What I found quite interesting is that they're planning to save something like 15bn a year in austerity measures, but something like 10-12bn of that will go on interest! So they'll only be managing to pay back 3bn each year at best! Crazy.

So why did we move from centralised mainframes with dumb terminals to having the power at the edge hosts?

Whoops yeah that wouldn't work against this attack, didn't realise we were talking about such low frequency attempts!

I tend to do something like: iptables -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -p TCP --dport 22 -j ACCEPT -m limit --limit 5/min to limit bruteforce attempts. Of course, this does open you up a little to someone DoSing your SSH, but you could always stick some specific IPs in there two which aren't rate-limited.

I'm still running my 2k install from 2001, soon to be retired though. It's been through several different PCs and is still fine. Only app that i've ever been told by the installer it can't run is MSN messenger - so I just used an opensource MSN app.

Somewhat unfortunately, I agree. Having fairly recently been a student at a UK city academy, AND afterwards been the IT admin in more than one, they tend to spend a massive amount of money on tech, for which the majority of teachers have no idea how to use. If anything the budget should be split in half, and half go to tech, and half go to teaching people how to use it. Hundreds of thousands spent on interactive whiteboards is pointless if no one has any idea how to use them. In addition, computers ARE very distracting, even if they are locked down to hell. At least with a textbook I can't spend half my lesson trying to get around the lockdowns, or seeing what internet pages weren't blocked, or reading slashdot. I think there is quite a niche in the market for education software that isn't quite covered or well known yet. An easy way to cusomise web use for a lesson would be a start, rather than global blocking - "for this lesson this bunch of PCs in this classroom can only access this webpage, and this application" would be a neat feature. I'm sure it's available somewhere, but it's not well known and probably not free (unless you want to be scripting it yourself - this needs to be something a teacher can do). Anyway blabbering - as a UK taxpayer, I too would like some more thought to go into the way school IT is run, maybe a government policy, but without stifling those schools which actually have good IT techs who spend wisely (few and far between).

Haha you joke, but I've actually opened a cabinet before to find a broken fibre taped up with a note on it saying 'inline splice, don't touch'. If you nudged it, the connection went down! Quality.