From TFA: "Silent Circle stresses that their product offers secure communications within the networks and only uses Canadian servers that are outside of U.S. government control."

I would not be all that surprised if it would cost more to maintain and extend Accumulo than it would to build the security features into HBase or Cassandra and allow those communities to shepherd the project. It's inherently difficult to measure -- which community (Accumulo's or somebody else's) is more active or productive, or has more potential to be so, and how do you value that monetarily? I guess you weigh it against the cost of support hours that would be needed otherwise. I think the OMB directive at its core is the right move, and even has the potential to push government dollars or tech support into OSS projects (versus USG building stuff in-house that may or may not get released and may or may not die a swift death).

Bloggingheads posts hour-long video conversations between two people and have been doing it for a few years now. I know they're now trying to use Skype when possible, but that requires high-speed on both ends, so they still use the old system a good portion of the time. My understanding is that there's some sort of hardware setup that gets shipped by post to the interviewee, and each side talks over the phone and looks at a camera. The people talking can't actually see each other, which is one downside, but the quality is generally good. http://bloggingheads.tv/

True, TFA doesn't touch at all on why Microsoft -- just why not Google. I guess Microsoft doesn't have a new social media pony it's pushing on everyone at the company. In the battle of who's more of a technology company, Microsoft or Google, the winner is...the one that doesn't make its money from ads?

I agree -- paid techs help make open source projects successful, particularly large ones, like an OS. But the real problem here is not the lack of paid developers, but the lack of real stakeholders. Even if HP kept on a lot more staff, the project would die simply because nobody has a vested interest in seeing it live. The justification right now seems to be that it's cool, not that somebody has a product that depends on it.

It's important to note that this isn't somebody's home wifi SSID, this was the SSID of the public recreation center's wifi network. As in, there's a sign outside that says "Free WiFi" and it's funded by the town. These "snooping authorities" are policing public resources, not people's home networks.