We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.

This is a good point. However, does a similar thing not occur in browsers caching data as one surfs the web?

I see your points, and I guess it's the redistribution that's the main issue. Facebook clearly sees their users' activities as valuable property.

Since this is publicly available information, and all he did was send a program to go grab it (much akin to asking your web browser to download it), does this mean Facebook has essentially threatened him for no more than reading too much of Facebook too quickly? Sounds absurd to me.

A fine rant sir. My thoughts entirely.

Did the author try Tools -> Internet Options -> Tabs -> Settings and change the option from the default "Always open pop-ups in a new window"?

Let's just hope the Moon isn't *actually* made of cheese

I know this isn't a popular approach on Slashdot, but, I'm guessing they were using Windows XP. Vista can play DVDs out of the box.

Sure, but if your traffic is encrypted then all anyone can know is that some communication occurred between machine A and machine B. Nobody can discern the nature of the traffic. Surely this is an improvement over the current situation.

So perhaps it's time for us to start encrypting all our communications? That would negate this issue, right?

This article is just as inexplicably Vista-bashing as almost everything the BBC has to say about Vista. But this is the bit that gets me most:

So he had to tweak Vista's TCP/IP settings to get on the internet? Exactly how is this Vista's fault? I cannot think of any explanation for this other than that he has a wrongly configured network, or doesn't know how the network is configured. Either way, he would have the same issues with any OS.