I do a lot of shipping between east coast US and asia-pacific. Packages coming from Japan arrive faster and for far cheaper than the same delivered by USPS domestically via first class standard. Fedex and UPS also have the courtesy to knock before affixing the "sorry we missed you" sticker and vanishing into the night. If they didn't have massive pensions, stopped stealing packages, honored insurance claims, and stopped forcing people to travel to the post office to pick up packages that were supposed to be delivered, USPS wouldn't be sinking like the Titanic. The problem with the postal service isn't the finances. The problem with the postal service is that it's filled with postal employees.

I'd question the government taking information assurance seriously. Manning obtained hundreds of thousands of classified docs undetected, and was only caught when he bragged to an outsider who ratted him out. If anything, information assurance in the government is pretty much nonexistent.

They did block an IP. But then they gave the spammer a block of new IPs to use. They're trying to use legitimate customers as shields for their spam support service.

They are incompetent because they have no evidence, not because they can't crack encryption. If the entire case hangs on the ability to decrypt digital data (which really has no verifiable chain of custody), then the prosecution isn't doing that great of a job.

If it's designed to fail, it means someone is going to get repeat business.

Depending on the criminal, encryption might just offer a delay, not prevention to the release of data.

A PDF looks the same in IE, Chrome, Firefox, Seamonkey, Safari, Opera, etc. HTML does not.

Mozilla. Mosaic Killer. Learned that from a bloomburg channel show about mozilla.

A cop's job is to enforce law, not save laws, not prevent crime. If a cop's actions are being easily overturned, then they really aren't enforcing the law, so either they fabricate evidence, or make it virtually impossible to defend.

...except in domain disputes, average joe never wins.

Duplicating data when there's no money exchanged as a condition: ok. Sharing physical means of information (books, cds, dvds, etc), with or without fee: ok. Taking someone's work, and selling it as your own: wrong.

It's more about getting VZ customers to complain to VZ customer service. However, just like their wireless IRC ban, they'll place the blame everywhere but where it belongs, with VZ's network littering the internet with abuse. Not that long ago, they were the world's largest source of spam (a title now held by a PA company called BurstNet). To this day, they still provide bulletproof hosting to botnets, script kiddies, and spammers.

If it has a for sale page up the week after registration, or it's hosted via sedo or information.com or other popular cybersquatters, that is a good indicator it's not in use.

Server 2008 CALs have to be validated against Microsoft, much like any other product validation from them. This is new, where 2003 just trusted you.