Thank you for spending the time researching Java signed applets and how we use this functionality.
We agree with you that this solution has limitations. If we had a way to ask users of our applet for access to only the resources we need, we would have done so. Increasing the trust that people have in our solution can only be beneficial and increase usage.
But even with this limitation in mind we are still grateful that Sun gave us Java and the functionality we needed to provide our service.

Thanks for a well written analysis.
The TimZon team.