I recently heard Stephen Levitt (Freakonomics) speak, and he actually addressed your first example. It's actually the title example in his next book "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers."
The gist of it being that while dealing drugs may make less money and certainly has more risk than McDonalds, their is greater opportunity for upward mobility.
Just because you don't understand what's going on doesn't mean that it's irrational.
What's to stop those sites from actually logging the information themselves? For the extra paranoid there is always tor for anonymizing your IP and CustomizeGoogle for anonymizing your cookie.
That's because there are already so many tools out there to do that already. Depending on what client you are using, Thunderbird has Enigmail as its wrapper around gpg. Kmail also has built-in support. This is great alternative for those who don't want to have to use POP3 to have a convenient way of using GPG.
I agree that everything Grandma cares could be destroyed, but without those admin privileges, Grandma's box is not turned into a spam spewing zombie, which is a major problem with windows machines, because not only are they wreaking havoc on their own machine, they also are increasing the load of servers everywhere.
While I think that works in theory, what somebody else independently discovers the same vulnerability you reported and exploits it. How do they know that you did not exploit it? If reporting it was all that was needed to remove your name from the list of suspects taking advantage of an exploit, wouldn't all blackhats report their vulnerabilities after exploiting?
To a certain extent every vote is uninformed. Nobody can know the ramifications of voting for a particular issue, much less for a particular candidate. To abate this, we have a representative democracy, and the whole point of that is because we can't trust everybody to be completely informed on every issue. While I still think that being informed is better than being uninformed, being informed was never intended to be a prerequisite in a representative democracy.
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I recently heard Stephen Levitt (Freakonomics) speak, and he actually addressed your first example. It's actually the title example in his next book "Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers." The gist of it being that while dealing drugs may make less money and certainly has more risk than McDonalds, their is greater opportunity for upward mobility. Just because you don't understand what's going on doesn't mean that it's irrational.
What's to stop those sites from actually logging the information themselves? For the extra paranoid there is always tor for anonymizing your IP and CustomizeGoogle for anonymizing your cookie.
That's because there are already so many tools out there to do that already. Depending on what client you are using, Thunderbird has Enigmail as its wrapper around gpg. Kmail also has built-in support. This is great alternative for those who don't want to have to use POP3 to have a convenient way of using GPG.
I agree that everything Grandma cares could be destroyed, but without those admin privileges, Grandma's box is not turned into a spam spewing zombie, which is a major problem with windows machines, because not only are they wreaking havoc on their own machine, they also are increasing the load of servers everywhere.
While I think that works in theory, what somebody else independently discovers the same vulnerability you reported and exploits it. How do they know that you did not exploit it? If reporting it was all that was needed to remove your name from the list of suspects taking advantage of an exploit, wouldn't all blackhats report their vulnerabilities after exploiting?
To a certain extent every vote is uninformed. Nobody can know the ramifications of voting for a particular issue, much less for a particular candidate. To abate this, we have a representative democracy, and the whole point of that is because we can't trust everybody to be completely informed on every issue. While I still think that being informed is better than being uninformed, being informed was never intended to be a prerequisite in a representative democracy.