TheEskimo

At this point software patents are broken beyond repair. The express purpose of patents is to encourage innovation. They're being used only to dampen innovation now. Why is that? The main reason is that patents, when created, are absurdly broad and often obvious and still accepted. Well over 90% of the existing software patents should have been denied as they're obvious ideas. There's a patent on backing up data online for heaven's sake. It's now to the point that anything you do on a computer will violate a patent somewhere.

What's even worse than stupid patents is the money being paid for them. A collection of patents, most of which are useless, being bought for billions of dollars is stupid. That money could have gone into R&D, employee salary, etc any of which would have been better. And the worst part? The reason you should be able to buy a patent is so that you can produce new technology and software with the unique idea contained in it. Unfortunately, the patents don't see the light of day as software because they're bought; nothing in those patents is new to google. They're simple a defense against other patents.

In the US the patent system is one of the most stupid and broken systems still functioning. Either patents need to be done in with altogether for software or the acceptance of them needs to only happen after significantly stricter review.

Sadly Mt Gox used salted and at one point unsalted MD5s for its passwords. Finding a collision would be far easier with that consideration taken into account.

You missed the option of SpiderOak. It's very similar to dropbox and, to my knowledge, has impeccable security.

My reason for not using LastPass is because it is proprietary. In fact, there has been an XSS attack on them in the past which was somewhat successful. I use KeePassX because it allows me to avoid laying trust on any proprietary entity. At present if LastPass were to have another security flaw (and hey, security flaws on web-facing servers are all too common) you'd be out of luck. With KeePassX security is local. The worst case for me is someone stealing my database and trying to bruteforce the password (hah, like that'll happen). This requires them to have physical access to my computer. Anyone can take a guess at your password because it's a web based service.

Just for example: Let's say I want to log into google's jabber service with a non-web client (pidgin or something). If I used firefox's built in password storage I could not easily log in. This applies to passwords that are not web based. In addition, firefox's security is not very strong. By default they are stored unencrypyed (Security -> Saved Passwords -> Show passwords ... That button wouldn't be there if they weren't unencrypted).

The reason I don't use LastPass is because it is proprietary. I use KeePassX over firefox because it has better security, can store associated details (Comments field which I can put, for example, what my secret was (I randomly generate those too) and so on), and can easily be used for passwords that are not for only web based stuff.

The most important detail would be the fact that passwords saved in browsers are only useful in the browser, not for apps etc.

As another random example, firefox couldn't save, say, the passwords of sites I ssh into or the irc keys I need to authenticate myself on various irc servers.

If you wanted you could write your own userscript to hide HN items with "LulzSec" in the title. This is not a feature that is needed as LulzSec articles are interesting to at least some of the community (they get points ... Clearly people want to see em).

If you don't want to see them you can avoid them or write your own user-side method of avoiding them. Forcing your choice upon others is unneeded and silly in this case.