I imagine there were a lot of angry calls from Washington and Beijing over this. I don't think companies are magnanimous like this without external pressure.
>but I think we should also applaud efforts of those who are taking the expensive steps of fixing the problem with no direct incentive to do so.
Applaud what exactly? That all these companies ship devices that happily take IP addresses and go on the public internet or punch through firewalls with upnp and do not force a first-time password change and do not have an auto-updater installed? Even the cheapest Netgear comes with a sticker on the side for a semi-random password instead of shipping everything with 'admin/password.' Or using antiquated and non-encrypted transports like telnet. These 1990's habits need to die and it won't happen because of corporate good graces, because those haven't worked historically. If it happens, it'll happen via external pressure via governments and lawsuits. Market forces are rarely a fix all here.