I agree fundamentally with your post, but I have to disagree that "Unlike your computer, or your car, your headphones will never wear out or become obsolete." Maybe I unknowingly turn into a violent maniac whenever I handle headphones or something, but even the expensive ones I've owned have developed problems in a year or (at most) two. It's much, much worse if I carry the headphones around with me instead of leaving them at a desk; I think I've gone through four of them since starting college. I generally consider them the most fragile piece of hardware I own.

This is an awesome feature whose applicability I can instantly see (though, of course, I'm sure many people were doing this manually before too). I hope the team adds this for a few other services as well, particularly SimpleDB. Since IAM only has Domain-level granularity there, encrypting each row with a particular set of IAM-account-specific credentials is the only safe way to allow a bunch of IAM'ed accounts to share the same Domain. I know at least two people who are encrypting/decrypting rows in SDB manually, and it's always better when this sort of critical thing can be done once in the SDK layer.

I'm glad my hackish attempts inspired a proper solution :) I'll run your JAR against my integration test suite, and if it passes I'll be glad to just fold my stuff and let yours be the "official" distribution -- there's no point in having multiple solutions to this problem. Cheers! Adrian