new channels coexist in your digital-ready cable boxes through the simple use of different channel numbers. I have no idea how many years it will take for them to force the non-HDTV channel numbers off, but I suspect that this will take as many decades as it took to implement HDTV and force it on us.
The only people having reachability problems like you mentioned will be those in NEW address blocks from poorly developed countries. Large companies needing more IP's may have issues, but nothing their IT teams can't fix with more 10.x.x.x addresses (2^24 addresses for internal company addressing "oughta be enough for [er, OK, most companies]") Consider the address space sizes. Though IPv4 is only 16 bits smaller than the MAC address space, which is small compared to the IPv6 total of 128 bits, nobody I have every heard is saying that billions of computers out there are going to run out of MAC addresses to give out soon. Funny because wireless devices and network devices tend to have multiple macs a piece.
Thanks!
I worded my original post around little "hardware support" meaning hardware shops creating touchpad peripherals for us to buy.
The plus side is that the thread is a wealth of info on touchscreens, kernels and my intended topics of touchpad hardware shopping :)
Thanks also to everyone who contributed
But the truth of the matter is that Linux on the Desktop will never become popular [...]
Just like "Unix on the desktop" didn't become mainstream? See MacOS X
and it's beyond their abilities to switch to a new one
See MacOS X's switch campaign some years back.
The main difference is that Apple had several more decades of hardware, software and market EXP than Canonical, and a ton more cash.
I'm not betting the house on something coming in the next five years, nor Ubuntu being that miracle. I'm just keeping the mind open ready a Linux distro so notable that it will be sold at your local Walmart store near the shelf with those bargain Antivirus bundles we've all seen :)
Other than specialty devices, hardware support is not even on the map.
I believe W7 already supports multitouch, joining the mac bandwagon. So, how long until non-laptops, non-cellphones start shipping with that, so that we can see an explosion in programmer response and API's?
Oh, and while we wait, it'd be good to find where I can buy a USB pad currently to add multi-touch support for a Windows desktop. Thanks
they're the number one internet site according to Netcraft for the US.
Oops... s/Netcraft/ALEXA/
I respecfully disagree: Nobody is going to complain because
1) Parked domains are useless to anyone other than a potential buyer, who has no rights to the site at all
2) Addons are annoying to apply AND keep updated if you have more than one username on your PC, one operating system, and one browser.
The "neutrality" stance has already been proven weak: Google already warns us about a few malware sites, and they're the number one internet site according to Netcraft for the US.
Sad that this malware problem is still not going to be enough to outlaw or reduce parked domains. Heck, network solutions doesn't even get a slap in the wrist for failing to check their modules.
Also, governments hate spending money on laws to regulate the internet... how about we let the current de-facto rulers of the internet do it: Search engines and browsers should do even more to stop malware domains from ever appearing in results or being reachable?
Do you "[worry] about our future as a species" when you discover people pay money for a good meal? If so, why do you view sex differently?
Because by being more "pleasurable" [to use your own words] than a restaurant outing, the law prevents you from doing it in public :-)
Paying for it, publicly or not, is also a crime in most localities.
That would have been a hit to the business, but would have earned the respect from companies AND governments around the world that want that level of trust.
The equation is unevenly weighted:
a) "Respect" is nothing tangible to shareholders, and can be easily lost by failings later on
b) "Business" loss in one whole country means big revenue loss, and can't be easily gained. Losing it by earning temporary "respect" is a losing proposition.
This will be pretty interesting in shaping the expansion of future multinational companies: how long until every country decides that your "private" T1 connecting New York to Tokyo needs to pass through traffic sniffing tools so that both countries are sure nobody is using private corporations for terrorist activities? Far fetched? AlQaida is a private corporation on its own way. You just need some sleeper cells properly situated at both ends of the wire inside a fortune 500 company, especially an outsource friendly one. Then, even if Intel has no idea of the crimes being aided by their "private" network, these "super-private" interests can be allowed to harm both countries.
That said, I do not agree with government spying, but see that even as cellphone communications are important to control, eventually government "greed" will stop at nothing for the sake of national security.
"How about writing better software. Stuff that doesn't require 24 cores and 64GB of RAM?"
I for one wish we would reach hard limits like the Planck barrier TODAY. Think of the benefits of other things lacking useful increase these days: like cheap modems stuck at 56K speeds, floppy drives for flashing those old corporate motherboards, ball mouse resolutions, sound card voice count, and CD/DVD recording units.
Prices fall like bricks: $20 instead of a hundred per unit, which is elusive on the CPU market today. Advantages of technology limited by physics? People learn to cope or get other optimizations, or develop alternatives like DSL, USB sticks able to store more than 8GB DVD disks, high precision/dust-proof laser mice, and finally our multi-threaded programming and our multi-core environments [curiously already made at nearly fixed speeds of 3.0 GHZ since 2006, mind you.]
CPU-wise, programmers can't handle parallel computing as a majority. Limits and company forces would stabilize them to a level playing field where "can't" makes you lose, and the best ideas are the ones that add value per each fixed clock cycle.
Website owners, forum administrator, people you meet on the internet.. Those who know your email but don't really know your real identity.
Yet another reason to hide your email on forums' public profiles.
If FB fails to change anything, then more power to me for avoiding it. I can't believe this past two years: google improved forum indexing to the point that too much crap obscures legit searches ... spammers have also gotten real good at stealing, curating my personal data and cloning it in a way to contribute to the above "crapflood." Phone books cannot even dream of the power of the spammers for aggregating data to piece together exactly who I am and who I work for and with, even if I have no linkedIn account --think cogmap and pipl.com and so on.
I've slowly been obfuscating inactive web accounts before even MORE data miners get them free. At least ten years ago you had to pay to find out as much.
...and the award for longest Slashdot post EVAR goes to you.
"POST"? I think that ... THING has evolved since your observation!
It's like I walked into a whole community: It's talking to itself now. Maybe GP has created SKYNET here and it just got lonely.
I'm going to just close my browser tab now... maybe shut down this PC and have my last walk before the terminators are loosed.
However a really good one is busy improving their systems to make them run faster/better and more efficient as well implementing new features to help the company grow, and not wasting their time fixing problems that really don't need to happen.
Working as an admin myself, I can tell this is just a manager's dream. The way IT runs, we are plumbers... nobody expects you mucking around in their production sinks unless something is leaking. Matter of fact, we are staffed in ratios such that you never have much time to improve efficiency. If you have any time at all, management will either promote you to train others AND do admin stuff, or they will stick more of their own projects under your belt.
When you give your all as a great admin, you're shunned for unduly raising standards for lazy admins. Managers and coworkers remind you to "keep problems buried to stay employed re-fixing them," and even clients say that "IT at this company is useless and already too slow, so why do you need to waste 3 hours countering the next meltdown when you said one lesser fix can have our system patched up to run in 1?"
So we all, or most, want to do good and clean things up, like any "great" doctor would. But there are doctors that love it when they can avoid operating and instead enslave you under certain medicines you for life, as approved by them while their bills get paid.
What they should have done was have an OS module which returns the adds, so the app didn't need internet access.
Yes, they should have... but "Hindsight is 20/20" applies here: Android is 2 years old, so it couldn't be held accountable, until Apple came out with the idea as a major OS / phone paradigm and loosed it to the public a couple months ago.
Though I can't answer your question, there's something FF lovers can enjoy out of switching, besides the fact that Opera wasn't cheese-holed enough to be "newsworthy" for their piece.
The Opera Private mode does NOT kill your current tab session like Firefox does. A single tab opens and any newly-linked tabs appear to be protected as well. You can, say, take your lunch and easily copy credit card details from gmail's "public" browsing session into a private tab containing amazon.com's credit card verification.
Aren't we tired of hearing of simple-sounding solutions that appear unattainable?
See recent /. stories stating our computer-level "private browsing" of the web is everything except "private." One problem I already see with any data wipe is that it takes a lot of time, like the article mentioned for Eraser.
The article had too few specifics, so let's sit on the what-if armchair for a bit: short of a strong explosion, the FBI could just not power the drive before removing the circuit board and replacing with one lacking wipe logic.
I thought the reason paparazzi's can intercept celebrities so well right before plane flights was because all plane boarding lists are public or at least thinly veiled to anyone but The Press (TM.) "Civil [aka public] servants" such as Ted Stevens likely do not bother to use aliases for an otherwise routine flight. Especially since congress or the US senate has so many holidays in which plane trips can be booked [quick research didn't yield a citation but bills pass slowly in part thanks to lots of days when they do not meet.]
That the press is much more experienced at digging up clues and yet is having a hard time seems doubtful. Maybe private flights or small planes don't need to publicize passenger lists to the FCC.
(?)
We either get Big Corporate or Big Government deciding on what, when, how, and how fast
Hmmm... At least individual "Big Corporate" members have a real chance of
Starting with our failed friend "nothing to see here, move along..." MS Antitrust breakup, I've seen that the US's Big Government takes a 3rd option: being acquired/bought by high bidding companies interested in their services.
Firefox updates require the most current full installer to be run, and most corporate users have no access rights for that. I am surprised that nobody on the dev forum mentioned this issue; they all assume a home machine with full admin right accounts is the only environment for Mozilla Firefox deployment. In Windows, updates only work when the binary protected by System Folder rights negotiates an independent daemon that triggers elevated-privilege installs in the background, like you mention. Firefox does not use this option. Firefox also does not set up the main browser engine under the User-writable profile; Chrome doing this means more seamlessness than Mozilla's current design choice.
I'm mentioning all that because geeks and on the FF forum seem oblivious to this simple and pervasive problem:
Non-admin rights usually fail to permit installs and updates.. Firefox's shameful reality is that since Version 2.0 or earlier, the default is for the software to update everything automatically. Any failures seen by all of us are caused by rights problems.
I have built windows environments for kids and mom/pop users. Just like corporations, I give them a "Limited User" account to keep their machine secured. They cannot install system-wide software without my Admin password. The result is that firefox just pops up notifications stating that an update is available but cannot be installed. That's all fine on single user computers, and FF being the grassroots software, geeks tend to install on HOME machines or machines where users have special rights. The result is that we have a reality distortion field on what it means to have updates be automatic.
Remember how people have been clamoring for Mozilla to add Group policy and Windows-server distribution / control to Firefox. That's because nobody wants manually log in as admin on hundreds of machines and initiate a manual install.
From TFS:
There's probably an excellent Firefox plugin to render this page's color scheme more bearable.
Halfway through this sentence I realized someone will now implement a nice little extension such that I never again have to answer these recaptchas. Pretty sure they would break this extension shortly with cunning, though. Anyway, at 30% accuracy now, it's easier to <F5> or click refresh 3 or 4 times than to get my hands off the mouse to type 2 word captchas that sometimes are eye-straining.
You don't have to reply here if you don't want to lose karma with such guilty-pleasure extension, brave spammers^Wcoders! :) I'll be googling the currently "virgin" string "captcha this fox" to find your work posted wherever.
Setting their browser to block ads by default would not hurt their cash cows (MS Office and MS Windows) but would certainly hurt their ad revenue... and other people's ad revenue as well... others like Google.
As a contrast, Safari/Apple Inc. is less involved with Ad-revenue, so they allow blocking of tracking components that MS AD department is too big to "ignore." Because there was no antitrust breakup of Microsoft after all the 1990's fuss, we see how now we all suffer from one more of these broken, corporation-centric design decisions.
The breakup would have caused "Microsoft /OS Inc" to be the logical buyer to all non-software assets, and "Microsoft /Software Dev Inc" to be [supposedly more] immune to the other's whims.
The only redeeming point on Verizon's side will be if besides slapping these lazy users on their wrists AFTER years have passed, they PRE-SET default passwords in the same serial-number conscious ways and update all their new-client literature to reflect that.
Is this even the same slashdot that advised against writing "viruses" that self-destroy after removing real viruses and closing critical vulnerabilities on similarly "lazy" John Does? Our reasoning back then was that nobody can intrude with computers and users without permission. It's not like the OP was a complete non-technical idiot that everyone here makes him out to be. He made the choice to ignore advise and knew full well the consecuences, just like all those businesses out there choose unpatched pirated Operating Systems over the more expensive alternatives.
The world spins madly, indeed. I see a swarm of furious comments yelling at the OP. Verizon does not even own the router anymore, and even though this is benefitial to all, Verizon has no right to come in and do it. The OP is allowed to sue for circumvention/new millenium digial intrusion grounds if he feels like it. A note and disconnection meassures should have been in place instead of forceful hand-holding.