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Interesting to note that the Yousef operation happened in 1994 (i.e over a decade ago) - it was not done using a binary liquid explosive, but using a nitrogen rich explosive (exactly the sort that are now checked for very easilly, but at the time were hard to detect).
The Register story in the OP talked about the near imposibility of taking two stable safe liquids and blending them with little of no special equipment into a powerful and deadly explosive.
The fact is that the chemistry is not in your favour.
Explosives have to have lots of energy to give up in a large BANG!
Stable reagents tend to have their energy trapped in strong chemical bonds.
This means that to make an unstable explosive from stable reagents generally takes either the input of a large activation energy, or a very long time.
Explosives are hard to make. Even gunpowder (where it is the reaction of the stable reagents that causes the explosion) is hard to blend reliably without special equipment.
One scenario that did occur to me as possible (but not likely and would be very dangerous to carry out) would be to drop a large amount of sodium metal into a plane toilet - this reacts with water and liberates hydrogen and generates heat. It might be enough to blow a small hole in the skin of a plane, but frankly it probably wouldn't down it. To bring a plane down you must damage the airframe so much that it loses integrity, or set fire to the fuel.
The problem with stories about terrorists catastrophically bringing down dozens of flights is that bringing down just one is bloody hard.
Think about planes downed by explosions historically - even Lockerbie (probably the biggest such loss of life) was achieved by a nation using it's security sevices and all of its abilities and finances.
A bunch of guys plotting in a living room, and using equipment that they've bought at CostCo or Tesco or whatever just are not going to be able to cook up an explosive that is ( a ) undetectible by current screening equipment, ( b ) stable enough to carry on board, ( c ) powerful enough to down a plane for certain.
To imagine that they could do this multiple times, on the same day, without anyone finding out about their plan, without one of then blowing themselves up on the way to the airport, or chickening out and confessing, or haivng their bomb fail to work, is to my mind (as a qualified and highly experienced Chemistry researcher and Project Manager) unlikely in the extreme. The cemistry and logistics are both insurmountable obstacles - it's just James Bond territory.
That doesn't mean we can be complacent, but it does mean that most of the security measures are heavilly overblown, and disproportionate.
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Overhead, the Albatross hangs motionless upon the air,
And deep beneath the rolling waves,
In labyrinths of Coral Caves,
The Echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand;
And everthing is Green and Submarine
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