PCheese

The site just emailed me my password in cleartext when I used the "forgot password" option, so they must not be hashing them on their side. Seems like a terrible security practice.

The incident notification states "website user names and passwords could also have been accessed", so I guess this means cleartext passwords.

Then you would just disable the "wave" function in the software, requiring a button press to hush the alarm.

Really? If you want these plugins, just do the one-time install when you first encounter the Missing Plug-In message, and then everything will "just work" again. (Well, perhaps you'll have worse battery life and maybe a less secure system.) There's a reason why that error message has a button next to it that makes it really easy to install the missing piece, as opposed to hunting for the right software on the Internet.

Can you be more specific about needing to "manually futz around with flash every two weeks"? I'm guessing you mean software updates, but I have a hard time believing that Flash stops working unless you update it. If you don't value the added security of having Flash updates decoupled from OS X releases, then you can just tell Flash to stop prompting you to update (or better, just tell it to do so automatically).

The guy in the desktop video would be more convincing if only he would stop shaking his head "no".

Did you read the contents in your standard web browser, like I did? What if it sent back a different set of commands if the user agent matched that of cURL?

It’s probably nicer to schedule this with iCal instead of crontab. Create a new iCal event, and add an alert for that event that runs your script. You can easily and visually configure the event to repeat only on weekdays, and the best part is that you can simply delete or modify single instances of the recurring event to deal with exceptions like holidays.