This isn't what happened here. It's one thing for a kid to play and learn. Here we have a father pursuing his sons MCP certification, for his own gratification. If this was about the kid, it wouldn't be in the news.

Seriously why fill a such important time in child's development with crap that will be irrelevant before he'll hit puberty. There's many more important lessons in life than this. The dad thinks his kids something special now, but in a few years when those valuable lesson and experiences can't be drawn upon....What then? This dad is a douche-bag.

This is the comment they're referring too apparently. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au... Could have all been dealt with, had they participated in the forum to correct any misunderstanding. Too late for that now.

This is more of a result of the recent hysteria by the Australian Federal Police and Australian Crime Commission over local criminals using Phantom Secure phones to coordinate contract hits allegedly. http://www.abc.net.au/news/201... Brandis might have good intentions, but he's about as illiterate as they get in the NLP on such technology matters. These gangs don't rollover. Even rivals will not roll on rivals. This is a naive idea and will fail miserably in practice, if it ever sees the light of day. Given the makeup of the current senate, not any time soon.

News at 11... Standard practice. It's their network. It's not a public network. If your BYOD computer joins a Windows domain, typically a GPO will install a root CA to various things can be self signed. If you using WPA-Enterprise, you need a cert installed for this also, not necessarily a Root CA, but doing so make life easier down the track for the schools IT dept. The Root CA will allow inspection of SSL via the school (transparent) proxy. If you are so paranoid about the traffic being snooped on, look at the sites cert chain. If it's spoofed to the School's Root CA, you'll know they can see your traffic. Just go buy a 3G stick or hotspot your phone and bypass the school network when you want some privacy. Then the problem shifts from the school to your parents.

Undoubtedly the reason for installing the cert would be to monitor/filter SSL traffic via a proxy. These days it's quite trivial to setup a transparent proxy that uses a MITM attack with a spoofed cert to monitor your traffic. Have a look at untangle. It does this out of the box. Just put the CA on the client and you can intercept all SSL traffic. Obviously it's not difficult to look at the cert chain to detect this, but even if you do discover a spoofed cert, getting around it isn't trivial.

which probably cost less than a $100 to manufacture.

Too much margin in it for them to return to standard DIN and integration options.

AFAIK, the meta data they harvest is most likely in the clear (SMTP/IP Headers/Phone Numbers). For that they can build a comprehensive map of who is taking to who and then delve deeper into actual content of associated/linked targets.

Not surprising. Given the refusal to remove those bloody Java sponsors from the JRE. Piss off the end users and now the developers.

Why? What was it that went so bad?

GA is very popular. Saying it's crap doesn't really align with the experiences with the few million businesses using it right now. I guess it must be specific requirement that couldn't be met.

A lot of assumptions based on a few strings. Don't worry, plenty of surprises left for IO.

That's just a bit naive. You can apply that argument to any outsourcing. Yet it seems quite acceptable for other industries/sectors.

Google Apps comes in many editions.

Standard Free (Grandfathered 7th Dec 2012)
Non-Profit (Now same as EDU)
Education
Business
Government
ISP

The ISP, Government and EDU editions are significantly different to the rest. Google offers additional customization and they also have multi-year contact terms granting those institutions certainty the service will be provided for x-years. The other editions are on a year by year basis for less than 750 users.

Been using the Gapps for many years, and yet to come across a paid service (SLA) that users were forced off. Video for business was ended, after a year's warning and before it was shut off, Google released Drive with replace all the features that Video for Business offered.

The flip side is that you get many new features/upgrades, that you don't have to worry about rolling out (reinventing the wheel).

GUI? GA has full Outlook support.

Security FUD...FYI, Google maintains an isolated instance of GA for Government, so it meets the necessary security requirements. This has been in place for several years now and widely known to those that careless for BS MS propaganda.