Like many I've certainly never been a member of his fan club and I'm not a fan of Apple, but you've got to admit, the guy was good at what he did and it's a real loss. My thoughts are with his friends and family.

Use a VPN.
I already use one as I don't like my ISPs proxy and I don't like getting redirected to their search page whenever I enter a URL that doesn't resolve. I've setup my own VPN on a VPS so I know exactly what's getting logged (nothing), but at the same time I don't feel it gives me any extra privacy as the IP address can quite easily be linked to me (as I host my personal site on the same server), but if I was being paranoid and was up to something illegal it would be relatively easy to setup a VPS that couldn't easily be linked to me.

The only thing I really miss about overplay.net is they have a DD-WRT extension so I could allow my home router to handle all the tunnelling for me, but I'm sure if I invested a bit of time I could setup my linode OpenVPN with DD-WRT, but at the moment I'm just not bothered enough to look into it.

Full control of what's logged and what's going on, if you use less than 200GB you can get away with paying less than $20/month for their entry level VPS, you'll get your own IP address so it's very unlikely to get blacklisted (as that seems common with a lot of the more popular proxy/VPN providers). You'll need to setup everything yourself, but you get a lot more control, you essentially have your own server to play about with and it's not much more expensive than move VPN providers.

Before I setup my linode I was using overplay.net who were okay, but they were often quite slow and I did have issues with blacklisting on certain sites and every so often the server I was using would go down.

I'm hoping this bad publicity puts Comantra out of business, but they'll most likely just disappear and pop up under a different name.

My family members have had calls from a few of these companies and my 84 year old grandpa was recently scammed out of around £85 and had his computer filled with their malware which really pissed me off, he'd just bought a license key for MS Office then a few days later got a call from "Microsoft Windows help desk" or similar saying they've detected a virus on his computer, blah, blah, blah, install our software, pay us money and you'll be fine.

We really need somebody to go after the people who actually process the payments, if the scammers could only accept payment through western union or bit coins it would trigger a lot more alarm bells in their victims heads. Given the right circumstances even intelligent people who are just a little naive can be taken in by these scammers.

I'm out of the IT industry now although I'm looking to get back into it (hands on stuff this time), but at the time (just over a year ago) Ingram weren't too bad for us considering our size and the fact that we never paid the bills on time, we managed to get free shipping for all orders so we could drop ship things, they'd often price match within the channel so we mainly used them and Enta. Ingram gave us a decent level of flexibility when it came to paying on time (i.e. not putting our account on hold the day after we were supposed to pay) as there was a bit of a cash flow issue that really limited our bargaining power, Micro-P, Azlan/C2K, Northamber, Westcoast and a few others were always very keen to get our business, but would either not give us the pricing we needed ("start using us and we'll think about it") or wouldn't give us credit based on their past experience with us.

I didn't say anything about Asia, I'm in the UK and we got some stock that was destined for mainland Europe, but the majority of the "grey" stock originated from the UK and was destined for the UK. When buying from brokers instead of through official channel partners for certain other things we often got things destined for the EU market (I remember a lot of netgear home routers we received that had been opened and the power supply obviously swapped for a UK power supply), but 99% of the CISCO stuff we bought was destined for the UK anyway.

Around the time I left the company there was talks of us getting more involved in the broker side of things, basically you get a Cisco partner, make up a fictitious job that requires enough kit to get Ciscos attention, the partner will have a customer who will be in on it which will be who Cisco thinks the kit is destined for, the partner contacts Cisco for price support, if the broker is happy with the price the sale goes ahead (often supported by Cisco Capital Finance), the partner and their customer take their cut, the broker put their markup on it and sells it on below disti price. As the stock was being sold with price support for Cisco for a specific customer, the moment it gets sold on to anybody else it automatically becomes "grey stock".

The majority of the time the price was good enough for us to undercut the channel price, but certain things were too cheap such as the GBICs and SFPs.

<quote><p>What government buys their network infrastructure equipment from small businesses? When you guy a router or switch, you are not just buying the hardware, you are buying services and software upgrades.</p></quote>

My last job was working for a small reseller with less than a dozen staff, we sold to the police, schools, colleges and yes, the local government.

The company I worked for had been about for around 30 years selling electronics, cable and electrical components (spurs, switches, plugs, fuses, circuit breakers etc.), we were already on the approved suppliers lists so when we started selling IT kit somebody must have thought "well we're already buying our fuses from them, we may as well buy our servers from them too". The people signing off the purchases are very rarely the same people installing or using the equipment and there's a lot of bureaucracy involved when it comes to getting a supplier approved it's often easier to start buying switches and routers from that company that's been selling you boxes of fuses and resistors. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of small resellers whose main source of income is the local government.

After reading this article, some comments and a bit of research on Google I wouldn't be surprised if I unknowingly bought and sold fake Cisco at my last place of work (who have since gone under).

It was the only job I've had that involved dealing with "The Channel", despite working in both sales then purchasing there I'm still not too clued up about that side of things (it's boring, as you don't get to play with the things you buy) and I'm still quite niave about what goes on.

We were a Cisco Select partner who frequently got invited along to our local Cisco offices as they were trying to push us more and more towards Cisco SMB stuff, our customers included local police, local government, schools, colleges and installers. We had accounts with Ingram Micro, Azlan/Computer 2000, Micro P, but we very rarely bought Cisco from them. We usually ended up buying "grey market" stock from brokers which was often cheap enough for us to add our mark up and still undercut the distributors, but the thing I'm really wondering about is the dirt cheap "OEM" GBICs and SFPs we used to buy which we'd normally put at least a 300% mark up on and still be cheap, these were one of the few things that weren't stock dependant, our supplier for them always had a good stock of them and they were always dirt cheap so we always had a reasonable stock of them.

At the time I never thought about the possibility that anything we sold was counterfeit, but looking back I suspect at the very least the GBICs and SFPs were, none of our customers openly questioned why a small company was being able to undercut the likes of Ingram Micro, with some of our closer customers it was a case of "yeah, it's grey stock, but we pass the savings on to YOU", but most of it was don't ask don't tell.

We were just a small business wanting to play with the big boys, we'd get pricing support from Cisco for big jobs, but we'd tend to take their quotation, remove the prices, send it to the brokers and say "see what you can do" and they'd pretty much always undercut Cisco so for a struggling company who might go under anyway the gamble of buying "grey stock" that could possibly end up being counterfeit will generally pay off.

1. This is almost 1 year old "news".
2. Why does it matter? These passwords are generally transferred in plain text without any sort of encryption anyway (which is another issue, but these old protocols are well known to be insecure without SSL etc.) so if you have access to get to the file in question you have access to sniff out these passwords anyway which is just as simple.
3. Any one way hashing is no solution if you need to transfer the passwords in plain text anyway, what's your POP3 server going to do with a MD5 hash?

..stealing source code for a competing Fox social networking site

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would Fox steal code from Fark for a social networking site when Rupert Murdoch owns the most popular and best known social networking site there is?