I've had some exposure to the hard disk industry and the same sort of thing happened there.

What ends up happening is that all the large players effectively collude to cross-license each other's portfolios and then the fact that someone has a patent on making the disk round and 3.5" doesn't really cause problems for the rest.

Of course what that does is makes it very hard for anyone new to break into the industry. I'd really love to see google do the right thing here and crush a bunch of the "obvious" patents (both on their side and apple's) and leave the licensing to things that are genuine innovation.

They've taken that away. Works on my G2, it worked on my girlfriend's old phone but when she upgraded to a Galaxy S, tmobile started charging her to tether.

It's a shame, makes me rethink staying with them

Yeah I get lots of them. They seem to come in waves, I'll get 2-3 calls a day for a few days then nothing for a while.

I've filed quite a few FTC complaints but it doesn't seem to help anything.

I've also had quite a few from someone claiming to be Wells Fargo but who can't confirm any account details of mine. I tried calling the main wf number and they didn't know anything about who called me. I'm not even sure what to do with that sort of thing.

Part of the way the middle class reduce their tax burden here is by running businesses. I hardly know anyone here that doesn't have some kind of business operation because it allows them to get various tax advantages.

Similarly the US likes to incetivize things through the tax code. I'm getting $53 because I put in an energy efficient door - in any other part of the world they'd just give that credit to the manufacturer and let the free market pass that through to the consumer, but for some reason that's not popular here.

I lived most of my life in the UK, and it simply astounded me to land here. It also allows americans to bitch about how high nominal tax rates are when many people pay less than them.

There's a reasonable summary from our co-defendant, a Mr. Tarrant Eightyfour

A site I run is allegedly on the complaint (see sig) and our user population seem to be competing to see who can get their names added to it.

I'm part of the team that run banniNation.com which is a news aggregation site with a fairly similar model to slashhdot.

While we haven't been officially served, our site and business are listed in the original complaint along with the handle of a user who mentioned Mr. Rakofsky.

We've got an official statement of sort at http://www.bannination.com/s/lawsuit and there's a link from there to a very level headed discussion about it. This definitely doesn't just affect bloggers and has further implications around the right to anonymous speech and the liability of service providers.

If I set up something like password_x = SHA1(password_(x-1) + SALT) I really can't see how that would be an issue unless it exposes some weakness in SHA1.

Still the bcrypt solution below looks a lot better

Thanks - will look into that

Yeah, I was thinking about doing that on my site in light of the gawker crack.

Logins are relatively rare events on the server, so I could do something like 1000 SHA-1's with a salt on each iteration. That'd mean

a) It'd take 1000 times longer to crack (obviously this is a constant war between me and the adversary)
b) If i build my own salting implementation on top of sha-1 I doubt I could end up with anything less secure than SHA1 but hopefully it'll require custom software to actually do the exploit.

I've routinely had employers that let me buy a new laptop every couple of years and expense it. That way I get something I'm happy with and the get a more satisfied employee.

I think it was called "Computer Studies" where I went to high school, and it was largely a waste of time. My teacher told me there wasn't any point in me showing up, and i just submitted the assignments and got an A.

The interesting stuff was part of our pure mathematics course. We were handed a simple example of how RSA encryption works and asked to encrypt/decrypt a few messages, break stuff with short keys and explain why it was infeasible at longer key lengths. That's how it should be done!

They did only seem to eliminate domestic roaming charges, and while that's appreciated it doesn't address the larger issue.

I'm kind of at a loss for why T-Mobile can't introduce an "our-network-only" roaming option. A good amount of the time when I'm in europe i never leave TMo's network, yet i still take it in the ass if i use my US sim card.

In fact it's probably still the biggest project I ever got my hands on.

I think there were always some patches that weren't available without a support contract. We ended up having to hack some support into the ftp server to talk to the java authentication backend somewhere.

Still i'm undoubtedly a little sad to see the end of it.