I have a Mitsubishi HC4000U and a 120" screen. After trying a couple of rather expensive but unexpectedly lousy screens from a local home theater store, I made one myself using screen material I got on eBay. For about four hundred bucks in tools and materials it turned out better than a three-thousand-dollar screen from HTX.
The setup works great with xbox 360 and PS3. Some people get dizzy playing Battlefield II or GTA 4, especially after a cigar or a couple of martinis:) The way to solve this problem is to lay off the booze and move a little farther away from the screen. From the very start you need to carefully choose the size of the screen that's appropriate for your projector and the size of your theater room.
That said I always find it amusing when people whine or whatever over something provided to them FOR FREE. Well, you can get hemorrhoids for free. Just because something is free, it doesn't mean it has to be a pain in the ass. SourceForge offers a good service, but they have their share of annoying problems. Some of the problems should be simple to address.
For the past year I've been struggling with Scali Manage - a cluster management tool that came with our two new HPC SLES clusters from HP. Essentially, Scali is an attempt to create a parasite OS on top of Linux. Scali does offer a couple of useful features, but nothing that can't be done by hand almost as easily and nothing that's worth all the additional problems it creates. The moral of the story is: if there are idiots willing to pay big bucks for useless software, there always will be those ready to take the money.
It's all in the article, just scroll down to small sabotage and pilfering:-) I think IT folks occupy a new position in this struggle. It's a unique combination of proletariat-like attitude and management-like control over the manufacturing process. IT guys also know where all the bones are buried and they have a cron job that check all the closets for skeletons every Sunday at 23:59. So the local bourgeoisie tend to be very careful when talking to me...
I will have to disagree with you. We all too often hear all the stupid shit people say about politics and dismiss it as a personal opinion. In reality, however, most of what people believe about politics is the result of insufficient information and not enough time and education to process what little is known to them.
If someone has an opinion derived from ignorance and stupidity, then it's not really an opinion, it's just ignorance and stupidity. So what make IT folks different? Three things: good education, easy access to current information, and time to process it.
Few other professions combine all three of these qualities in such generous proportions. Engineers certainly have education and access to information, but they have no time. Factory workers may have the education, but no easy access to information and, again, no time. Management has none of these things - unless someone calls a telecon.
So, yes, I think IT people tend to be much better informed and better understand the issues than people in most other professions. I am a senior sysadmin and I have time to follow the news and I have the background and time to properly digest this information. When i form an opinion about a political candidate, it is usually based on more than a fifteen-minute CNN special.
Reading Lord's comments I couldn't help the feeling that I was listening to a service delivery manager from one of those outsourcing companies like CSC or Unisys. All that stuff about "we know money doesn't create loyalty" and "we leverage all the expertise out there" sounds painfully familiar. And after they run out of BS and the fog of confusion finally clears, you realize that all of your Unix servers are supported by two guys in Hyderabad, who share one Solaris 2.6 certificate and know less about Unix than my cat. The worst thing USAF can do is take advice from the outsourcing industry.
A good pay is how your employer shows you that your work and your experience are appreciated. And knowing that you are appreciated is what makes you a happy employee. And happy employees tend to be loyal to their employers. So, yes, money does create loyalty. Lord says that "in many cases we do offer compensation competitive with the commercial sector". While this may be true, working for the USAF as a civilian contractor is not like working in the commercial sector. There's a whole different level of crap that you need to put up with. So, if the USAF is serious about this Cyber Command business, they need to do a whole lot better than just salaries that are "competitive... in many cases". When hiring, don't go for the quantity - you are not planning a cyber-invasion of China - but go for quality instead.
Speaking of quality, while Lord understands that they "need to look beyond what we've traditionally recruited", he is still under the impression that the USAF can "bring them in from a general practitioner level and take them to expert level in reasonable time". Of course, this depends on their definition of "reasonable time", but somehow I don't think they mean 10-20 years. They are probably talking about a couple of years at most. I remember reading a resume of a guy claiming to have "reached the Unix guru level". I just had to bring him in for an interview: I wanted to see what a Unix guru looked like. Apparently, some time in the past ten years the minimum guru requirements have been significantly lowered.
Programming and system administration are not those fields where you can turn a rookie into an expert in reasonable time. The time required will be most unreasonable. For example, a good sysadmin is not someone with encyclopedic knowledge of "man" files, but someone with a big database in his head of stuff that broke down and how it was fixed. Theoretical knowledge is important - comp-sci degrees, training, certificates, etc. - but what really matters is experience - years and years of it. So hire the most experienced personnel you can afford and hold on to them as if the security of your country depended on it. Guys who are good, know they are good, so you need good ego-stroking skills to keep them around. Hint: pinning medals to their chests is not going to help, but a fatter paycheck might. So the approach along the lines of "we'll take what they have to offer, and in turn they might be surprised by what they get back" is not going to work. The people USAF needs are of that certain age where they don't like and can ill afford surprises.
"The U.S. military complies with all applicable domestic and international laws, and that will certainly apply equally within cyberspace..." And that's what everyone is afraid of. But, hey, as long as they wear uniforms while hacking networks, they should be in the clear as far as the Geneva conventions are concerned.
I still think the main problem during boarding is the same as at the airports in general: lack of direction. So at the entrances you have a couple of flight attendants who point people in the general direction of whatever class seats they've got. Why stop there? There are plenty of traffic management spots along the isle from where a flight attendant can direct the passengers to their seats. Instead, flight attendants tend to congregate at the ends of the isle, from where they calmly observe the chaos.
Oversize carry-on needs to be better screened at the baggage check-in and at the security gate. Rules for accepted carry-on sizes and weights, as well as their contents, change frequently and you can't expect an occasional traveler to know the rules by heart.
I would guess the biggest factor contributing to boarding delays is stress. By the time you get through all the chaos of the airport to the terminal, your brain is not exactly functioning at its peak efficiency. Some airports are better (PHL) some are worse (LAX), but they all offer an experience that's far too stressful. And then they tell you to arrive two hours ahead of your flight, so you have plenty of time to get pissed off.
And then there is the matter of delays. If I was on time to get on the plane but boarding was delayed; and if at that particular moment I feel like stuffing my face with a greasy whopper, then so it will be. Sure, their plane will be a few minutes late because of me, but, hey, they started it. I think that as long as airlines cannot guarantee timely departures and arrivals, they cannot demand the same of their passengers.
Actually, there are plenty of spaces in the isles designed for "traffic management", such as near restrooms and emergency exits. But even if a flight attendant has to block a few seats, she can always move when the passengers arrive and it's a small price to pay for getting the rest of the passengers seated quickly. On the other hand, cramming fewer seats into airliners should accomplish the same.
The proposed method of boarding an airliner may work for ferrying troops to Iraq, but it's just not practical in case of disorganized civilians with kids and luggage. What would help is more assistance from the flight attendants. They need to do more than just point you in the general direction of the coach section. I fly often and I already have a good idea where to find my seat. Most others, however, have no idea and end up shuffling - bags, kids and all - back and forth in search of their seats, making the cabin look like I-95 in Delaware on Friday afternoon.
A few flight attendants strategically positioned along the cabin should help people settle down faster. It would also help if boarding actually begins on time. When there is a delay, people start wandering around the terminal in search of bathrooms, coffee, pizza, etc. So when the plane finally is ready to be boarded, there are always a few passengers missing in action and everyone has to wait for them.
Imagine all the problems RIAA's gonna have dividing the profits once it gets the $1.65 trillion from Allofmp3.com! They'll need to rent dump trucks just to deliver checks to the artists.
I heard NYPD will be testing this new concept developed by FBI: to deal with the Russian mafia problem a second, more secure Brooklyn will be set up on the outskirts of Ruby Valley, Nevada.
I think teachers ought to be more mature than their students and show the usual restrain and tolerance associated with their profession. Teachers suing school students for insulting and contemptuous behavior is childish behavior in itself. A capable teacher commands respect and authority among most students. An incompetent teachers becomes a target for pranks. This has alway been a part of any educational process. Lawyers and judges are not going to bring any positive changes. While a distinction needs to be made between insults and threats, schools need to hire teachers with enough maturity to rise above their students' shenanigans.
Here's an interesting business scheme for a mediocre photographer who can't honestly sell his work: put hi-res photos on a website and protect them with a tiny and easy-to-remove watermark; wait for someone to get tempted and use an unlicensed photo; sue him and make twenty times what the photo is worth. It may be important to get this suing business down to a science so not to waste money on lawyers.
An important fact to consider is that in many cases bugs discovered by outside resource are already known to the vendor. More often than not vendors consciously ignore known issues because fixing them is considered inefficient use of resources. They realign their budgets toward developing new features instead. Known bugs migrate from version to version.
The approach often is to address known bugs only if there were documented incidents. This is particularly easy to do if much of your development work is subcontracted and offshored. As a manager, all you hear back is "yes Sir, thank you Sir." There is very little transparency and accountability. Even if a company like Gleg privately informed the developer about a discovered bug, there is little reason to expect a swift action, if any.
The best approach is to make information public, along with an exploit (an make money in the process). This will force the developer to divert whatever resources necessary toward fixing the issue. As to hostile governments and terrorist organizations, they don't need Gleg - a small group of Russian programmers - they have their own plentiful resources. It is possible and even likely that many of such "0-day" vulnerabilities have already been discovered by others, who rather keep their knowledge to themselves.
I actually went to Gleg's Web site and checked out their information. Whatever they find and develop is published on a CD with regular monthly update, similar to anti-spyware and anti-virus products. All information is available for sale at set prices. I see no restrictions as to who is allowed to purchase their products. The prices are a bit steep for you and I, but then Gleg's product is not exactly a consumer item and it is priced entirely within the range of such specialty commercial software. So it's not like they are trying to extort millions out of Real.
If Real is concerned with the quality of their software products and if their own debugging resources are not up to the task, they should seek outside expertise. It is much more difficult for Gleg to find bugs in someone else's compiled software. Real has the programmers who actually wrote this software and who have the source code and all other necessary information and resources to do their troubleshooting.
The unfortunate fact is that many mainstream software vendors develop their software on the cheap side. They outsource the work to temp code shops with poor skills and non-existent quality control. These vendors frequently rely on the same hacks to do debugging, security and troubleshooting as a cost-saving measure. Gleg seems to be performing a valuable service that keeps this type of irresponsible behavior in check and helps to keep your computer safe.
If someone is going to find a security hole in some software I have on my PC, I'd rather hope it is Gleg or a similar company. The price of their product is outside the range of most hackers and script kiddies. This information usually quickly makes it's way to software vendors. It' not free - and, believe it or not, this is actually a good thing - but it's freely available.
Gleg is not really 'targeting' anybody. This is what these guys do: they dissect latest releases of popular software and look for serious problems. It's not like Gleg's programmers put the bug into Real's player. They found an issue and let people know about it. This is a public service in itself.
Even if Real is not willing to pay for detailed information, at least now they know there is a serious vulnerability in their product and they know the general nature of the problem. Most importantly, now YOU know there is a big hole in your Real player, so you have an option of NOT USING IT until Real comes up with a fix. Now tell me this is not useful information?
And if anyone buys this information from Gleg and illegally uses it to compromise your PC, you have only yourself (and Real) to blame: you knew there was a problem but you continued using the product.
Everything is really up to Real and whatever comes is entirely their responsibility. Whether they choose to pay for information or deal with the bug on their own - its their product and their responsibility. Of course any software has bugs. Who's responsibility is it to fix these bugs? Gleg's? I don't think so. Not for free anyway.
Don't go overboard with your analogies. The important consideration here is whether or not Real was willing to pay the price to obtain this information or if it was expecting to get the information for free. Another key question is whether Gleg offered the information to Real at the same price as it did to the rest of its customers. The article does not say.
Real's perception of Gleg's business model is really beside the point: I, for example, have a problem with Real's business model of peddling consistently buggy software loaded with adware. Gleg has no obligation to provide Real with any information, especially considering that Real was the one who put out an unsafe product on the market in the first place.
What bothers people in this situation is the realization that Gleg could have done a great public service by providing the fruits of it labor to Real for free; by telling Real what the problem is and how to fix their stupid video player. Unfortunately, the days of Communism in Russia are over and money talks. If you are in business of selling defective products, you might as well learn to pay for your mistakes.
Look at the situation in more general terms: there is a consumer product that contains a flaw. There is a company that identified the problem and developed a solution. Finding both the problem and the solution required time and resources. This is their product. This product is being offered for sale with no restrictions.
Anyone can purchase this product. Just because you cannot obtain this product for free does not make it blackmail. There are countless products on the market that were developed and marketed in a similar way.
This depend on the proliferation of whatever OSS application you are using. If someone invests time into developing an exploit, they are more likely to go after bigger targets. Firefox is still a distant second in the browser race.
In my opinion, there is nothing worse than someone badmouthing the country he was born in. The funny thing about Russian Jews, who finally "escaped" to America, is that whenever someone asks them about their nationality, most say that they are Russian. People who are ashamed of who they are don't have the moral right to criticize anybody.
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I have a Mitsubishi HC4000U and a 120" screen. After trying a couple of rather expensive but unexpectedly lousy screens from a local home theater store, I made one myself using screen material I got on eBay. For about four hundred bucks in tools and materials it turned out better than a three-thousand-dollar screen from HTX.
:) The way to solve this problem is to lay off the booze and move a little farther away from the screen. From the very start you need to carefully choose the size of the screen that's appropriate for your projector and the size of your theater room.
The setup works great with xbox 360 and PS3. Some people get dizzy playing Battlefield II or GTA 4, especially after a cigar or a couple of martinis
For the past year I've been struggling with Scali Manage - a cluster management tool that came with our two new HPC SLES clusters from HP. Essentially, Scali is an attempt to create a parasite OS on top of Linux. Scali does offer a couple of useful features, but nothing that can't be done by hand almost as easily and nothing that's worth all the additional problems it creates. The moral of the story is: if there are idiots willing to pay big bucks for useless software, there always will be those ready to take the money.
And I say: alive and healthy.
It's all in the article, just scroll down to small sabotage and pilfering :-) I think IT folks occupy a new position in this struggle. It's a unique combination of proletariat-like attitude and management-like control over the manufacturing process. IT guys also know where all the bones are buried and they have a cron job that check all the closets for skeletons every Sunday at 23:59. So the local bourgeoisie tend to be very careful when talking to me...
I will have to disagree with you. We all too often hear all the stupid shit people say about politics and dismiss it as a personal opinion. In reality, however, most of what people believe about politics is the result of insufficient information and not enough time and education to process what little is known to them.
If someone has an opinion derived from ignorance and stupidity, then it's not really an opinion, it's just ignorance and stupidity. So what make IT folks different? Three things: good education, easy access to current information, and time to process it.
Few other professions combine all three of these qualities in such generous proportions. Engineers certainly have education and access to information, but they have no time. Factory workers may have the education, but no easy access to information and, again, no time. Management has none of these things - unless someone calls a telecon.
So, yes, I think IT people tend to be much better informed and better understand the issues than people in most other professions. I am a senior sysadmin and I have time to follow the news and I have the background and time to properly digest this information. When i form an opinion about a political candidate, it is usually based on more than a fifteen-minute CNN special.
Reading Lord's comments I couldn't help the feeling that I was listening to a service delivery manager from one of those outsourcing companies like CSC or Unisys. All that stuff about "we know money doesn't create loyalty" and "we leverage all the expertise out there" sounds painfully familiar. And after they run out of BS and the fog of confusion finally clears, you realize that all of your Unix servers are supported by two guys in Hyderabad, who share one Solaris 2.6 certificate and know less about Unix than my cat. The worst thing USAF can do is take advice from the outsourcing industry.
A good pay is how your employer shows you that your work and your experience are appreciated. And knowing that you are appreciated is what makes you a happy employee. And happy employees tend to be loyal to their employers. So, yes, money does create loyalty. Lord says that "in many cases we do offer compensation competitive with the commercial sector". While this may be true, working for the USAF as a civilian contractor is not like working in the commercial sector. There's a whole different level of crap that you need to put up with. So, if the USAF is serious about this Cyber Command business, they need to do a whole lot better than just salaries that are "competitive... in many cases". When hiring, don't go for the quantity - you are not planning a cyber-invasion of China - but go for quality instead.
Speaking of quality, while Lord understands that they "need to look beyond what we've traditionally recruited", he is still under the impression that the USAF can "bring them in from a general practitioner level and take them to expert level in reasonable time". Of course, this depends on their definition of "reasonable time", but somehow I don't think they mean 10-20 years. They are probably talking about a couple of years at most. I remember reading a resume of a guy claiming to have "reached the Unix guru level". I just had to bring him in for an interview: I wanted to see what a Unix guru looked like. Apparently, some time in the past ten years the minimum guru requirements have been significantly lowered.
Programming and system administration are not those fields where you can turn a rookie into an expert in reasonable time. The time required will be most unreasonable. For example, a good sysadmin is not someone with encyclopedic knowledge of "man" files, but someone with a big database in his head of stuff that broke down and how it was fixed. Theoretical knowledge is important - comp-sci degrees, training, certificates, etc. - but what really matters is experience - years and years of it. So hire the most experienced personnel you can afford and hold on to them as if the security of your country depended on it. Guys who are good, know they are good, so you need good ego-stroking skills to keep them around. Hint: pinning medals to their chests is not going to help, but a fatter paycheck might. So the approach along the lines of "we'll take what they have to offer, and in turn they might be surprised by what they get back" is not going to work. The people USAF needs are of that certain age where they don't like and can ill afford surprises.
"The U.S. military complies with all applicable domestic and international laws, and that will certainly apply equally within cyberspace..." And that's what everyone is afraid of. But, hey, as long as they wear uniforms while hacking networks, they should be in the clear as far as the Geneva conventions are concerned.
They do know that Google Street is not a real-time video feed, don't they? Not exactly a surveillance tool.
I still think the main problem during boarding is the same as at the airports in general: lack of direction. So at the entrances you have a couple of flight attendants who point people in the general direction of whatever class seats they've got. Why stop there? There are plenty of traffic management spots along the isle from where a flight attendant can direct the passengers to their seats. Instead, flight attendants tend to congregate at the ends of the isle, from where they calmly observe the chaos.
Oversize carry-on needs to be better screened at the baggage check-in and at the security gate. Rules for accepted carry-on sizes and weights, as well as their contents, change frequently and you can't expect an occasional traveler to know the rules by heart.
I would guess the biggest factor contributing to boarding delays is stress. By the time you get through all the chaos of the airport to the terminal, your brain is not exactly functioning at its peak efficiency. Some airports are better (PHL) some are worse (LAX), but they all offer an experience that's far too stressful. And then they tell you to arrive two hours ahead of your flight, so you have plenty of time to get pissed off.
And then there is the matter of delays. If I was on time to get on the plane but boarding was delayed; and if at that particular moment I feel like stuffing my face with a greasy whopper, then so it will be. Sure, their plane will be a few minutes late because of me, but, hey, they started it. I think that as long as airlines cannot guarantee timely departures and arrivals, they cannot demand the same of their passengers.
Actually, there are plenty of spaces in the isles designed for "traffic management", such as near restrooms and emergency exits. But even if a flight attendant has to block a few seats, she can always move when the passengers arrive and it's a small price to pay for getting the rest of the passengers seated quickly. On the other hand, cramming fewer seats into airliners should accomplish the same.
The proposed method of boarding an airliner may work for ferrying troops to Iraq, but it's just not practical in case of disorganized civilians with kids and luggage. What would help is more assistance from the flight attendants. They need to do more than just point you in the general direction of the coach section. I fly often and I already have a good idea where to find my seat. Most others, however, have no idea and end up shuffling - bags, kids and all - back and forth in search of their seats, making the cabin look like I-95 in Delaware on Friday afternoon.
A few flight attendants strategically positioned along the cabin should help people settle down faster. It would also help if boarding actually begins on time. When there is a delay, people start wandering around the terminal in search of bathrooms, coffee, pizza, etc. So when the plane finally is ready to be boarded, there are always a few passengers missing in action and everyone has to wait for them.
Imagine all the problems RIAA's gonna have dividing the profits once it gets the $1.65 trillion from Allofmp3.com! They'll need to rent dump trucks just to deliver checks to the artists.
I heard NYPD will be testing this new concept developed by FBI: to deal with the Russian mafia problem a second, more secure Brooklyn will be set up on the outskirts of Ruby Valley, Nevada.
I think in this difficult time for our government all patriotic Americans should refrain from inventing stuff for the next five years.
I think teachers ought to be more mature than their students and show the usual restrain and tolerance associated with their profession. Teachers suing school students for insulting and contemptuous behavior is childish behavior in itself. A capable teacher commands respect and authority among most students. An incompetent teachers becomes a target for pranks. This has alway been a part of any educational process. Lawyers and judges are not going to bring any positive changes. While a distinction needs to be made between insults and threats, schools need to hire teachers with enough maturity to rise above their students' shenanigans.
Here's an interesting business scheme for a mediocre photographer who can't honestly sell his work: put hi-res photos on a website and protect them with a tiny and easy-to-remove watermark; wait for someone to get tempted and use an unlicensed photo; sue him and make twenty times what the photo is worth. It may be important to get this suing business down to a science so not to waste money on lawyers.
They got a government grant to find patterns in random data, and so they will look for these patterns until their funding dries up.
An important fact to consider is that in many cases bugs discovered by outside resource are already known to the vendor. More often than not vendors consciously ignore known issues because fixing them is considered inefficient use of resources. They realign their budgets toward developing new features instead. Known bugs migrate from version to version.
The approach often is to address known bugs only if there were documented incidents. This is particularly easy to do if much of your development work is subcontracted and offshored. As a manager, all you hear back is "yes Sir, thank you Sir." There is very little transparency and accountability. Even if a company like Gleg privately informed the developer about a discovered bug, there is little reason to expect a swift action, if any.
The best approach is to make information public, along with an exploit (an make money in the process). This will force the developer to divert whatever resources necessary toward fixing the issue. As to hostile governments and terrorist organizations, they don't need Gleg - a small group of Russian programmers - they have their own plentiful resources. It is possible and even likely that many of such "0-day" vulnerabilities have already been discovered by others, who rather keep their knowledge to themselves.
I actually went to Gleg's Web site and checked out their information. Whatever they find and develop is published on a CD with regular monthly update, similar to anti-spyware and anti-virus products. All information is available for sale at set prices. I see no restrictions as to who is allowed to purchase their products. The prices are a bit steep for you and I, but then Gleg's product is not exactly a consumer item and it is priced entirely within the range of such specialty commercial software. So it's not like they are trying to extort millions out of Real.
If Real is concerned with the quality of their software products and if their own debugging resources are not up to the task, they should seek outside expertise. It is much more difficult for Gleg to find bugs in someone else's compiled software. Real has the programmers who actually wrote this software and who have the source code and all other necessary information and resources to do their troubleshooting.
The unfortunate fact is that many mainstream software vendors develop their software on the cheap side. They outsource the work to temp code shops with poor skills and non-existent quality control. These vendors frequently rely on the same hacks to do debugging, security and troubleshooting as a cost-saving measure. Gleg seems to be performing a valuable service that keeps this type of irresponsible behavior in check and helps to keep your computer safe.
If someone is going to find a security hole in some software I have on my PC, I'd rather hope it is Gleg or a similar company. The price of their product is outside the range of most hackers and script kiddies. This information usually quickly makes it's way to software vendors. It' not free - and, believe it or not, this is actually a good thing - but it's freely available.
Gleg is not really 'targeting' anybody. This is what these guys do: they dissect latest releases of popular software and look for serious problems. It's not like Gleg's programmers put the bug into Real's player. They found an issue and let people know about it. This is a public service in itself.
Even if Real is not willing to pay for detailed information, at least now they know there is a serious vulnerability in their product and they know the general nature of the problem. Most importantly, now YOU know there is a big hole in your Real player, so you have an option of NOT USING IT until Real comes up with a fix. Now tell me this is not useful information?
And if anyone buys this information from Gleg and illegally uses it to compromise your PC, you have only yourself (and Real) to blame: you knew there was a problem but you continued using the product.
Everything is really up to Real and whatever comes is entirely their responsibility. Whether they choose to pay for information or deal with the bug on their own - its their product and their responsibility. Of course any software has bugs. Who's responsibility is it to fix these bugs? Gleg's? I don't think so. Not for free anyway.
Don't go overboard with your analogies. The important consideration here is whether or not Real was willing to pay the price to obtain this information or if it was expecting to get the information for free. Another key question is whether Gleg offered the information to Real at the same price as it did to the rest of its customers. The article does not say.
Real's perception of Gleg's business model is really beside the point: I, for example, have a problem with Real's business model of peddling consistently buggy software loaded with adware. Gleg has no obligation to provide Real with any information, especially considering that Real was the one who put out an unsafe product on the market in the first place.
What bothers people in this situation is the realization that Gleg could have done a great public service by providing the fruits of it labor to Real for free; by telling Real what the problem is and how to fix their stupid video player. Unfortunately, the days of Communism in Russia are over and money talks. If you are in business of selling defective products, you might as well learn to pay for your mistakes.
Look at the situation in more general terms: there is a consumer product that contains a flaw. There is a company that identified the problem and developed a solution. Finding both the problem and the solution required time and resources. This is their product. This product is being offered for sale with no restrictions.
Anyone can purchase this product. Just because you cannot obtain this product for free does not make it blackmail. There are countless products on the market that were developed and marketed in a similar way.
This depend on the proliferation of whatever OSS application you are using. If someone invests time into developing an exploit, they are more likely to go after bigger targets. Firefox is still a distant second in the browser race.
In my opinion, there is nothing worse than someone badmouthing the country he was born in. The funny thing about Russian Jews, who finally "escaped" to America, is that whenever someone asks them about their nationality, most say that they are Russian. People who are ashamed of who they are don't have the moral right to criticize anybody.