Details of the exploit were presented Friday durning the "Electronic Bank Robberies" talk at Chaos Communication Congress, yet some how the slashdot article completely misses that. You can watch the talk on Youtube or download the MP4 Video(172M) if you want to watch the original talk.

Absolutely correct. I work in Seattle on FreeBSD, and there are plenty of places looking for employees (Amazon, F5, Isilon, etc.) with a Linux/BSD background. If you want to work on the "MS Stack" you are more or less going to be looking for a job a Microsoft. The market here is completely saturated with Microsoft employees who are looking for a change of pace. They actually do have 6 years of experience developing on frameworks Microsoft released 5 years ago.

Eh, I wouldn't be so sure about that. This was the front page story of The Stranger print edition, which is a fairly popular weekly newspaper in Seattle. I had no connection with The Stranger story, but I'm one of the obscure bloggers investigating the wireless mesh. I made my first request to the Seattle Police Department in February 2013. Yes, a full 10 months ago. I didn't ask them to answer any questions, I just asked for the records. I made the following request:

Obviously these are all things they should have right? I've been fighting with the police department for months, and the best I've gotten is a picture of a crumpled up printout of a low resolution map of the system. You'd think there would be source files for that picture right?

There is clearly a coverup going on here, but the police aren't going to talk about it. So I went to the IT and Finance people. Well, I got back quite a few interesting records from them! For example, this project included $9795.19 RADIUS server. On what planet does a RADIUS server cost that much? It turns out to be a $1000 dell server running FreeRADIUS. Even that is overkill.

Another interesting feature, is the camera aspect you brought up. There are already 36 high-res pan tilt zoom cameras on this network, and there is enough bandwidth for them to add over 1600 more. In addition, they significantly overpaid for the cameras by not properly following their own bidding process rules.

There are real problems with this project and most of them are not related to surveillance. Even when it is just a small blogger investigating, it is the Seattle Police Department's responsibility under Washington state law to turn over copies of records requested. Hopefully The Stranger article will bring enough attention to this problem to encourage the Police department to do the right thing, obey the law, and release the records to anyone who asks for them.

Um, no. IRS Publication 17 doesn't agree:

I live just a few blocks from the park (and staffed a table on Sunday of the event), the 4G problems are not due to coverage but due to network congestion. You can easily get 10-15 Mbps via both Clear and Verizon 4G when there aren't 50k people there. You really should be looking at point to point microwave for your backhall. I'm sure Spectrum Networks can provide you with a 1Gbps link on at least the south half of the park. Digital Fortress has a datacenter in the big black round building that overlooks the park. I suspect they could get you roof access and a 1Gbps feed too. Most of the buildings along the park belong to tech companies (F5 networks, Big Fish Games). If you can talk one of them into sponsoring you, they could likely get you bandwidth on their roofs too. Bandwidth isn't a problem, you just need to bring your own. Obviously that requires money and forward planning.

They DO have a working tracking system for both letter sized mail and packages. You just have to build your own interface, all they do is upload a file with scans to your FTP server. They give quite a bit of data on a letter, here is an example from a mailpiece I sent a few weeks ago. It was scanned five times over two days, and they will send scans as frequently as once per hour.

Oh, and the example I provided was a First Class letter. Tracking cost me nothing more than printing a barcode on the envelope before dropping it in the mailbox. Too bad they don't provide an easy way to use this service.

Ubiquiti Networks makes the best wireless gear for 95% of applications. Once they add gigabit ports to their 802.11N line of radios they will be amazing. Netgear makes fairly good cheap switches though.

And don't forget about EMC Isilon.

When else?

Hey, at least you aren't at that other state university. The one that uses microsoft hosted outlook. If you want an unreliable, insecure, windows only email solution with the same privacy implications as hosted Gmail, Try Outlook Live!

Oh, and just to clarify, this is not an option offered by the university, this is the only option.

Yea, Where's the 6 digit UID award!